A (possible) WWE Night of Champions 2011 liveblog

Monday May 7th 2012, 22.45pm: I made a DECISION. I skipped over Money in the Bank and Summerslam for two reasons 1. They were basically two match cards, and I feel like I've written enough about Orton and Christian. 2. I'm writing a separate piece on CM Punk vs. John Cena (and the feud in general). It feels like I should give it a fuller treatment than the smug glibness I manage here.

22.47pm: I don't want to give anything away from that piece, of course - otherwise, you'd have no reason to check back Wednesday for my opinion a match which was as good as any done in the promotion and the style for maybe a decade. OR WAS IT?

22.48pm: (Yes, it was.)

22.50pm: So here's Night of Champions, a PPV designed to showcase title matches headlined by a non-title match. Ha, that would like if the Royal Rumble event wasn't headlined by the Royal Rumble match or the Survivor Series event wasn't headlined by a Survivor Series match or the King of the Ring wasn't headlined by the King of the Ring final or if Tuesday socks weren't worn on Tuesday. They say Tuesday on them! Why do you hate society?

23.07pm: There was a tag title match to start the show. Miz's fall down the card is quite spectacular, now doing the same comedy gimmick that R-Truth is doing, only doing it with seriousness. They do an ending where the heels get screwed three or four times and lose by DQ when they get frustrated, and I only just got how amusing it is for a professional wrestler to have a gimmick where they believe they keep losing because an unknown outsider had decided they are going to lose. They could really push it and start questioning all sort of wrestling cliches.

23.18pm: I've just noticed that the sound on this (entirely legal) DVD is about two seconds out. The sounds of Cody Rhodes vs. Ted Dibiase is next, followed by the pictures of Cody Rhodes vs. Ted Dibiase.

23.33pm: Match was standard TV match stuff. Dibiase pulls off Cody Rhodes' protective mask at the end and I add excitement to the match by shouting 'OH MY GOD IT'S CODY RHODES' as it comes off. Commentators claim Cody won by holding on to a handful of tights - replay confirms he had perhaps one-and-a-half finger tips near some tights. It's odd to me that Cody Rhodes is the one that got the push out of that tag team.

23.45pm: Fatal fourway for the United States title. Cole is doing this thing where he lists the famous holders of each belt, but it's a really predictable list. I'd like him to start pulling out obscure title holders with the same reverential tone: "Past winner of the US title have included Steve McMichael, General Rection and future Hall of Famer Orlando Jordan".

23.50pm: They're doing a escalating row between Vicky and Dolph, with Jack Swagger in the middle of it. Vicky puts Swagger's foot on the ropes to save a pinfall, then Dolph comes over and gets annoyed with Vicky for saving Swagger and asking if she cost him the match. The match is still ongoing. This makes absolutely no sense. Then Lawler says, "What do you think? Did Vicky just cost Dolph the match?" Seriously, the match is still ongoing.

Tuesday May 8th 2012, 12.02am: This was quite fun with some nice spots. Dolph looked really good (nice dropkick, great bumps off some of Morrisons more flippy offence). Said flippy offence is fine by me in this sort of sprint.

12.10am: Henry vs. Orton. Henry has been booked really well over the few months leading up to this match and I secretly have Sting-Vader type expectations.

12.11am: I'm also a child and I'm laughing to myself about figuring out that Apex Predator is exactly one letter away from A Sex Predator, which I've always thought would be a gimmick that suited Randy's creepy  creepy face.

12.13am: Cole fails to mention Vince Russo and David Arquette among the notable holders of the big gold belt.

12.26am: Totally great match. It opens with Henry being surprised to be caught out by Orton dodging his offence and tumbling to the floor. Henry's obviously in control for most of the match, and he has some great  offence - there's a great moment where he that knocks Orton off the top to the outside with a single right hand, and another where he does a backbreaker around the post. The measure of Henry as a big-man wrestler is how good his selling is of when his opponent is on offence - watch how he rocks and flails around as Ortonf fires off punches and uppercuts. Orton times all his big hope spots well, but gets caught with what almost looks like a frustrated fluke kick and takes out one of his legs. This leads to a great ending where Orton, like a champion, tried battling on defiantly and stands right up in Henry's face. He almost sneaks in an RKO, misses and gets slammed for the victory. Perfectly executed story with really great character depth on both sides.

12.30am: Belt looks good on Henry.

12.45am: There was a Divas title match and then we moved on to the WWE title match. I'm a sucker for John Cena's overly grandiose promos about integrity and honour and the fans and what it means to be alive. It's the sort of thing that should probably come across as trying too hard, but he somehow makes it work

1.08am: Not a spectacular match, but pretty good stuff. I thought Del Rio came across as pretty dominant here, as Cena does such a good job of timing his comebacks, only to be cutoff quite soon afterwards. Del Rio has quite a lot of really good-looking offence that I don't remember seeing before (top rope senton, bridging German suplex, jumping enziguri whilst Cena was sat on the turnbuckle). Cena wins feels decisive, like a true champion surviving everything and finally getting his biggest offence in - I particularly liked how much he was cranking up the STFU.

1.33am: It's getting late, so I've stopped typing much. I thought the main event was overbooked to the point of collapse. The majority of the match was absolutely fine - the brawling was at the upper end of WWE brawling, and their were some fun bumps (the announce desk elbow was a clear highlight, and really felt like the climax of the match before all the other stuff happened). The result of all the run-ins and finisher kickouts was to make the actual outcome meaningless, but maybe that was intentional. Based on this match, I'm not convinced the WWE can continually write for a character as nuanced and different as Punk was from June to August - the storyline of the feud and the match were both less well-defined (in that Punk motivations and ambitions weren't as clear as during the Cena-McMahon), and consequently it felt a bit more ordinary (two guys don't like each other; have a match).

1.37am: Fun show, with one absolutely standout match in Orton-Henry, and a bunch of other things I enjoyed. Demonstrably less good than the previous two PPVs.

Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling: 5th May 1993

I have acquired (legally) some 1993 FMW shows from Tim up via WrestlingDVD.net. Top seller. Anyway, this is the first one, and it's the annual big outdoors May show for FMW at the Kawasaki Stadium. It's also freely available to watch online.

There's a whole load of clipped matches to open the tape. The only thing I'm disappointed not to see a full version of is the M-Pro six man pitting The Great Sasuke, Kendo and Battle Ranger against Super Delfin, Espanto 4 and Espanto 5. What's shown three minutes of some beautiful lucha and Kendo doing his awesome comedy spots with the rudos and a magnificent Sasuke quebrada. I need to find more Kendo from this time period.

The joshi tag title match (Kudo and Combat vs. Toyota and Yamada) was heavy on workrate and low on smarts and personality. I lost count of how many times momentum changed in the last fifteen minutes of what I would laughably refer to as the finishing stretch (the match was 22 minutes), and thinking back now, I can't really remember any specific moments that happened for about 90% of this. It's all blurring into one and I didn't care it. I did like Combat's lariat, and the Doomsday Device was pretty nasty (but even that wasn't allowed to be the finish). Oh, and Toyota's shrieking really grates after about seven seconds, and I don't know what to do about that except for sit here and engage in casual chauvinism.


The worked shoot between judo guy Gregory Veritchev and boxer Leon Spinks is this weird thing where I thought pretty much everything they did looked kind of lousy, but I found it oddly compelling. Partly, I though that what they started off doing was so unentertaining it built up this perverse expectation that it was going somewhere. Spinks just keeps punching Veritchev for the first few rounds and knocking him down and then he'd just beat the ten count. After about eight minutes of this, Veritchev gets close enough to manage a takedown, and from there on in he gains more and more advantages, manages a couple of throws and submissions, and finally wears down Spinks enough to get a tapout. I really got into this as a story of a grappler surviving and overcoming a striker. If the striking had actually looked better and they hadn't stretched out the stuff up front, this might have been pretty cool.

The main is the pretty famous exploding ring barbed wire match between Terry Funk and Atsushi Onita. I'm not sure, when watching something like this, where the line between wrestling match and performance art really is. The actual elements of a contest are not exactly front and centre - the core of this is about survival and endurance, while the actual finish is almost throwaway, and the biggest moment of drama (Onita attempting and failing to save Funk from the imminent ring explosion) comes two minutes after the bell has rung.

None of this to say that it doesn't work. It completely works. Onita, wrestling as the underdog, takes a bunch of barbed wire bumps and bleeds a lot while Funk yells "get that son-of-a-bitch up" at, well, no-one really. When the tables finally get turned and Funk hits the wire, it's hard to imagine a better time for his wobbly legged, glassy-eyed selling. Sidenote: his spacial awareness is amazing - there's about five times where he stumbles and teeters on the end of the wire, just to mess with the crowd, and that could easily go wrong. There's also a brutal flurry of punches that are really ugly and unrestrained, in a way that is completely appropriate for the setting. Post-match heroics, Onita breaking down on the mic, and Funk's interview where he thanks Onita for saving him but won't accept he's been bested (complete with sad Bambi eyes from Onita as Funk walks off) is all icing.