Jack

For what it's worth I thought it never quite got going in the way you'd hope, but it was still Matt Riddle vs. Rampage Brown and had plenty of neat moments. Surprise Matt Riddle might be the best kind of surprise and the best kind of Matt Riddle! I was also at that ATTACK/Fight Club show the other week and had such a blast! The Fixxion Warehouse might be the best place to watch wrestling in the country, it's such a charming, intimate dive. And Moustache Mountain vs. Dunne/Moloney was outrageously good fun.

Thought this was extremely good fun! Sloppy in places but totally charming, with Amazing Red's students evoking him with some really jaw dropping high flying...

I reckon Chris Hero is head and shoulders the best U.S. worker at the moment. A lot of people have mentioned him but I'm honestly surprised there are one or two that haven't. I'm fairly confident in putting Matt Riddle, Drew Gulak and Roman Reigns as the next three, but the fifth choice is really tricky. Styles or Cena or perhaps Ricochet, though for whatever reason I don't seem to have watched much of his work this year. TJP is a very good shout.

Thought Reigns-Styles was FANTASTIC. AJ just flung himself all over the place, Reigns kept up with him all the way, the interference from the Usos and Anderson/Gallows was really well done and added lots to the drama, and down the finishing stretch I really bought a bunch of Styles' near falls. My heart was pounding heart with all the tension. I reckon internet favourite vs. internet villain is probably the most compelling in ring story WWE tells these days?

Maybe I'm just an abnormally large Cody Rhodes fan but I really think he could have worked in a main event role? He was a fine wrestler, a really good actor by WWE's standards, he tried his hand at a wide variety of characters and was convincing in pretty much all of them, and it certainly doesn't hurt that he's a good looking young man as well. You could even say he's DASHING hahaha. I was rewatching his and Goldust's matches with the Shield from late 2013 last week and it's some of the most emotional pro wrestling in recent WWE history. It's still quite moving even now. Certainly guys have had decent main event runs with less about them than Cody has. It would have been great to see him get a proper chance at least.

My knowledge of Japanese wrestling (or indeed any wrestling outside of my Western comfort zone) is underdeveloped to say the least, my knowledge of Japanese women's wrestling even more so. But, fuck, I just watched Aja Kong vs. Manami Toyota from the Tokyo Dome in November 1994 on a whim, largely because I like Awesome Kong and Kongo Kong and wondered whether Aja Kong was somewhat similar, and as it turns out, maybe... maybe it's the greatest professional wrestling match that has ever happened? I mean, it's impossible to say considering I only saw it five minutes ago. But I just couldn't believe what I was watching at times. The athleticism from both of them was incredible and it was combined with moments of sheer nastiness, it was just so compelling. It's almost perfectly tailored to my fickle attention span as well, just under 20 minutes and it felt even shorter considering there was zero fucking around from either of them, they just started beating the heck out of each other and kept going. I've got to get acquainted with as many Aja Kong/Manami Toyota matches as possible.

Sabre Jr-Hero was pretty damn marvellous, wasn't it? I think I could have watched a full hour of that. The whole show was really good as well, I enjoyed Riddle vs. Nese and Gargano-Scurll tons, and thought Lio Rush looked terrific in the opener. I think Evolve might legitimately be my favourite promotion in the world at the moment

Ah I'm really sorry I missed you! Didn't check this thread before I left. I am aiming to ramp up the amount of shows I go to this year so maybe we'll bump into each other some time! What did you think of the show? 4 hrs is too long for any card I feel, but I really enjoyed the majority of it. Marty Scurll vs. Tommy End was terrific and I thought the eight man tag had a ton of energy and ambition. Two of my favourites are through in the Cruiserweight Series as well! Marvellous!

I've managed to get a ticket for Progress tomorrow at the last minute! It's the first time I'll have ever been and I'm so excited I can barely sit still! I'm going to the RevPro show at the Cockpit next weekend as well, which means that as far as I'm aware I'm going to see all the UK qualifiers for the Global Cruiserweight Series that have been announced so far? Unless there were any at the last RevPro shows in Reading and Sittingbourne or something. Isn't professional wrestling in 2016 so utterly surreal? I've picked these shows almost at random and now I'm going to get to see matches with genuine WWE implications. What a time to be alive.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3swsop_sami-callihan-solomon-crowe-vs-mike-bailey-czw-seventeen-2016_sport I really like Sami Callihan and I really like Mike Bailey, and as such I thought this match, which not entirely uncoincidentally happened to be Sami Callihan vs. Mike Bailey, was very good indeed.

I went to see a small Revolution Pro show in Portsmouth this evening and wanted to ramble about it on here for a bit because I'm still mega excited from it. I don't get to see anywhere near enough live wrestling considering it is such a great thing. I tend not to be too bothered about RevPro's Portsmouth shows even though they're so close to where I live. since they're so much more low key than the big events in York Hall and such, but this time around they had Zack Sabre Jr vs. Timothy Thatcher! Yeah! That was a match I've wanted to see since they had that really cool match in Evolve a year and a half ago. It wasn't quite up to that level, but was still such good fun. Timothy Thatcher is so impressive. He is just so focused, he will never miss an opportunity to do something small but vicious to an outstretched limb. He controlled most of the match by working away at Sabre's arm, but Sabre pulled out the victory with the Penalty Kick. There were European Uppercuts and slick submission reversals in abundance. It was top. Before the show I was shuffling past the merchandise tables seeing if they had a DVD of the Sabre vs. Styles event available, and then suddenly I ended up at Sabre's table, from which he was selling his T-shirts. Now, technically I am an adult male, a 20 year old adult male, a grown up, but there is something about pro wrestlers that make me feel like an utter child, and ZSJ is one of my favourite wrestlers in the entire world, and so when I managed to blurt out "Zack, I'm a huge fan!", I genuinely started shaking a bit. Happily, Sabre was so nice. I told him that his match with Thatcher was the main reason I'd come to the show, and he said it was the first time they'd wrestled each other in the UK, and he seemed a bit hesitant about it because there were a lot of children in attendance who might not be the target audience for their style. He joked that they would do "BattlArts mixed with the holiday camp style," and I tried to think of a hilarious quip and opted for saying that they would probably be the first wrestlers ever to try and merge those two, and it kind of hit me that I was talking about fucking BattlArts with one of the best pro wrestlers on the planet, and it was so cool. Anyway, the point is, Sabre-Thatcher had a darn good match and Zack Sabre Jr is a very pleasant man and I am hopelessly giddy in the presence of pro wrestlers. The rest of the show was good fun as well. Carlito was there, which was a fun novelty even if his match wasn't especially memorable. There was a tag team match immediately following Sabre-Thatcher which featured The Flatliner running through old comedy spots from 90s WWF, from the Bushwhacker walk to Mr. Socko to the Stink Face, and he got the biggest ovation of the entire night, which made me wonder whether maybe charming silliness is actually what the pro wrestling is all about, rather than straight laced grappling. The main event was a Triple Threat between Marty Scurll, Will Ospreay and Pete Dunne. It was a definite house show main event, much more restrained than the Scurll/Ospreay singles matches that have got such attention recently, but still good fun. Marty Scurll is tremendous, he just exudes cool and charisma. Will Ospreay put in a fine shift as well, we got glimpses of the athleticism that is going to make him absolutely huge in 2016, surely. I had such a good time and cannot imagine how I would pass the time without pro wrestling. It really is a very good invention.

Timothy Thatcher? He's another wrestler who's had a superb year, both in terms of the quality of his matches (the stand outs being his bouts with Chris Hero for WWN and PWG) and the vastly increased amount of exposure he's received. He's doing a tremendous job as Evolve Champion and really exemplifies what I think that company is doing so well at the moment.

I think the obvious two from the U.K are Zack Sabre Jr and Will Ospreay. ZSJ cemented his reputation as one of the best technical wrestlers in the world and smashed into the main event scene of the major Western indy promotions. He won the Battle of Los Angeles as well, of course. Ospreay is arguably the most jaw dropping high flyer in the world at the moment and has set himself up to explode internationally in the year to come with his New Japan bookings lined up. He had a quality match with Matt Sydal in June, and again his Battle of Los Angeles performance was significant for him. His match with Mark Andrews in that was a gem.

I'm about six months late, but I'm just getting started on my New Year's Resolution of watching much more wrestling from Japan than I have previously, since I hear it can be pretty good sometimes. I really really enjoyed Tomohiro Ishii vs. Yuji Okabayashi from Legend Pro on the 13th. It's funny (at least, it is to me)- even a year or so ago I would have watched a match like this and been all like "WHY AREN'T THEY DOING MOONSAULTS?," and now I watch matches with moonsaults in them and go "WHY AREN'T THESE HUMANS MUCH LARGER AND INTENT ON CRASHING INTO EACH OTHER REPEATEDLY UNTIL ONE OF THEM FALLS DOWN?" I think I've grown to appreciate just raw power and feats of strength more maybe, I really liked Okabayashi's almost effortless powerslam on Ishii, and then Ishii one-upping him later on with a crazy superplex. The only thing that disappointed me really was it wasn't quite long enough, it ends kind of abruptly and was missing a few extra minutes of slamming and lariating and razor sharp near falls for my liking. Still, it was a hugely worthwhile use of 15 minutes or so. Okabayashi is rapidly becoming one of my favourites, it'd be great to see him live sometime.

Jacobs' run in ROH from 2004-2007 was absolutely outstanding and should have solidified him as one of the top top top indy guys. The way he was able to transition from childlike comedy wrestler who thought he was the Berzerker to psychotic cult leader who thought he was emo Jesus remains so incredibly impressive, each little stage in that evolution was so natural and perfectly realised. His Steel Cage match with BJ Whitmer posted above is possibly the best epic feud ender that ROH ever did, and his promos surrounding that match are the best I've ever seen in an indy promotion. Some of the comedy stuff he did was really really funny as well, particularly the 'Jimmy Loves Lacey' stuff, you wouldn't believe that was leading somewhere so dark. I get what Jingus is saying about him being too small to be believable as this leader of men, but I think that it's unfair to dismiss Jacobs even slightly because of your own personal prejudices surrounding that, he did pretty much everything right in trying to portray himself as a dangerous maniac despite being small even for ROH, and personally I thought he was by and large very convincing, especially because he never tried to be this all-powerful, magnetic leader- the group were almost always on the brink of collapse, and it was always because Jacobs was just not quite cut out to lead. He never put together a proper reason as to why the group existed, instead just spouting vague anti-corporate slogans and hoping that would be enough to legitimise them; he accidentally drove his girlfriend Lacey out the group and then had an in ring breakdown when she left him for Austin Aries; he grew jealous of Tyler Black and kicked him out despite the fact he was by far the most successful wrestler they had; he tried to brainwash both The Necro Butcher and Delirious and failed with both... I liked The Age of the Fall angle a lot. I think in many ways people just didn't understand it properly and were expecting them to be, like. an indy version of the N.W.O, rather than just this deranged fantasy of this ultimately pathetic little guy. In short, I think Jacobs is just brilliant, and it's a shame he hasn't really shown that very much these last few years. He's proven before he can be one of the smartest talents out there, I hope he'll get to demonstrate that again someday.