Quick Thoughts #2: ROH/NJPW Supershows, Best in the World, Jay Lethal & The Television Championship

Welcome to another addition of me rambling on about pro wrestling in a completely inane fashion. This time I’m going to look back at the exciting ROH-NJPW Supershows (of which I’ve only seen one so far) and where ROH should look to in the future.

ROH has had a pretty stellar 2015 so far. The World Championship division has been somewhat stagnant but has been saved by the other parts of the card as well as the surprise returns and debuts we’ve seen. All in all ROH seems in a very good position right now, producing very compelling television on a weekly basis. Their production values seem to have gone through the roof too (horrendously bad looking Supercard of Honor show aside) and the whole company seems to be on the up.

On June the nineteenth they return to pay-per-view with their annual Best in the World show. A show which, despite having only debuted in 2011, has quickly become ROH’s second biggest event in any given year. This year looks set to be no different with a mammoth main event scheduled (spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the results from the latest set of TV tapings). But we’ll get to that in due course.

ROH’s partnership with New Japan seems to be going strong and on the back of two excellent shows last year they followed up with four collaborative efforts this time round (albeit the fourth of which was merely a TV taping). War of the Worlds last year was one of ROH’s best shows of the year and this year they more than met expectations.

The talent ROH and New Japan had agreed to use looked pretty good on paper but something about the Global Wars iPPV card just didn’t sit right with me. It looked like a very average show but being a ROH/New Japan show I decided to go ahead and watch it anyway. The show delivered in spades.

Every match, aside from a pretty weak Tanahashi/Elgin match, was at worst mildly entertaining and at best mind-blowingly brilliant. A match-up between Cedric Alexander and Kazuchika Okada pitted two guys raved about (to different extents) by their personal company’s fanbase that I’ve never really understood the hype for but they absolutely tore the house down with a great showing.

ACH and Shinsuke Nakamura had a very good match too although not as good as I had personally hoped given the talents of both men and the fact that the latter is, in my opinion, the best wrestler on the planet right now. Jay Lethal continued his streak of great matches with another against a man who seems, to me at least, unfairly marginalised by the New Japan crowd in Tetsuya Naito.

The match of the night without doubt though had to go to the main event. It was a match that Jim Cornette would have absolutely loathed but I loved it. I like a little bit of everything in my wrestling and I love a good technical classic (i.e. Steamboat/Savage) or a match of brute force where two guys just destroy each other (i.e. Danielson/Strong). Hardcore, big man matches etc. almost everything has its place – and so does a good spotfest.

Make no mistake that is exactly what this main event was. A 10-Man Tag that saw the Bullet Club taking on the ROH All-Stars and it was glorious. Superkick’s, plancha’s and finisher’s galore. It was phenomenal to watch and a really good way to top off an all-around excellent show. The best thing that happened on the whole show though was what happened after the main event. After Mark Briscoe had pinned Nick Jackson a certain ROH World Television Champion came out and laid out both ROH World Champion Jay Briscoe and IWGP Heavyweight Champion AJ Styles.

This man, Jay Lethal, has completely transformed my opinion of him in little over a year. I’ve never rated Lethal and honestly when he won the Television Championship off Tomasso Ciampa at last year’s WrestleMania weekend show a part of me groaned. Another part of me was intrigued by what a partnership with arguably the greatest manager not named Paul Heyman in professional wrestling today (Truth Martini) could do to rejuvenate his character.

Lethal, since returning to ROH in 2011, had been nothing but a very bland babyface and the act had more than worn thin. Lethal turning heel at least gave him a chance to start over in my eyes and boy has he done that. He has been one of the most consistently entertaining performers in ROH in the past twelve months and it has got to the point where I will be absolutely ecstatic if he wins his Title versus Title match with Jay Briscoe at Best in the World.

ROH absolutely should pull the trigger on Lethal right now, he is on the cusp of breaking through in the same way Adam Cole did when they put the Championship on him. However, as much as ROH pulled the trigger on Cole at the right time they have previous for failing to capitalise. Names such as Nigel McGuinness and Tyler Black spring to mind, with Tyler the more prominent of the two. Black was over enough to win the title eons before he did to the point of, when he did, the crowds just didn’t care anymore.

ROH can’t afford to do this with Lethal, he is ready and putting the Championship on him could spark a bit of life into the division that has been kind of messy for lack of a better word since Michael Elgin’s issues of last summer.

The problem I have with it is the Television Championship has become an excellent secondary title in recent years and I really don’t want to lose it. I get why they’re doing what is essentially a unification match because it makes the match even more attractive but they have to execute it in such a way that allows the Television Championship to remain active without tarnishing it forever by having Lethal merely discard it once he’s won the actually important Championship.

It’s a fine balance but presents ROH with an opportunity. If they can somehow word it whereby (much like with Austin Aries and Hulk Hogan in TNA a few years ago) ROH Matchmaker Nigel McGuinness decides that he can’t have one man holding both the singles Championships and forces Lethal to vacate the belt then that would be great.

What they should follow up on that with is a tournament for the vacant Championship. It adds prestige to the title to see multiple guys fighting over it and tournaments always give you the chance to put an up and comer over. For example how huge would it be if Adam Page were to eliminate a stalwart like Roderick Strong or even Adam Cole (although logistically that may difficult since Cole seems to be remaining heel for the time being) in a match.

The tournament finals seem to be a no-brainer to me. Fresh off finishing off their feud with the KRD over the Tag Team Championships (perhaps with a bit of miscommunication during their loss to them in the two teams’ final encounter) it should be Bobby Fish facing Kyle O’Reilly.

Personally I’d have Fish weasel his way to a win over O’Reilly and start a brutal feud between the two friends and partners based on Fish’s jealousy of how O’Reilly was always seen as the star of the team. The feud just seems to write itself.

So, overall thoughts – ROH is in a good position right now and I hope that continues for many moons to come and they should really put the World Championship on Jay Lethal and have Bobby Fish beat Kyle O’Reilly in the finals of the tournament for the vacant Television Championship. I can only hope I’m right.

Thanks for reading, I’m sure I’ll be back with another “Quick Thoughts”/thesis sooner rather than later but until then you can follow me on twitter @watadam20 and I’ll see you again soon hopefully.

P.S. Adam Cole is back, and the world should rejoice……. BAYBAY!

Quick Thoughts #1: Payback/TakeOver

It has been quite the month for wrestling fans with a multitude of different high profile shows from different companies all over the world during the month of May and that continued last night with Payback and will extend further into the week when we are treated to our first NXT Live Special since February. Just going to do a quick review and preview of those two shows here. Not a traditional style review and preview, just my general musings. These musings may contain potential spoilers, you have been warned.

We start with Payback. I’ve not long finished watching it having been at work all day (and up early preventing my watching of the show last night). It was a pretty average show with few highlights if truth be told. The Tag Team division continue to kill it with The New Day transforming themselves from being dangerously close to Big Show levels of making me want to change the channel all the way to one of the most entertaining acts on the entire roster. Cesaro and Tyson, to the surprise of no-one except maybe Vince, are getting really over as faces and they are the perfect foil for the Tag Champions at the minute.

I thought their two out of three falls match was a lot of fun even if it did feel far too short, if they were going to do two out of three falls they should have given the guys more time. You’d think after watching the guy for the better part of a decade now I wouldn’t be surprised by Cesaro’s feats of strength but I still am. Him throwing Big E around like a small child will never fail to amuse me. I thought the finish was very clever and worked well for both teams. I cannot stress how much I am looking forward to the tag team Elimination Chamber match, I’m not sure quite how it will work logistically yet but I am sure it is going to be great to watch.

A small diva related quibble. I was fine with the tag match in general and thought Naomi and Tamina going over made the most sense but why did Nikki need to kick out of Naomi’s finisher? And much more why did then Naomi merely dragging a distracted Nikki from the top rope into the ring cause that much more damage than her finisher did? Bizzare.

Also, I hope Ziggler is okay – that headbutt was straight up nasty and the blood pouring out of his head was a serious issue. The guy is so talented I really don’t want to see him sidelined too.

And finally, regarding Payback, what an incredible main event. It may not have been a five star classic but it was perfectly booked and about as good as an overly convoluted fatal-4-way with a boatload of interference can get. The mini-reformation of The Shield was a thing of beauty and goes to show that a Shield reunion in the future will work fantastically well, just don’t do it quite yet.

Reigns came across really well in the match. I actually quite like the guy when he seems to be acting natural and not cutting Looney Tunes inspired promos. Him and Ambrose sharing a little bit of brotherly love before beating the hell out of each other in order to gain the biggest prize in the industry was really well executed. And Reigns' quip outside the ring about “Loser buys the beers?” came across as actually cool and really relatable rather than the unrelatable, forced Roman we’ve been subjected to over the past number of months. More of actually cool Roman Reigns will eventually see the crowd back on his side.

Now onto NXT and this Wednesday when we will see Takeover: Unstoppable. This looks set to be yet another great show – as we’ve come to expect with NXT – despite being plagued and threatened by injuries to some of the bigger stars. I would have thought they would have announced a change to the main event by now if Zayn wasn’t going to be fit for the show so it looks like Zayn/Owens II will thankfully go ahead. More on that later.

With Hideo being injured and out for a significant amount of time it appears we will see Finn Balor vs. Tyler Breeze for the #1 contendership. It should be a great match but I would have liked to have seen Hideo in the equation as I think he would probably have been the best choice to face Owens next (especially given his adorable, absolutely unbooable promo on last week’s episode where he proclaimed he’d like to fight Owens because “he is a bad man”). Plus him adding a third dimension to the match would have been cool. As it stands, Breeze may need to go over because I don’t want Owens to lose the Championship soon and Balor/Owens again with the same outcome may not be the right thing to do with Balor.

The tag division is probably the weakest area of NXT right now but the feud between Team Thick (AKA Blake & Murphy) and Big Cass & Enzo has been really well built. They’ve even managed to include Carmella and Alexa in interesting ways which is cool. As much as I’d like to see Enzo and Cass win the titles I smell shenanigans from a mile away for this one and I think it will probably work very well.

The women continue to impress. I’ve long been a fan of Becky Lynch and I got fully on board the Sasha Banks bandwagon in the build-up to her first match for the Championship against Charlotte well over six months ago. Both women have been great and the scene is set for another incredible match between two unbelievably talented women. The contract signing from a recent episode of NXT was fantastically done. Sasha signing the contract with her own ‘BOSS’ stamp showcased the little things that NXT just gets right.

The women’s division may be losing a little steam with Charlotte having now done all she can in NXT and being more than ready for the main roster leaving only three of the really talented women left. I do hope they push on with the division and build some women up to the same level as the Sasha’s, Becky’s and Bayley’s of the world. Signings like Jessie McKay and a rejuvenated, actually interesting to watch Emma are really healthy signs for the division.

The work the big four have put into this division cannot be overstated. They have been given the ball and have ran with it. In fact if Owens/Zayn had been cancelled due to Zayn’s injury I would have been all in favour of Becky and Sasha main eventing the special.

Speaking of main eventing, I have seen more Zayn/Owens matches than I can count and they always deliver, the last special was one of their weakest matches against each other but that was deliberate in order to build to the bigger story they were telling, which was absolutely fine. I also think that their feud has not been quite as impactful as it could have been. That being said, the promo that ended last week’s episode was incredibly well done. I think, if I were a casual fan, that one promo would have sold me on this match and I think they will go all out (and knowing them probably succeed) to have an absolute classic on Thursday – and I can’t wait to see it.

PREDICTIONS: Owens retains, Sasha retains, Blake/Murphy retain, Corbin wins, Bayley/Charlotte win and Finn wins.

Hope you all enjoyed my little musings tonight. I might start doing this more regularly as it allows me to vent my anger and release my joy – as well as getting rid of the occasional craving to just write. Stay tuned for more potential updates, more of this, more of the rebooking series - when me and Jonathon can find the time and much, much more.

Thanks for reading, enjoy NXT on Wednesday and I hope you’ll come back to read some more. Until then, if you wish, you can follow me on twitter @watadam20. See you all soon.

P.S. Baron Corbin and Dana Brooke are also wrestling………………….