The Z

It's former NXT wrestler Arturo Ruas a.k.a. Adrian Jaoude. He's now wrestling as Tiger Ruas. Tito is an Indie wrestler named Bad Dude Tito, he already wrested on previous editions of Bloodsport.

Ethan Allen vs. Chris Ridgeway

Joker

Just came back from the cinema and I absolutely loved it. Might even be my favorite Daniel-Craig-Bond movie, but I also liked the supposedly "bad" movies, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Re-watching the previous four movies before watching this one was definitely a good decision, though.

N-1 Victory Finals spoilers inside.

They only have around 2.000 of 8.000 videos that were on the old Wrestle Universe up on the new Wrestle Universe so far, but they plan to re-upload everything to the new WU eventually.

He will side with 2point0 and their son.

I just re-watched both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace and interestingly enough I liked Casino Royale a lot less than I liked it initially and liked Quantum of Solace a lot more than I liked it on my first watch. I actually remember falling asleep in the cinema, when I first watched Quantum of Solace. If you have a shoddy memory like myself, Quantum of Solace is a lot better, when you watch Casino Royale right before it. I can't be expected to remember everything that happened in a movie I watched two years prior to that. This time around I thought QoS was a complete thrill ride. I already got my tickets for No Time To Die for the upcoming Sunday.

Really? I'd bet all my money on Kiyomiya beating Nakajima in the finals, but obviously I've been wrong before.

ZSJ/Ibushi on Day 5 was excellent obviously, but don't skip past Takagi vs. Nagata. Shingo brought out the absolute best in Nagata. The middle stretch was rough, though. Great O'Khan vs. Yujiro directly followed by Toru Yano vs. Tanga Loa, do they want their fans to fall asleep?

Watched my first DDT show, since the King of DDT tournament yesterday. This was a very good show with a lot of the things I like about DDT and only few of the things I dislike. Don't sleep on Takeshita vs. Brookes, one of the best wrestling matches I've seen this year. I hope they start thinking about English commentary with the launch of the new Wrestle Universe in October. I think DDT would benefit even more of English commentary than NOAH.

I realized Muto/Kiyomiya would go to another time limit draw as soon as the match started. Clearly it's too much to ask of Muto to take a single loss and a draw would be enough for Kiyomiya to advance, so that's the way to go. Well, at least Muto didn't win. Kenou vs. Mochizuki was the MOTN for me, but Nakajima vs. Sakuraba is well worth a watch, too. Nice surprise to see Funaki knock out Fujita. Not that I hate Fujita, but Nakajima/Funaki sounds like a good semi-final match on paper. The directions for both semi-finals and the finals seem obvious, but I don't mind.

Well, Family Guy did it.

I hope that all the Covid and Brexit bullshit is sorted out by then, because I want to be there whenever that match happens.

Out of all the 30 Minute Time Limit Draws that happened in September 2021, this was certainly one of them.

Even if he doesn't have a Visa, who's going to tell Minoru Suzuki that he has to go back?

Holy shit, they also released Low Ki vs. Ninja Mack for free today. Those fools, I would have paid money for that probably.

Lots of new free wrestling on the interwebs lately: New promotion out of Canada put out their first show in full on YouTube incl. Daniel Makabe vs. Nicole Matthews and Mike Bailey vs. Artemis Spencer in the Main Event. ROH put up the first few matches from the second Wrestle Carnival show including Doug Williams vs. Dean Allmark in a ROH Pure Rules match. From the same Wrestle Carnival show, but this one is on the SHIMMER YouTube channel, because it's for the Heart of SHIMMER Championship: Hyan (c) vs. Alex Windsor GCW put up Jordan Oliver vs. Ricky Marvin for free. Ricky Marvin is still the man after all these years! FNW Bank On It Another full show from Fight! Nation Wrestling with a great card. Chris Ridgeway vs. Warren Banks in the main event, also Callum Newman vs. Danny Black, The Young Guns (Ethan Allen & Luke Jacobs), Joe Lando, Giselle Shaw etc.

I think by law they are obligated to turn this into a three way match with some barely trained rookie.

Just finished watching Day 4. Really great tournament so far. A complete breeze to sit through as well, as Day 2-4 are only around 1:45h long each. Even the Kendo Kashin & Keiji Mutoh matches were enjoyable. I was way off with my Kitamiya prediction, but I realized that on Day 1 already. I thought he was in for a big push, since he won the big cage match against Nakajima, but I guess this is Kiyomiya's year. Unless Mutoh wins lol. I guess we'll see on Friday. Even though he lost both of his matches, Daiki Inaba has been growing on me as well. I think he'll have a bright future in the company.

There just was a press conference to announce the launch of a new version of Wrestle Universe on October 1st. Sounds pretty good to me. Some of the most interesting points from the press conference in my opinion: Better video quality, better stability Website will be available in English, no more Google translation Time shift viewing, which means during a live stream you will be able jump to the beginning of the show, when the live stream is already going on (has not been possible so far) You can switch back and forth from Japanese to English commentary directly in the video Mobile Phone App is in development with Chromecast support (I forgot who the user was, that asked about this, but this is great news for you) If you're already subscribed to WU right now, you won't have to pay anything for October to December, so you will essentially get four months for the price of one Here's a complete Twitter thread with the entire transcription of the press conference:

Almost everyone who was in Season 2 of the original NXT is a strong contender: Husky Harris, Lucky Cannon, Eli Cottonwood and of course Michael McGillicutty.

Day 1 of the N-1 Victory was good, Nakajima/Tanaka especially to the surprise of noone. Are you going to provide commentary for any of the tournament shows, @Mark Pickering?

Is he going back to the UK? I still don't understand how all of the New Japan gaijin's that left for the U.S. and Europe are unable to return to Japan, but Drew Parker was able to fly to the U.S. for one weekend only and then returned to Japan.

Of course AEW has sports entertainment aspects. Most wrestling promotions throughout history had those aspects, but their aim is still to put on a good pro-wrestling show and have good pro-wrestling matches. If a good wrestling match happens in WWE it's by mere happenstance. Fans, wrestlers and even some of the people in the WWE office all got this wrong. All the time I see people saying things like "How can they look at a talent like Tommy End and not push him accordingly? How can they put a talent like Ricochet on Main Event?". They probably know how talented those wrestlers are, but they don't care, because it's a completely unimportant aspect to them. It doesn't matter to them, if a match is 1/2* or ***** on 5-Star scale, because it's not their aim to put on a good pro-wrestling show. There's an article on PWInsider right now labelled "MICK FOLEY: "WWE, YOU'VE GOT A PROBLEM"" and he's making the argument that young aspiring talent is now looking at AEW instead of WWE as their goal. But he got it all wrong. The WWE doesn't care about that kind of talent. Even their head of talent relations Triple H got this wrong. He was signing pro-wrestlers, when he shouldn't have. William Regal was scouting talent at PWG's BOLA and other Indies, when he should've gone to Gold's Gym or football and basketball games.