War of the Worlds 2015 - Night 2

ROH/NJPW War of the Worlds 2015

(2015/5/13)

1.       Takaaki Watanabe vs. Adam Page

Solid opener with Adam Page looking really good, totally different and fresher than your usual ROH drone, dude’s good at role playing and I see great things for him down the road. Watanabe didn’t repeat his good performance from a night earlier.

**1/2

2.       WOAT Michael Elgin vs. KUSHIDA

Philly HATES Lelgin, and rightfully so, because he’s horrible. Anyway, the first half of this match was really good with KUSH being a tremendous bumper for the faux powerhouse Lelgin, and fighting for his survival really hard in the process, it was a great carryjob by KUSH and all his comebacks were compelling. But then in the other half the whole “big man vs. small man” structure was abandoned and the match turned into a generic MovesMania.

**3/4

3.       Kyle O’Reilly vs. Tetsuya Naito

Holy shit, this was so bad. The comedy was awful and totally overstayed its welcome, and then when they shifted to regular wrestling, they somehow made it even worse. Just a dry, emotionless, colorless “wrestling” with one of the worst strike exchanges ever. While Naito certainly deserves a lot of blame for the shitty match, man oh man, Kyle O’Reilly is right up there with WOAT Lelgin as a walking abomination of pro-wrestler.

bad

4.       4-WAY: Jushin Liger vs. Mark Briscoe vs. Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Jay Lethal

One of those shitty, nonsensical ROH multi-way matches with only two guys in the ring at the same time, with others waiting on the apron for a tag-in, which is stupid and absolutely ridiculous. It turns matches into quasi-tag team matches, and this one was no exception. What a mess!

bad

5.       Roderick Strong vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi

I cringed when they announced this match, because as we all know, Tana’s back have a rich medical history, and Roddy Strong’s go-to attack is multiple backbreakers. Fortunately for Tanahashi, he only hit like two of them in this match. Anyway, this was fantastic, such a grueling, hard-hitting smackfest, two warriors giving their best inside that squared circle. Roddy got busted open early in the match and it certainly helped to some degree, it’s always nice when some blood enhances drama. Roddy totally deserved that G1 Climax spot instead of WOAT Elgin. Fuck you, WOAT Elgin!

****1/2

6.       The Addiction (Christopher Daniels & Frankie Kazarian) vs. Kazuchika Okada & Gedo

Good match that was really nice at both easy-going and serious parts. Gedo’s exchanges with Daniels and Kaz were great and Okada was perfectly booked as a fearsome force worth avoiding at any cost.

***1/2

7.       ROH World Championship: Bobby Fish vs. Jay Briscoe ©

Really good title match that reminded me of old school ROH due to its tight and organic nature. Not a MovesMania, but rather a normal pro-wrestling contest. The layout was logical and made for a coherent clash of styles, Jay’s in-your-face rough brawling styles against Fish’s mat based, submission style. Shame Fish’s stuck with the useless little shit O’Reilly in a crappy tag team, it’s so easy to forget he’s one really good singles competitor. There was one part of the match I disliked, though, it’s Fish kicking out of the Jay Driller, but thankfully it paid off through the great follow-up.

***3/4

8.       The Kingdom (Adam Cole, Michael Bennett, Matt Taven) vs. Bullet Club (AJ Styles, Matt Jackson, Nick Jackson)

Another good match. Wasn’t a big fan of typical indie comedy and they used quite a lot of it. Mostly hit or miss, you can only SUCK IT so much. “The Kingdom” is probably the very lamest stable/tag team name in history of pro-graps. None of them was good in this match, except for maybe Adam Cole on a couple occasions. All the three and a half stars are the courtesy of the Bucks and AJ. But even then the match simply wasn’t that good, it’s the last few minutes with two really big nearfalls that made it ***1/2 worthy.

***1/2