War Of The Worlds 2017 SuperThread

[The Dragon Saga]

Daniels has alluded a couple times now to doing "whatever it takes" to retain the title. I wouldn't mind a heel turn somewhere in his run where he just can't give it up, because he knows he probably won't have another chance to hold it again. I'd hope they do Cody/Lethal in a proper blow off at the next PPV, but I wouldn't be surprised if we get Daniels vs. one or the other.

[King of Indy Style]

A desperate Daniels that will do absolutely anything to keep his title reign going would be a pretty compelling character. You could boo him for breaking the rules to do anything to stay champion, but also be sympathetic for him because this is his last hurrah and he doesn't want to give up the thing he's chased his whole career.

[famicommander]

Ian Riccaboni said last night that the War of the Worlds NYC show was the fastest sell out in ROH history.

Going just by what they have said on commentary this year:
-15th Anniversary Show was the most watched PPV/iPPV/VOD show in ROH history
-Supercard of Honor was the most attended show in ROH history
-WOTW was the fastest sellout in ROH history

I don't think Sinclair could ask for a better start to 2017 after 2016 was a down year relative to 2015.

[maxx_powerz]

Thinking about it more, I think I want to see Scurll drop the TV title to Jay White in a triple threat or four-way where he isn't pinned and then go after Daniels for BitW. Not sure who is or isn't available, but ideally my top half of the card is Daniels v Scurll for the title, Cody v Lethal FWH, White v Ospreay 2 for the TV title and Bully & the Briscoes v the Bucks and Page for the six man titles. Add Fish v Young, maybe start a Castle v Martinez fued or do Gresham v Frankie and add a multi team tag title contenders match (maybe Kingdom v MCMG v War Machine v Roppongi Vice) and I'd watch the hell out of that show.

[rovert1]

Daniels has alluded a couple times now to doing "whatever it takes" to retain the title. I wouldn't mind a heel turn somewhere in his run where he just can't give it up, because he knows he probably won't have another chance to hold it again. I'd hope they do Cody/Lethal in a proper blow off at the next PPV, but I wouldn't be surprised if we get Daniels vs. one or the other.

Expect Cody to challenge and win at the PPV.

Ospreay/White was must see. I liked the show overall but it didn't have too many ROH centric talking points.

[famicommander]

Daniels has alluded a couple times now to doing "whatever it takes" to retain the title. I wouldn't mind a heel turn somewhere in his run where he just can't give it up, because he knows he probably won't have another chance to hold it again. I'd hope they do Cody/Lethal in a proper blow off at the next PPV, but I wouldn't be surprised if we get Daniels vs. one or the other.

Expect Cody to challenge and win at the PPV.

Ospreay/White was must see. I liked the show overall but it didn't have too many ROH centric talking points.

Will Cody go back to Impact to drop that alphabet soup Global Force title he's holding?

[rovert1]

Daniels has alluded a couple times now to doing "whatever it takes" to retain the title. I wouldn't mind a heel turn somewhere in his run where he just can't give it up, because he knows he probably won't have another chance to hold it again. I'd hope they do Cody/Lethal in a proper blow off at the next PPV, but I wouldn't be surprised if we get Daniels vs. one or the other.

Expect Cody to challenge and win at the PPV.

Ospreay/White was must see. I liked the show overall but it didn't have too many ROH centric talking points.

Will Cody go back to Impact to drop that alphabet soup Global Force title he's holding?

That's a very good question and I've no answer.

[BurningHammer]

Enjoyed the PPV overall, thought it had something for everyone, it felt it also allowed things to progress for ROH more than a usual PPV when these guys combine, from the main event which I feel will have alot coming from it overall, to Page vs Kaz which i think really has some legs and could be something to cement both in ROH within Singles action.

White vs Ospreay was everything that it had been described and lauded, White showed that he is starting to get "it" it seems, especially from a moves set point of view and what is needed in this day and age, obviously from a charachter and emotional point of view he is still lacking a bit but matches like this really help him with him crowd.

I liked the win for Castle and hopefully that's the start of another build for him hopefully towards the TV title and a true fued with Marty which would also tie in with Dalton's involvement with the Bullet Club

Sometimes you don't realises how big some guys are but Sanada looked huge in a ROH ring, shows what a great athlete he is the way he moves and is able to do the things he does.

One thing I didn't like was the amount of unprotected chair shots to the head, in the Trios match that really didn't have to happen, I hope both Trent and Mark are ok.

[Big Red Machine]

Daniels has alluded a couple times now to doing "whatever it takes" to retain the title. I wouldn't mind a heel turn somewhere in his run where he just can't give it up, because he knows he probably won't have another chance to hold it again. I'd hope they do Cody/Lethal in a proper blow off at the next PPV, but I wouldn't be surprised if we get Daniels vs. one or the other.

Expect Cody to challenge and win at the PPV.

Ospreay/White was must see. I liked the show overall but it didn't have too many ROH centric talking points.

The same Cody who just got pinned clean on the PPV?
I would LOVE to hear someone on the roster just lose it and vent on Delirious' idiocy on some sort of shoot interview.

[King of Indy Style]

Been following someone who's tweeting out spoilers, nothing particularly eventful nor intriguing thus far besides

Spoiler: show

Adam Page beating Adam Cole, and it kind of looks like they're building to another Cole/Scurll match. Maybe at BITW?

[King of Indy Style]

Spoiler: show

CHUCK TAYLOR IS TEAMING WITH ROPPONGI VICE AGAINST THE BUCKS AND ADAM PAGE

[DXvsNWO1994]

There's a spoiler thread set up, so you can freely discuss tonight's TV Tapings (without spoiler tags) here:

viewtopic.php?f=4&p=144571#p144571

[Big Red Machine]

Spoiler: show

CHUCK TAYLOR IS TEAMING WITH ROPPONGI VICE AGAINST THE BUCKS AND ADAM PAGE

See... this is the kind of thing that sounds really fun on a house show but not like something that belongs on TV.

Also, just to be clear:

Spoiler: show

Chuck Taylor as in DUSTIN, not as in Chuck Taylor™, correct?

[King of Indy Style]

Spoiler: show

Not entirely sure since I don't watch either EVOLVE or CHIKARA, all I know is that his titantron said The Kentucky Gentleman, he was doing Best Friends stuff with Trent, and he got a clean pin on Nick Jackson. So...neither I guess.

[Big Red Machine]

Spoiler: show

Not entirely sure since I don't watch either EVOLVE or CHIKARA, all I know is that his titantron said The Kentucky Gentleman, he was doing Best Friends stuff with Trent, and he got a clean pin on Nick Jackson. So...neither I guess.

Spoiler: show

Was it the man you would know as Chuck Taylor, or was it Stokely Hathaway?

[Mike0284]

Spoiler: show

Not entirely sure since I don't watch either EVOLVE or CHIKARA, all I know is that his titantron said The Kentucky Gentleman, he was doing Best Friends stuff with Trent, and he got a clean pin on Nick Jackson. So...neither I guess.

Spoiler: show

Was it the man you would know as Chuck Taylor, or was it Stokely Hathaway?

Spoiler: show

[Big Red Machine]

Here is my review of the PPV. I hope to finish watching the Toronto show tomorrow.



ROH War of the Worlds 2017 (5/12/2017)- New York, NY

FOUR CORNER SURVIVAL MATCH: Bobby Fish vs. KUSHIDA vs. Silas Young (w/Beer City Bruiser) vs. Dalton Castle (w/the Boys)- 5.75/10
Before the match Silas Young grabbed a mic and started to cut a promo on KUSHIDA for coming out in a Yankees jersey to get a cheap pop. Yes, really. On a f*cking PPV. I don’t care that it was only thirty seconds! You cannot be wasting time with stupid house-show bullsh*t on a G-d damned PPV (and especially one that has nine matches in three hours).
KUSHIDA goes up for a spring board and… the camera cuts Dalton Castle down and selling. The incompetence is staggering. And not just with the camera crew, as it turns out that instead of doing, say, a springboard dropkick or knee-strike or whatever, KUSHIDA- a babyface- just landed in the ring so he could run up to Silas Young and give him a back-rake like Silas had just done to Dalton. They had a choice between “cool high-flying move” or “stupid cutesy bullsh*t comedy spot with the babyface cheating,” and they chose the latter. Wrestling in 2017 needs to get a lot better. They did stuff for a while with a bit of a story of someone always coming in to break up the pin. It was fine.

ADAM PAGE vs. FRANKIE KAZARIAN- 6/10
The video package for this match was quite good. Unfortunately, the booking hasn’t been, as I just watch ROH’s show from two weekends ago where I saw Kazarian pin Page clean to already get his revenge.
The match was very intense and very fast-paced. If the program is going to continue I guess Page winning via illegal leverage is a fine finish, but to be honest: it’s Frankie Kazarian. I’d rather Page just win clean and move on to someone else.

WAR MACHINE vs. LOS INGOBERNABLES DE JAPON (Sanada & EVIL) vs. JONATHAN GRESHAM & CHRIS SABIN (w/Alex Shelley)- 5/10
This right here is an example of a match that should not have been on this PPV. You can’t do nine ROH-quality matches on a three-hour PPV you just can’t. I understand wanting to get War Machine on the show because they’re former ROH World Tag Team Champions and also IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Champions, but the rest of these guys, god as they are, do not need to be on this PPV. They should have stuck War Machine in the ROH World Tag Team Title match (they never got a rematch without any interference, after losing the belts a whole year ago), and you stick LIJ vs. Sabin & Gresham on the pre-show (and if that means you have leave dorks like Ferrara, Cheeseburger, the Kingdom and The Rebellion off of tonight’s card entirely, then so be it). I’d even say you should mush White vs. Ospreay into the opener to make it a Six-Man Scramble to save time on this show so that all of the matches can deliver. This a f*cking PAY-PER-VIEW. This is a match that no one is going to pay to see, either from an action standpoint or from a storyline standpoint (because there is no storyline to it) so it doesn’t belong on the f*cking PPV.
Anyway, having had their badass factor completely destroyed two weeks ago at ROH Unauthorized by being Dalton Castle’s Boys for the night, War Machine went out and got themselves some new entrance gear- in this case, warriors’ helmets- to make themselves look more badass. The match was short and predictably pointless. It also apparently needed to have a really lame chairshot spot in it that didn’t matter one bit. LIJ need to stop that spot because it almost never looks good.

JAY WHITE vs. WILL OSPREAY- 8.5/10
Well. F*ck. That was kind of insane now wasn’t it? I could go into a bit more detail the big spots but that would spoil them for you and this is one match you definitely want to go into knowing as little as possible.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- Punishment Martinez attacks and steals their moment.

NO DISQUALIFICATIONS MATCH FOR THE ROH WORLD SIX-MAN TAG TEAM TITLES: The Brisoces & Bully Ray(c) vs. CHAOS (Hirooki Goto & Roppongi Vice)- 6.25/10
So the challengers come out like normal and the Briscoes come out like normal but Bully Ray has to start all the way up in the balcony (again, a waste of time on a PPV) and come through the crowd, and of course they’re all chanting “ECW! ECW!” which is exactly why any promotion that wants to look big league and look like it’s growing and look like the promotion of the future shouldn’t be bringing Bully Ray into your promotion in 2017. Even if he’s working these shows for free (which I can guarantee you he isn’t) he’s still not worth having because of the damage it does to the brand.
Then Bully starts talking, wasting even more time. Yes, we all know that we’re in New York City and we all know that you’re Bully Ray. Now shut the f*ck up, get your fat ass down to the ring and start WRESTLING. Bully announces that this match is no No DQs because apparently that’s what people want to see. Well if they wanted to see no DQs matches for no reason why did they buy tickets to ROH as opposed to, say, CZW? This is, like, the fourth time that Bully has done this sort of thing in ROH, and he’s only been in the company for about eight shows. And if, for some reason, you HAVE to do a No DQs match, why not ANNOUNCE IT IN ADVANCE, SO YOU CAN SELL MORE TICKETS/PPV BUYS? If garbage matches are truly what people want to see as Bully claims, why not ADVERTISE THEM?
And once again, please look at the whole set up of this thing. Bully Ray is the one who gets the special entrance where he is among the people, gets the spotlight all on him (literally) and is the one who gets to cut the promo for all of the cheap pops, which makes the fans chant for a promotion that he alone of the ROH roster is identified with, and allows him to have a match where he can get big pops by doing very little, whereas the other five men in the match would be perfectly at home in a regular old wrestling match. So someone please explain to me how any of this helps anyone other than Bully Ray.
Anyway, we’ve got yet another six-man tag title match with no build and where the challengers have done nothing to earn their shot, and yet another Bully Ray match that is a No DQs match for no reason. And yes, somehow, the saddest part is that I can totally see CHAOS winning here not because it would mean anything (these belts don’t mean sh*t) or because it would help any sort of storyline in any way (it wouldn’t) but simply because Delirious has proven himself to be such a mark for getting ROH Titles somehow involved in New Japan (O’Reilly being planned to drop the belt right back to Cole at the Tokyo Dome, Ishii’s title win derailing the Roddy vs. Fish feud over the TV Title, wasting PPV tag title matches on New Japan teams no one thinks has a chance in hell of winning, Lethal needing to join LIJ in order to beat a jobber like Honma) that he’d put the belts on CHAOS just for the sake of doing it.
These five brave men tried to have Bully Ray’s match while having to work around Bully Ray’s inadequacies. Bully did almost nothing, but he did get to do all of his big spots at finish, basically turning the Briscoes into a pair of redneck Devons.

ROH TV TITLE MATCH: Marty Scurll(c) vs. Matt Sydal- 7.75/10
A fun match brought down by the fact that absolutely no one thought that Sydal had a chance of walking out with the belt, which has been an issue with all of Scurll’s title defenses due to Delirious’ ridiculous decision to only book him against guys who either aren’t under ROH contract or who are on their way out the door. Scurll worked the arm and shoulder and tried to win with the crossface chicken wing while Sydal used his athleticism to do athletic stuff to try to win.

ROH WORLD TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: The Young Bucks(c) vs.Los Ingobernables de Japon (Tetsuya Naito & BUSHI)- 7/10
This is a match between two teams of heels that get cheered like babyfaces for being heels. What has wrestling come to?
Anyway, we’ve got a tag title match on PPV where absolutely no one thinks the belts have a snowball’s chance in hell of changing hands because the challengers are fly-ins from New Japan. You know, just like the last time the New Japan crew was in town for a PPV (and as was the original plan at the last PPV as well before the Hardys got freed up earlier than expected). It’s nice to see that no one is learning anything.
The match was great, as we all knew it would be with the talent involved, but it didn’t feel very exciting because it never once felt like LIJ had a snowballs chance in hell of walking out with the belts. Naito continues to impress, busting out new stuff all the time. There was one spot in this match that I really hated, which involved a blinded Jackson brother nailing people with superkicks: first Naito and BUSHI, and then he hit his brother when his brother tried to come over and Too Sweet him, and then referee Paul Turner, with neither of the latter two having ever even touched him. Firstly, I just can’t buy that his superkicks at THAT accurate that he can nail four people in a row while blinded, and without having any frame of reference of where the second two were other than their voices in a large, noisy room. The idea of him kicking both his brother and the referee was also stupid because he had just kicked two people! Who else did he think was there? And especially- and this is key- neither of those two actually touched him, so all he was going on was sound… and the sounds in question would have been men speaking perfect English in a match where he knows that both of his opponents to not come close to it. Thirdly, and, in a way, worst of all, it felt like a spot that was done for the sake of doing it rather than something that made sense in the story. It didn’t add anything to the match or really even effect much of anything. It was just a pointless ref bump and a pointless “whoops, I kicked my own partner” spot done for the combination of shock value and to get in more f*cking superkicks.

ADAM COLE vs. HIROSHI TANAHASHI- 6.25/10
This is almost certainly Adam Cole’s last high-profile ROH match (I think he’s scheduled for the TV tapings on Sunday, but that’s it), and he received not only a pathetically small amount of streamers, but the fans completely failed to all throw them at anything close to the same time, so it didn’t look anywhere near as cool. He also had an extremely disappointing match with Tanahashi. In large part that is because they didn’t even get fourteen minutes (but that stupid three-way tag definitely had to be on the show. Right.) This felt like first ten minutes of a really great forty-minute match and then the final three minutes of that same match with none of the in between.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- The Young Bucks show up and tease superkicking Cole but then he turns around and they celebrate with him instead. Then the lights go out and we get a video from Kenny Omega on the SinclairTron and did an excellent job with a promo that felt like it was live even though we all know it wasn’t. I’ll get into some details on why I thought Kenny was excellent here in a moment, but I really dislike the direction this is all going in, which is as follows: Marty Scurll has joined the Bullet Club and Kenny is sending him after Cole. Marty appeared with Kenny on the Tron. Then the lights went off and took absolutely f*cking forever to go back on. When they did, Scurll was standing in the ring and reveals himself to be the newest member of the n.W.o. The Bucks appear shocked by this but then they superkick Cole, Marty hits Cole with umbrella and he and the Bucks pose over Cole’s dead body.
First the good:
-Kenny Omega. His delivery and verbiage were both excellent, and if he hadn’t made a comment about being disappointed in the Bucks this would have had a lot more of an obnoxious Russo-swerve vibe.
Now the bad:
- Whoever came up with the idea of having Marty Scurll appear in the video with Kenny is a f*cking idiot. It both created the logic hole of requiring him to have magical powers of teleportation to get from Omega’s secret lair (you know he has one) to the ring, and it completely spoiled the surprise of what was about to happen, which made the whole lights off/teleportation thing pointless. It would have been much better to have Kenny’s verbiage serve as the hint for what was about to happen so that those that did figure it out would be able to feel smart by figuring it out right before it happened and that those who didn’t figure it out would actually be surprised when Scurll showed up to attack Cole. It also made Marty’s whole “I’m in Bullet Club” reveal spot with the umbrella before he hit Cole completely anti-climactic. It would have been A LOT better to have Marty not appear in the video and not do the second lights off thing, either. Have the lights come back on and then have Scurll quickly pop out from the crowd, run in, and hit Cole with the umbrella FROM BEHIND (all stopping right in front of him did here was give Cole time to defend himself. If the Bucks hadn’t been loyal- as Kenny’s promo hinted that he didn’t think they were being- Cole would have had ample time to either escape or attack Marty while Marty was pointlessly standing in front of Cole basically saying “I am about to attack you and kick you out of Bullet Club). THEN you can have Marty open his umbrella to reveal the Bullet Club logo. Then I would have the Bucks tease superkicking Marty before decided to remain in Bullet Club and instead join in on giving Cole a beat-down before they all posed over his corpse.
-Scurll just successfully defended his title against Cole last month, so sticking them in a feud will just tie up the TV Title rather than give us good, built-up title defenses where people think there is a snowball’s chance of the title changing hands.
-I really dislike the general concept of just throwing Scurll into Bullet Club, from both an ROH and New Japan perspective. In New Japan it’s really just kind of annoying at this point. They basically did this same thing with Zack Sabre Jr. two months ago when he joined Suzuki-Gun and they just had Cody join Bullet Club in December even though he really doesn’t fit as part of the group. They are now up to ELEVEN members, and that’s after they just lost Cody Hall and nobody even noticed! I didn’t even notice. I had literally typed “twelve if Cody Hall ever comes back from his injury” and then Googled him to find out his condition and it was only then that I learned that he has started working for NOAH and thus isn’t with New Japan anymore. And this eleven-member heel faction is already on top of the nine-member heel Suzuki-Gun and the five-member heel LIJ. They don’t need any more guys!
From an ROH perspective, I’m quite sick of Bullet Club on an entirely different axis. For the past year ROH has felt like they’ve thrown everything all in on Bullet Club. One year ago they threw an entire PPV main event under the bus to kick this thing off- killing Colt Cabana’s big return dead and destroying whatever interest was left for the Lethal-Briscoe so-called “biggest rematch in ROH history” that they ran for the following PPV. I had no problem with them putting the ROH World Title on Adam Cole, since it made natural sense for O’Reilly to win from Cole to finally pay off the feud they had started the previous fall, but I really disliked the way that the Young Bucks were inserted into the tag title picture in the middle of what felt like it should have been a very personal feud between The Addiction and the Motor City Machine Guns. I’m not saying that the results of that (specifically the Ladder War) weren’t great, but it felt like they stuffed the Bucks in there just so they could make Bullet Club the champions rather than letting The Addiction and MCMG finish their feud and then have the Bucks win the belts at the next show.
Then they had Kyle lose the belt right back to Cole in his first defense just so Cole could lose it to Daniels in an angle that involved Kazarian joining Bullet Club as a ruse. Other than that angle and three other feuds- Cody vs. Lethal, Cody vs. Daniels, and the short Hardys vs. Bucks feud- all of which involve Bullet Club, the entire promotion has been spinning its wheels. TV Champion Marty Scurll in particular has been a source of disappointment to many, having won the TV Title on his first weekend in the company, has gone the intervening six month until now defending in random matches against a series of challengers who all had little to no build and all clearly got the title shot because they either weren’t on the ROH roster or were about to leave the company. And now, after six months, he finally has an angle… and it involves him joining Bullet Club. It feels like Bullet Club is inadvertently sucking the life out of ROH, and at this point I just want it to go away.
-The other thing I didn’t like about this angle (and about Bullet Club in ROH in general) is best summed up by the following fact. Despite being a member of the heel Bullet Club, Adam Cole has been a very popular character in ROH, always getting cheered. The Young Buck just turned on Cole and he was kicked out of Bullet Club… and everybody cheered. Just like they have done every single time Bullet Club has done something dastardly. HEEL BULLET CLUB DOES NOT WORK IN ROH! So why does Delirious keep booking it?!



But at least this all means that Adam Cole is sticking around for a bit, so that’s good.

ROH WORLD TITLE MATCH: Christopher Daniels(c) vs. Jay Lethal vs. Cody Rhodes- 7.5/10
They did a good job of telling the standard story of the third man always coming in at the last second to break things up, and they used this to great effect to make the false finishes that came after Daniels had seemingly been taken out via table bump seem more exciting, then paid it off well by having Daniels pin Cody while Cody himself was neutralizing Lethal via American Nightmare. That being said, while the match was certainly exciting at many points and the story was well-told, it just didn’t reach that ROH main event level. Probably because Delirious ONCE AGAIN shortchanged a main event because he booked WAY too many matches on a PPV. I think at this point the verdict on Cody is that while he is a very good personality he just doesn’t have the ability to be a main event singles star in a theoretically work-rate heavy promotion like ROH.


This was yet another disappointing PPV from ROH. The only matches that delivered to or exceeded the level they needed to be at were White vs. Ospreay, which was a totally random match between two babyfaces that had zero build to it, and the TV Title match, which had very little build and featured a man not even on the roster. The completely pointless three-way tag match I ranted about above? That got nine minutes. The SIX matches on the card above it- which includes FOUR title matches and a first and almost certainly only time ever match between Cole and Tanahashi- all got between thirteen and fourteen. Aside from the main event and Kaz vs. Page (which are really part of the same feud) the only match that received any sort of build at all was Scurll vs. Sydal which got one angle, and the main event was the only one of the four title matches where the outcome ever seemed in doubt. This show was not only a waste of a PPV, but was itself hurt by being forced into the three-hour PPV time window. Meanwhile, coming out of this, the only direction anyone seem to have is Page vs. Kaz and Cole vs. Bullet Club. There is lots of talent in this company, but everyone is getting dragged down because none of it belongs to the guy with the pencil.


STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Ian Riccaboni referred to both EVIL & Sanada and Gresham & Sabin, neither of whom have ever teamed before in ROH as “top teams,” the same descriptor he used for former ROH World Tag Team Champions and current IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Champions War Machine.

2. Kevin Kelly tries to tell us that CHAOS’ feud against Suzuki-Gun has helped prepare them for this No DQs match.
You mean the feud that has had a grant total of ZERO gimmick matches and where the babyfaces are never the ones using the weapons? How, exactly?

[DXvsNWO1994]

Here's the review of the War Of The Worlds PPV (which I attended live) that I did for Voices of Wrestling:

http://www.voicesofwrestling.com/2017/0 ... ts-review/

This was a pretty fun show to see live. The Hammerstein Ballroom is a fantastic venue for wrestling. If you ever have the opportunity to go there for a wrestling show, do it. My seat (front row of the lower balcony) was pretty awesome. Best seat in the house IMO:



Like I say in the review, I thought this PPV was very similar to the 14th Anniversary Show. If you take away that one spectacular standout match (in this case, Will Ospreay vs. Jay White), you had a card that's very good, but not exactly PPV worthy. The angle with The Bullet Club was pretty awesome to see live.

I'm actually pretty intrigued to check out the shows from Toronto & Dearborn. They've definitely had better cards for this tour in the past, but there were still a number of interesting matches that I'm intrigued to see.

[Big Red Machine]

ROH War of the Worlds Tour 2017: Toronto (5/7/2017)- Toronto, ON

MOTOR CITY MACHINE GUNS vs. THE REBELLION (Caprice Coleman & Rhett Titus)- 6/10
Shayne Taylor didn’t accompany his Rebellion stablemates to the ring, but instead he just wandered out to ringside a few minutes in. This was so the announcers could tell us that he should be focusing on his match with Hirooki Goto later tonight, which Kevin Kelly tells us that Taylor himself has called “the biggest match of his career.” You know… if they had ever let Shayne Taylor cut a promo where he talked about how important this chance was to him, I might have actually given a sh*t about that match during the build-up to tonight’s show instead of writing the match off as a match booked for no other reason than Goto needed an opponent so Delirious supplied him with an undercard guy he could beat without anyone caring.
Rhett and Caprice had a very good showing here. Taylor did eventually help his pals win. Ian Riccaboni said that this feuded started “all the way back at Champions vs. All-Stars.” I’m almost certain that’s not true, as my notes have no record of these factions interacting each other at all on that show, and The Rebellion was still The Cabinet at that point. He probably means the next month’s Survival of the Fittest 2016: Night 2 when the newly rechristened Rebellion attacked the Motor City Machine Guns, but either way, this feud has now been going on for at least SEVEN MONTHS and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED! They’re just having random tag matches all over the place and the results never matter because they just get booked against each other again. And they’re already booked to have another on the next show in this tour.

SHAYNE TAYLOR PROMO- so Shayne Taylor finally gets to cut a promo and he says… that he doesn’t want to wait anymore and he wants to have his match with Goto right now. Not even one single word about how important the match was to him.

HIROOKI GOTO vs. SHAYNE TAYLOR (w/the Rebellion)- 6.25/10
A good showing for Taylor, but it still felt like a disappointing waste of Goto.

DALTON CASTLE & THE BOYS vs. CHAOS (Roppongi Vice & Gedo)- DUD!
Yeah. ROH brings in ELEVEN of the stars of New Japan and decided that the f*cking Boys also needed to wrestle on this card. If you’re bringing in a bunch of outside guys that means that you can book FEWER of your own people- both to help offset costs and to make space on the card so that it doesn’t either go too long or get too crowded. Delirious completely fails to understand this. Instead we got this match, featuring two of the most tired schtiks in wrestling: on one side we’ve got Dalton Castle and on the other side we’ve got Rocky Romero. Uch.
Stupid comedy and tired schtik is abound for the first few minutes. It was all comedy, and in that time I only laughed once, which was when Gedo “threw out his back” trying to lean back like Dalton Castle. CHAOS then started to get frustrated and were throwing things on the outside. It started with Trent picking up a trashcan, and when he did I actually found myself hoping that he would hit one of this opponents with it to cause a DQ so that this match would just end. Instead they started to walk out like they were going to take a count-out. No one believes that this will actually be a count-out, so why even bother with it?
Well, it turns out that the reason to bother with it was so Dalton could send the Boys to go after them and so Dalton could try to go after them but referee Tod Sinclair would hold Dalton back for no discernable reason other than so Dalton could be yanked off of the apron by a member of CHAOS. In other words they went out of their way to create a situation no one believed in so that they could have the referee act completely illogically just so they could cut the babyfaces off and go into the heat. How about, instead of doing all of this stupid sh*t you just have the heels cut the babyfaces off like normal in a match where you actually wrestle like normal from start to finish?
Once the serious part of the match starts, the announcers immediately go off on some tangent about some stupid thing or another. One of the Boys was the babyface in peril. The hot tag came when Gedo got distracted, allowing the Boys to pull twin magic, and when Gedo kicked out of the fresh Boy’s small package, the Boy immediately made the tag to Dalton. So yes, the babyfaces cheated to get the hot tag. Making matters worse was the predictably idiotic announcing, where heel commentator Colt Cabana rightly complained about his while the babyface announcers- the two men who have been called “the Voice of ROH,” were all but mocking Cabana by saying they had no idea why he was getting so upset. But of course the next time we see a heel cheat Kevin and Ian will talk about how terrible it is, because they’re hypocrites, which is just about the worse thing a babyface announcer can possibly be.
Dalton ran wild and he and the Boys won so way to make CHAOS look like sh*t for not being able to beat the f*cking Boys. This was a match that served no purpose other than to fit extra people on the card, and the show suffered for it. They should have opened the show with Roppongi Vice vs. MCMG and stuck Dalton in the next match to make it a more traditional ROH Fatal Four-Way instead of a three-way. As for Gedo… either stick him on the pre-show, or have him replace the unbearable Vinny Marseglia as Taven’s partner against LIJ.

BULLY RAY vs. HANGMAN PAGE vs. PUNISHMENT MARTINEZ- 4/10
Adam Page, a member of the top heel stable, came out slapping fives and shaking hands like a total babyface. *face-palm.* Meanwhile, Kevin Kelly tried to describe Page’s role as the “problem solver” of Bullet Club (and someone please find me one problem he has ever solved for them) by vomiting out a string of words so incoherent that the only reason I have any idea what he was talking about for part of it was that I saw the show he was talking about- although I have no idea what the heat is between Bullet Club and Martinez that Kevin seems to think exists, nor have I heard a single peep about the rest of Bullet Club being unhappy that Page in particular was not at ringside at the 15th Anniversary Show to stop Kaz from stopping Cole from cheating.
About six people threw streamers at Bully Ray. All of those people should be forced to eat those streamers. There are now “ECW!” chants, too. Well if you want to see ECW so badly why aren’t you at home watching it on the WWE Network? How about we only chant for the promotions that are putting on the show and/or involved in an angle, okay?
Bully cuts a pre-match promo in which he tells them to chant “ROH” instead. That was good. He also made a big deal out of following the Code of Honor, which is also good, although his “even though I’m the veteran” almost killed that because he came off like such an asshole who was basically saying that he was lowering himself to their level by shaking their hands. Then he talked about they were all going to “tear the house down” in this match. You know, because wrestling is fake and the goal is to entertain the fans rather than win the match (in a sportsmanlike manner).
Both heels refused to shake Bully’s hand. Bully also managed to look like a douche during this by giving Martinez a lecture when Martinez stood there stoically when Bully offered a handshake, to the point where I actually popped when Page jumped this arrogant piece of sh*t from behind to jump-start the match.
Yup. Here’s Kevin Kelly condemning Page for hitting Bully in the nuts. He also elaborated a bit on how Punishment Martinez plays into Adam Page not helping Adam Cole at the 15th Anniversary Show and his story is… frustrating. Basically he says that Martinez diving on to Page at the end of their Six Man Scramble many matches earlier injured Page so badly that he couldn’t take part in whatever Cole’s evil plan to retain the title was. This is one of those things that is frustrating not because it’s implausible (which it isn’t) but because if this was supposed to be the story then they haven’t done an atrocious job of telling it because I didn’t even know that it was the story. If this was the story they meant to tell then they should have mentioned in passing on the PPV that Page had to go to the hospital because of Martinez’s dive and then gave us a segment of Cole yelling at Page about having not been there to execute the plan. Instead we get Kevin Kelly telling us something two months after the fact, so it feels a lot more like Kevin pulling something out of his ass to try to create a feud where there doesn’t need to be one and which will never be blown off… or even acknowledged by the wrestlers involved.
While we’re on the subject of Kevin Kelly, can we please note for the record that his comment that Kaz “went back to his roots” by stopping Cole from cheating at the PPV seems to show absolutely no understand of what actually happened- that this was all a plot by Kaz and Daniels from the very beginning to infiltrate Bullet Club to be able to stop them from cheating.
They had to distract the referee earlier in the match for Page to hit Bully in the nuts, but now they’re working together to hit the Whazzup right in front of the referee. No comment from Kevin Kelly about how wrong it was for Page to hit Martinez in the nuts, despite his earlier protestations when Page did it to Bully. Bully then wants Page to get the tables (you’d think that whoever told Bully about the Code of Honor would have told him about the part where you’re not supposed to do things that would get you disqualified)… and Page head to do so while Bully poses to the crowd… and of course the moment that dumbsh*t Bully Ray turned around, Page kicked him right in the face, and I laughed my ass off. Then more stuff happened, which lead to Page grabbing Bully’s scrotum right in front of the referee.
Awesome chokeslam-age occurred and Martinez started to run wild on everyone. Then Bully tossed him out of the ring and hit the Bubba Bomb on Page and pinned him. Fun fact: Bully Ray’s wrestling career began the same year that Adam Page was born. Bully Ray did nothing of any use in this match, while Page and Martinez did some cool-looking stuff together. Bully Ray just plain cannot go at an ROH level and he never should have been signed in the first place, but instead they’re giving him a big push and having him beat guys who we have been told for years are going to be “the future of ROH.”

WILL OSPREAY vs. CODY RHODES- 7/10
Kevin Kelly talks up that Cody could win the ROH World Championship as a “free agent.” So what? He’s made all of his ROH bookings so far and it’s not like the world title is defended on every show or something, so who cares if he has an ROH contract or not?
Finally a match that delivers. This was really good aside from Cody’s stalling in the beginning. Cody’s dickishness got Ospreay all fired up so he wrestled a more strike-based style. It was quite interesting to watch. Ospreay also busted out a bunch of moves I’d never seen him do before.

MATT TAVEN PROMO- bad.
He tried to hype up his ROH World Title match against Christopher Daniels in a few days but it took him forever to get around to saying it, at which point the fans were well past the point of giving a sh*t. The only good thing about this is that Marseglia didn’t get to talk.

LOS INGOBERNABLES DE JAPON (Tetsuya Naito & BUSHI) vs. THE KINGDOM (Matt Taven & Vinny Marseglia)- 6.75/10
Because I enjoyed Marseglia so much when he was silent during Taven’s promo, I think I’ll watch this match with the sound muted (which has the added benefit of sparing me from having to listen to the announcing.
Turns out that it did help. This match definitely exceeded my expectations. Still, I’d like someone to explain to me why Naito couldn’t get a clean pin on Vinny f*cking Marseglia.

THE BRISCOES vs. SILAS YOUNG & THE BEER CITY BRUISER vs. LOS INGOBERNABLES DE JAPON (Sanada & EVIL)- 8.25/10
Speaking of exceeding expectations: this match! My main concern going into this match was that Silas & the Bruiser, who very much felt stuffed into this match when it was first announced, would drag down what should have been a great brawl between the Briscoes and LIJ (especially the Bruiser). Instead they added to it. This was the first time that Silas & BCB really felt like a force to be reckoned with in the tag team division, while the Briscoes and this particular LIJ connection did their usual excellent brawling.

Why in God’s name are we zooming in on the Beer City Bruiser’s beer can sitting on the announcers’ table? THERE IS A WRESTLING MATCH GOING ON.

JAY LETHAL vs. KUSHIDA- 8/10
Lethal worked the head, KUSHIDA worked the arm, and they had an awesome match. KUSHIDA winning doesn’t make much sense as Lethal is headed for an ROH World Title shot at Friday’s PPV, but then again KUSHIDA is scheduled for an ROH TV Title shot at Sunday’s TV tapings so… if I were booking this, it would have gone to a draw.

HIROSHI TANAHASHI & THE ADDICTION vs. BULLET CLUB ELITE (Kenny Omega & the Young Bucks)- 6.5/10
This was six extremely talented wrestlers going out there and having a match that went almost half an hour. This was something I should have loved, and yet I found this match extremely frustrating for several good chunks of it. This match was very similar to a match that four of these men were involved in last weekend at Masters of the Craft when the Bucks teamed with Adam Page to take on The Addiction and Dalton Castle. It was similar to that match both in the fact that I had many of the same problems with that match that I did with this one and also in that several of the comedic sequences that they did at the beginning of this match were directly lifted from that one (I hated them then and I hated them here, too). You just can’t do that in a promotion that promotes each and every one of its shows as something fans should pay to see. This might come off as being ungrateful for the risks the wrestlers put their bodies through, but quite frankly I found this to be extremely lazy. I already paid to see that stuff once. If I pay for a different show, I expect a different match. It’s one thing to do it with wrestling sequences because those can be slotted in at different times and made to feel different, but a comedy spot is the same joke a second time.
One of the problems I had with that match was that there was WAY too much of a focus on antics and comedy, especially in the beginning. This match took that even farther. For the first half of this match I felt like I was watching cartoon characters and not real people. They weren’t wrestlers having a worked fight; they were actors putting on what was clearly a staged performance- and not in the “way too well choreographed to be real” way (which I often have no problem overlooking) but by having their actions and mannerisms so exaggerated that I even though the things they did were perfectly plausible it felt so put on that I couldn’t possibly believe that it wasn’t a performance.
And yes, the crowd was eating it all up with a spoon, but the wrestler’s job is to lead the crowd, and if you don’t start off with antics and buffoonery, the crowd will never get to the point where they’re chanting “THIS IS AWESOME” at Tanahashi doing a double back-rake in the first place. This sort of thing was made even more grating than last week by the fact that while last week’s match was just six ROH regulars, this match was one of my few chances to see Omega and Tanahashi in an ROH ring this year (and for Omega it might have been my only chance to do so in North America). I bought this show in large part to see Tanahashi and Omega in a big main event, and I feel like half of it was wasted.
The other big problem I had with this match was the overbooking. They did a spot where Tanahashi hit the High Fly Flow and then Daniels hit the Best Moonsault Ever on Omega and had him pinned, but one of the Bucks pulled referee Paul Turner out of the ring. He made absolutely no attempt to hide that he was the one who had done it by running away or hiding or something. He just grabbed Turner by the leg, pulled him out of the ring when he was about to count the three and started talking to him. Turner chastised the Buck in question for putting his hands on a referee, but it seems to me that he should have called for a DQ.
Then Daniels hit an Arabian Press that hit both the Bucks and the referee and the ref took a bump… and this fact did not matter one bit. No one hit anyone in groin or tried to use a weapon or even got any visual pinfalls or anything. Then once the second referee came out (which took a while), Bullet Club immediately started to distract him so Omega could try to hit Daniels with a title belt. This attempt failed when Daniels ducked, and soon an errant superkick caused yet another ref bump, which the crowd, for some reason, popped for. Don’t we as fans want to see the match end with it being made clear who the better wrestler/team is? That can’t happen if the referee is unconscious.
After this ref bump it was the babyface Ring of Honor World Champion who grabbed a title belt and tried to hit his opponent with this illegal foreign object. Read that sentence again and let that sink in for a moment. Cody Rhodes of the heel Bullet Club came out to stop him. Thank you, Cody, for preventing this cheating and helping to preserve the integrity of Ring of Honor. But because Cody is a heel we are supposed to be angry at him for doing this, even though Kazarian did the exact same thing to stop Adam Cole from cheating in the exact same way in the match where Daniels won the title less than two months ago, and Kaz was treated as a hero. The reason this ass-backwards spot happened (and the reason the entire second ref bump happened, really) was because Cody is challenging Daniels for the ROH World Title next weekend and this spot is supposed to help build to that match. This is RING OF HONOR. If you can’t build to a title match without doing a f*cking run-in- especially in a main event and especially in this sort of ass-backwards way) then you shouldn’t be booking here.
And this is all just so frustrating to me because the parts of the match that weren’t either antics or overbooking were all GREAT. This is RING OF HONOR. If we’ve got thirty minutes for our main event why can’t we just have thirty minutes of great wrestling? Why does it have to be fifteen minutes of comedy and antics, twelve minutes of great wresting and then three minutes of overbooking?


This was a very disappointing show from ROH. It certainly picked up as things went on but the first half of the card felt completely pointless and the main event was extremely disappointing.

STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Ian Riccaboni says that Goto is “the first man to not back down from the 300lbs-plus Shayne Taylor.”
Oh. Is that was War Machine was doing in their six month long feud last year? I’ve seen every match Taylor has wrestled in ROH, and I don’t remember anyone backing down from him.

[cgstong]

Coming hot off the heels of the sold-out War of the Worlds 2017 Tour in North America, ROH is thrilled to announce, in conjunction with NJPW, CMLL and Revolution Pro Wrestling, the first-ever War of the Worlds UK Tour from August 18th , 2017 – August 20th, 2017! With stronger-than-ever partnerships, stars from the top professional wrestling organizations in the world will do battle over the course of three nights!

The tour comes in overwhelming response to not only the resoundingly successful ROH Reach for the Sky UK Tour, but also to the rapid sellouts of Ring of Honor, New Japan, CMLL, and Rev Pro events around the globe. The match possibilities are endless, dream teams could be formed, and various championships WILL be contested!

ALSO, RPW (Rev Pro) will host their annual ‘Summer Sizzler’, which will serve as a special Kickoff Event on Thursday August 17 at York Hall in London! From there, the stars of ROH, CMLL, NJPW, and RPW will compete at York Hall on Friday August 18 and then head the Liverpool Olympia on Saturday August 19! The tour will wrap up on August 20th in at the Edinburgh Corn Exchange to mark ROH’s first ever event in Scotland! Tickets for the most-recent WOTW USA Tour sold out so keep it locked into ROHWrestling.com to ensure you are the first to have the opportunity to purchase tickets to these historic events!

If history is any indication, anything can and will happen on these tours! On the Reach for the Sky Tour, the ROH World Television Title changed hands twice, while on the most recent War of the Worlds Tour, a New Japan star captured the World Television title!

Event Dates :
August 17th – RevPro Summer Sizzler 2017 @ York Hall - London , England

August 18th – WOTW UK Night 1 @ York Hall – London , England

August 19th – WOTW UK Night 2 @ Liverpool Olympia – Liverpool, England

August 20th – WOTW UK Night 3 @ Edinburgh Corn Exchange – Edinburgh , Scotland