Archibald

With WK card being out last Road To shows got the cards as well: https://www.njpw1972.com/tornament/61313?showCards=1 https://www.njpw1972.com/tornament/61314?showCards=1 https://www.njpw1972.com/tornament/61315?showCards=1 It has some strong tag team action and teases all possible combinations of double gold match on 1/5. And Hiromu makes his return here.

Cards look good, only thing that I'm a bit eh about is Juice having another shot at USA title.

WTL finals was a great show, some spoilers below so don't read further if you don't want to: Outside of opening two matches rest of the card had strong matches and to be honest most of WTL had decent to good matches, but it felt a bit lame because nothing of importance was actually happening. Well this show had lots of stuff happening. One of the happenings was Jericho's new video for Tanahashi feud and this is probably first time that it didn't get much reaction and I think all other happenings overshadowed it. Time to wrap up his NJPW run? Moxley showed up and attacked Archer, they want to do Texas deathmach at WK. He also hit his ddt on Suzuki so figures this could be next match if they continue using Mox and Suzuki isn't leaving. Okada was mocking Ibushi this entire tour and Ibushi finally snapped. Liger did his farewell promo and we got a video from Dragon Lee (now calling himself Ryu Lee), there was much confusion to what it means because Liger then talked about Hiromu and people started thinking that Liger's last match is triple threat against Dragon Lee and Hiromu, but it looks like Dragon Lee challenge Liger for "one of his last matches" so it could end up happening on one of those Road To shows. Yoshi got his moment by rolling up GoD. Finals was match of the tournament, but I think that most people are not going to love it as much since most people didn't watch WTL and similar to Ibushi/White G1 finals they were doing various callbacks to their league matches. Basically stuff that was winning matches was near falls here and if you don't know that they won matches with those sequences then it isn't as strong. Either way it was Finlay's moment to shine and he shined.

Anyone remembers what were buys for those two PPVs? Either way it doesn't sound bad.

I don't subscribe to Observer so this is a second hand information, but supposedly Dave talked about double Dome and said that both shows are ahead of previous WK when it comes to ticket sales. This doesn't mean that they are going to sell out, but that it probably is going to be close. He also said that tdespite The Elite leaving it looks like they'll have around same amount of foreigners in attendance. And well, NJPW still has good number of matches to announce (and Liger's final opponent) so maybe they'll actually be able to get double sell out.

WTL updated before the finals: Since Sanada is clearly going to challenge ZSJ for RevPro's title then it becomes obvious that this is going to be a big win for Juice and Finlay, and likely a big win at WK as well. Was anything worth watching? Nothing really surprised me, but I'd say that stuff that looked good on paper delivered and other stuff was just there. One unexpected thing was probably KENTA's post match interviews, he absolutely killed it with his comments about Ishii, Goto and Yoshi while doing some weird fantasy video tropes.

Probably nobody cares, but RoH started releasing promo videos for FB matches, I think they are kinda cool? Definitely not on OTT's level, but better than what RoH usually produces.

He doesn't have to worry about it, he knows that he is taping out in third fall to UG.

Issue is not really Cornette defenders (thou they obviously don't help), but that it looks like two episodes have been derailed by it and PPV build likely suffered due to it as well. NWA is not in a position where staying as they are is fine, they need to grow in order to become a viable promotion.

My guess would be that all of them found it funny.

That thank you Cornette bit sounds like them trying to work both sides, look we fired him because you bitched about him and look, we totally respect him because you bitch about us firing him. I can't see this going down well with either side and maybe NWA should grow a spine and pick a side. Other than that it was better episode, but I'll just go back to what I said after the first or second episode, I don't see a hook: I can see that with the guys that they have running Aldis/James Storm as main event makes sense, but it could have been built up way better. Now, build itself sounds ok to me, Storm is annoying asshole and Aldis wants to teach him a lesson. Ok, but that to me sounds more like a title defence for an episode and not for PPV. Tag titles rematch makes sense, but maybe Kingston and Homicide should have been involved in this somehow. At the moment it looks like a match to put Wild Cards over and its like, who cares. National title, didn't Aron defeat Ricky on this episode? So why is this triple threat? I probably missed something here. Won't be surprised if Colt doesn't want to put anyone over and it will be his last match in NWA. Drake vs Anderson sounds like it builds from that unaired match that James Storm got involved in since their other interactions wouldn't really warrant it, I think. But since it didn't air and I saw nothing of it I don't really care. I hope that Drake tries to do Burning Hammer again for a 2 count. Women's match looks like a clusterfuck and I really hate that Thunder Rosa was pushed back for Melina. Funny enough, Murdoch vs Question Mark is the only match that I have zero problems with. Perfectly fine opener. Looking at that tweet posted earlier it sounds like Muta is likely to appear for the post PPV tapings. Is the plan here to get everyone who was connected to original NWA and is still somewhat mobile? Doesn't inspire much confidence.

Sanada getting in position to replace Tanahashi and Ibushi.

Title match against Moxley is great too and it was 90% Juice.

Top tier talent getting opportunities...

Bandido and Flamita were also replaced on AAA's show so it does feel like it is a bit more planned than some other stuff that CMLL does. But now the main question is who is going to replace Sanson to feud with him? On the other hand four weeks is not that long, if Bandido is willing they can easily drag it out till Sanson is back.

At this point this is not about who wrestles for RoH or who are the champs, it is about upper management getting fired.

And they did an angle with him and NGD. I'll laugh very hard if we'll never see him again in Arena Mexico.

From my experience bad or boring stuff usually doesn't get many dislikes unless it is motivated by some outside factors like politics or some cultural war crap. While NWA did get some people that watch AEW I think it is also very likely that it got lots of Cornette types as well who think that modern wrestling is bad and things should be taken more seriously, oh and fuck political correctness while we are it. So to them it probably looks like Cronette got canned for pointless stuff and real reason is that he was critical of AEW. NWA might claim that this being a clip episode was planned, but it certainly doesn't look like it. For me real problem with NWA is that I don't feel like any matches for PPV have been built properly and I think this might hurt them badly, but this Cornette stuff isn't helping either.

I don't know, Rush being the champ has done absolutely nothing for the tickets and those two are really bad wrestlers that will drag down the quality of the shows.

Thats a very good take. Next G1 is coming up and it would be probably difficult to rationalize why his spot shouldn't go to someone like Henare or whoever else they might get by that point.

I think that this year he has been on Dontaku, G1 and WTL tours. Probably doesn't make that much sense to offer a contract to guy that does limited amount of dates, isn't a big draw or doesn't produce great singles matches. Maybe due to more USA shows being planned next year he could have a bigger role in the company.

Unfortunately we saw some of their talent (Cobb, Young, TKO, maybe someone else as well) being defensive about all this stuff on twitter so it is very likely that they just said yes sir during that summit and nothing is going to change.

Taven doesn't really have anything to do with it. Rush is now the champ and numbers are continuing to drop. Likely same would have happened if Marty won, PCO is not even worth bringing up. Problem is that Taven became a face of "lolRoH" and got lots of shit for it when we can clearly see that main problem here are guys like Greg and not the talent. I mean, Marty wins and you still have Enzo/Cass, Allure, Bully and what else shitting up the place for next few months? You'll still see declining ticket sales. For example, another major problem with RoH is that people on twitter and other places just post pictures of empty arenas and make fun of it. As a result hype around RoH slowly dies and it has negative impact on how brand itself is seen. It simply is not cool at the moment to follow RoH regardless of all their other problems. So, this moron thinks that running packed 500 people shows will not help them, but running empty 10 000 people arena will? What the fucking fuck? And why you'd pay talent less for wrestling in smaller arena? What the hell? So, lets say you put the title on Marty here... you'll still have these stupid people making same stupid decisions. NJPW guys would still be pissed at RoH, internet community would still be pissed for Enzo/Cass, everyone would still mock RoH for running empty arenas, Bully still goes around saying stupid shit to fans. Taven winning at MSG probably doesn't even make the "top 10 problems with RoH" list at this point. I really don't like Flip and I think that he is bad wrestler that shouldn't be earning what people in grocery store are earning either. But Greg throwing him under the bus for not drawing is amazing. How is he supposed to draw? What they have done to make him a draw? I think that Bully putting him over at last Final Battle was okay, but everything since then was meaningless. I haven't watched last few shows, but I think they never even explained why he joined VE. How is he going to draw anything? Why should I care about him? Even people that really don't like YBs and Cody probably agree that they are great at self-promotion, argument probably could be made that they are one of the greatest self-promoters in this era of wrestling. And RoH had them. They also had NJPW talent here and there when novelty of seeing NJPW guys in USA was very strong. So basically they didn't have to do anything, shows would just sell on their own and probably they figured that this is how things are supposed to be. You book the arena, talent draws on their own and you just get the profits. And now things have changed and they have no clue what to do. When the guy brings up some ideas what to do Flip.. Greg looks baffled? Its like some alien concept to him that they should do something with the talent.

I'm starting to think that after all we are getting KENTA/Goto since they did some stuff with them on WTL shows + as I understand they are throwing shades at each other on twitter + Goto had strong booking this year so he probably is getting a featured match on WK card and there are no other suitable opponents for him. On the positive side I liked their interactions so far and it looks like they have some chemistry and Goto tends to deliver MOTYCs at WK. And Shibata in his corner will add some feels so even if it is not something that I really want I think it is going to be fucking great anyway. This video is rather edgy and going over the top, but I think it explains rather well what we are getting here: