SturmCRF

Great show overall, fascinated by how it came off on TV but probably not enough to spend four hours watching the replay on Thursday when there'll be a new Dynamite to watch. We left at the end of the Trios Title match, because queuing down Wembley Way for two hours plus with 80,000 people would have been intolerable, especially just for more of MJF and Cole's Bloodline bullshit. It's very well done bullshit, in that it's over, but if they hadn't lost me with weeks of poor cinematic skits, they had done by the time they'd casually dispatched Aussie Open, simultaneously removing most of the doubt that MJF would retain with no big turn. Punk vs Joe and the tag titles were my favourites, as the crowd were genuinely split and passionately invested in the outcome, which you need when you're watching things you can't hear happening half a mile away. Wembley is so huge, Stadium Stampede was kind of a chore to pay attention to, rewarded with massively entertaining spots if you happened to be concentrating at the right time. But like, Eddie and Claudio were fighting one tier above us, in the right quadrant of the building for us to have a good view, and I could still barely see them. If I wanted to strain my eyes to see two distant bald men hitting each other, I could just wait until Millwall next make the Playoff Final. I went into Ospreay vs Jericho intending to belt out Judas (which is at least a slightly more ethically sourced National Anthem Of Wrestling than Real American) and then get behind Ospreay, and glad that everybody else seemed to have the same idea. Very good match, happy to see that Will is over like a motherfucker. The Bullet Club six man was also disappointing, so many men with big hair that it was tough to follow, and when you're part of a minority who seem familiar with all the years of tangled NJPW lore, there's not much you can do to get an atmosphere going. Made me wonder if your Cornettes and Punks are onto something with a Hangman or a Kenny missing some fundamental old school wrestling crowd connection intuition. Much less so with Kenny, but it didn't work here, and wasn't going to when 3/4 in attendance were watching at a distance where he looked barely distinguishable from Juice Robinson. Coffin match ruled, House Of White ruled, even if it never feels right seeing them lose to anyone, let alone the Bum Father. Women's match was fun for the entrances and didn't outstay its welcome, dubious about Saraya as champ, but hard to begrudge her, and the whole division needs a shakeup anyway. Good time overall! The Rev Pro show the day before was much more how a live wrestling show should be, but none of the stadium shows I've been to can possibly match the intimacy of a normal sized building where you can smell the Deep Heat and hear the slap of man chopping man. For all my grousing, I'll definitely go again next year.

Update: Ospreay vs Shingo fucking ruled, obviously. And then on the way out, Shibata was there, and I bought an 8x10 and shook his hand and my girlfriend and I both got pictures with him. I looked like a gurning loon, but hey, nice bonus!

Also, I feel the need to apologise for not trying harder to start a 'Both these Skyes!' chant just now when Skye Blue and Skye Smitson squared off in the battle royale. I didn't commit early enough and then they both got eliminated (one might say the Skyes fell) before there was another window. Negligent on my part.

I'm literally in the Copper Box Arena, twenty minutes away from a ludicrously stacked Rev Pro show. Ishii vs Luke Jacobs, Kosei Fujita vs JJ Gale, Ospreay vs Shingo Takagi, ZSJ vs Ricky Knight Jr, and seven other matches that will probably also be really good. Shameful lack of Shingo merch though, we went to all the trouble of getting cash out this morning, so of course they're taking card payments for once but have a pretty miserable selection. El Phantasmo and Bullet Club War Dogs and Rev Pro 11th Anniversary are great and all, but goddamit, they're not the Japanese Dragon.

I haven't seen the last few shows, we cancelled our subscription after the last PPV for all the obvious reasons any reasonable person might not want to pay £10 a month for Dark. But giving Kiera Hogan vs Lady Frost two minutes is a glaring example of where they've gone wrong. Sure, maybe it's too much to ask that we get competitive Claudio or Aussie Open matches regularly, but why give so little time to two women who are slotted at a level where they should be going back and forth and having to struggle for the win a bit? I know the answer is that they're taping before Collision, but it totally ruins what made the first few episodes of studio ROH unique, where nearly everyone got time.

Ospreay got a decent match out of Tanga Loa, he'll get an actively good and memorable match out of Jericho in his sleep.

I feel like what I've seen of his character work and promos on this comeback run have been some of the worst, repetitive, trying too hard to be intense shit I've seen him do, but his matches usually end up being much better than I expect.

I'm with Zendragon, I've always thought the Atomic Drop looked like total shit, even when I was a small child and was 95% sure I was watching a real fight.

Yeah, there's so much money in a Malakai singles run, especially a match vs Punk. I don't know what sort of physical state he's in, he always looks fine but from interviews you'd think his back was worse than Dalton Castle's. I hope not, because as much as I love the House Of Black wrecking people as a team, they all have loads to offer as singles wrestlers. And I want to see him entering the ring to Amenra again.

I do. Honestly, probably no because I also subscribe to Stardom World, NJPW World and WWE Network, and watch everything AEW does, so I only tend to get round to watching it for the bigger Noah shows, a handful of TJPW shows and maybe two DDT shows a year. But the service itself is hard to fault, the picture quality shits on NJPW World and you get a vast amount of wrestling, it's just whether you can get the value out of it. I'll be pleased I have it this month for the N1, and basically any Nakajima or KENOH match makes me feel justified in paying the subscription. If you can view the other two companies as a bonus and not feel guilty about not having the time to keep up, or if you specifically want to follow the Tokyo Joshis or the DDTs, go for it!

Doppel post.

Well shit, I remember it being just after Wrestlemania, so I guess I have seen CM Punk. We probably didn't stay for the dark match as I was on teen-minding duty and it's a bit of a trek back from Greenwich, but if I can forget seeing Caylen Croft vs JTG, who knows how deep my wrestle-amnesia goes.

I'm going. I guess I'm looking forward to seeing Punk the most, as I'm fairly sure I've never seen him live before (unless he was in the midcard of a Jack Swagger title reign Smackdown that I took my cousins to in 2010 at the 02). Apart from that, Ospreay because I always enjoy seeing that maniac wrestle, and Jericho because a Wembley full of people singing Judas will be a moment.

I'm happy with that news, the Bucks irritate the shit out of me, but I can enjoy their matches when I'm in the mood, and when they're in the mood they can make a Private Party or a Top Flight look like future megastars. I'm mainly happy Kenny's staying, because for all his faults, which do bother me too on a more subconscious level even if I'm not as attuned to picking them out, I do think he's one of the best wrestlers in the world and capable of insane feats of athleticism that we're kind of privileged to witness. It's not normal for human beings to be able to do some of the shit he does. And his ridiculous face just intrinsically makes me laugh. Also glad AEW keeps Hangman, his matches usually entertain me, he seems a nice guy when he's not winding up CM, and he supported Ukraine against that addle brained fuck Mayor Kane.

I'd settle for him ingesting a Young Buck.

Oh totally. All the money AEW made from selling 75,000 tickets to Wembley would burst into flames in despair.

I'm going and I'd be moderately up for Ospreay vs Jericho. I'm seeing Ospreay vs Shingo the previous night at Rev Pro, so I don't need or expect a super work rate match from him at Wembley. As long as the rest of the card is full of matches that are either good or consequential storyline wise, that'll do me. If they try and sell some extra tickets by having Paul Wight wrestle on the other hand, and I realise this is just a hypothetical that Matt threw out there, then I'd be as angry as people seem to be on the UK's behalf about the Ospreay-Jericho rumour.

If you can look past the self inflicted brain trauma sized elephant in the room, Shibata vs Okada is the best Shibata match I've seen by a mile, and possibly the best Okada match.

I really liked Aldis vs Cody on the original All In, but it had the advantage of being the only traditional, meat and potatoes, old school wrestling match on a show full of mainly flippies. It was a perfect change of pace in the context of that show.

Apparently he did his post match interview, so can't have been anywhere near as bad as it looked. Seemed like a horrendously incompetent botch from Nicholls, but I saw some people saying he himself looked concussed after busting himself open with shoot headbutts earlier, so maybe the mindless stupidity really took place at that point. Either way, glad Henare seems to have had a lucky escape, that was one of the more disgusting head drops I've seen.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1011636426338734170/1129418593591885824/IMG_5443.jpg The artistic spirit overtook me and I used my dubious marker pen skills to draw everyone in the 2023 G1 Climax, so I can cut them out, put them on a giant corkboard and move them up and down as the block standings change. Pretty proud of my efforts.

I dreamt last night that Roman Reigns finally lost his Undisputed WWE Universal Title to... Eddie Kingston. WWE and AEW had done some sort of mutual cooperation/exchange thing, but I can't remember who AEW got out of the deal. I don't hate that booking though.

Well that's a dreadful fucking shirt. Why remind people that NJPW shat on the lineage of their main title and replaced it with a new one with about two years of history? And on a purely aesthetic level, it's a hideous eyesore that nobody in their right mind could possibly want to wear.

Just on the off chance that anyone on here can go to Forbidden Door at short notice and needs tickets, I have two. Ticketmaster won't let me sell them through it directly from a UK bank account, but it seems I would be able to transfer them to someone. I wouldn't ask any more than face value from anyone on here, PM me if you're interested. And sorry mods if this is verboten, feel free to delete.

I'm assuming it means it's like the FA Cup, where you get drawn against an opponent at random each round, rather than there being a bracket. Which is actually quite a good idea considering how predictable brackets make most wrestling tourneys.