BRM Reviews the 7/30/2016 ROH (very bad)

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews the 7/30/2016 ROH (very bad)

Post by Big Red Machine » Aug 2nd, '16, 16:39

Cabana gets his rematch next week.

JAY LETHAL PROMO- he’s a babyface now, so he says it was wrong what the Young Bucks and Adam Cole did to Kyle O’Reilly and how Kyle had his title shot stolen from him. He says that Cole will always be where the Bucks so, he asks Nigel to change this week’s main event from Briscoes vs. Bucks to being Cole & Bucks vs. Briscoes & Lethal. Nigel says okay.
I didn’t like this. I think it would have been better for Lethal to offer to have the Briscoes’ backs and have the Briscoes not trust him. Lethal would then bring up the eight-man tag they had a few weeks ago where it was Bullet Club vs. Lethal, Roddy, and the Briscoes and point out that he didn’t turn on them then, and that was right before he faced Jay Briscoe for the world title so he had more incentive to turn on them then than he does now. The Briscoes would remain suspicious, but consent to his present at ringside, telling him that he had better not cross them, or what they do to the Bucks tonight will look like a walk in the park compared to what they did to Lethal. This would both keep our advertised main event intact while also giving us a segment that feels more like Lethal is earning the babyfaces’ trust instead of just being given it.

On the bright side, this segment was very short and concise. When it ended Lethal went to the back with no Bullet Club attack whatsoever (which I was certain we were going to get when the camera started to follow Lethal up the ramp). It’s good to have something not happen every once in a while to make it more surprising when something actually does happen.

STEVE CORINO TALKS TO KEVIN SULLIVAN- terrible
They’re sitting a picnic table in the park. Yes, really. Steve Corino and the man who helped his mortal enemy defeat him by STABBING HIM IN THE HEAD WITH A SPIKE. Just sitting and talking. We keep fading back and forth between that and clips from the Whitmer vs. Corino Fight Without Honor. Now we’ve got some pictures of Corino and his family, too. Shall I copy and paste the “you’re not Lucha Underground so don’t try to be” paragraph from my review of Impact from a few days ago?
In addition to the above issues, this segment gave us NO NEW INFORMATION AT ALL. Every question Corino asked was a question that he already would have known the answer to if he had watched the promo Sullivan and Whitmer cut on TV a few weeks ago. The fact that people high enough up in the company to get it okayed thought that any of this Kevin Sullivan crap was a good idea is a very, very bad sign for the future of ROH creatively.

Once that crap was over, they cut to the ring… and f*cking P-Dog and the Get Along Gang were in the ring. At that point I screamed “OH COME THE F*CK ON!” at the top of my lungs, and was then immediately thankful no one else was home.

P-DOG CALLS OUT MOOSE- we’ve seen Moose beat these losers up before. His promo was about thirty seconds long and managed to get boring chants. Why do they even keep using this guy? Surely between the Georgia, both Carolinas, and eastern Tennessee there must be at least one other jobber, right?

P-DOG (w/the Get Along Gang) vs. MOOSE (w/Stokely Hathaway)- DUD!
Like I said above, we’ve seen Moose beat up the whole Get Along Gang before. It was boring then and it’s even more boring the second time around.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- Prince Nana and Donovan Dijak come out and Nana sets forth the challenge: Moose vs. Dijak… right here right now. If this was what you wanted to do, why waste time and money with P-Dog and Get Along Gang instead of JUST BOOKING THIS MATCH IN FIRST PLACE? Then you could actually hype it up! As Nana said, this is a contest to determine “the king of the big men” in ROH. How do you not hype this up?

DONOVAN DIJAK (w/Prince Nana) vs. MOOSE (w/Stokely Hathaway)- 5.75/10
The match was a fun “big guys doing power moves” match, with Dijak winning clean. It… could have been smoother, but not unwatchable, either. I could have done without Moose kicking out of a chokebreaker at one for no reason (especially when Kevin Kelly kept trying to put the move over strong on commentary).
Both Kevin Kelly on commentary and Nana in his earlier promo feel the need to hammer home that Nana played an important part in bringing Moose into ROH. Kevin’s exact words were “let’s not forget” that Nana helped bring Moose into ROH. “Not forget?” This is a fact that been relevant a grand total of ONCE. And that was eighteen months ago. Meanwhile, they apparently want us to forget pretty much everything that happened in Whitmer vs. Corino feud before Whitmer turned heel (including the entire f*cking SCUM angle).
Speaking of forgettable things, we got a post-match segment in which Dijak hit Stokely with a bicycle kick on Nana’s orders. This prompted Kevin Kelly to angrily shout “THAT’S FAMILY! How do you do that to FAMILY!?” This would have been a lot more effective if Nana and Stokely had been seen together more than five times EVER. And all of those were over eighteen months ago. If you want us to feel some sense of betrayal at this because “Stokely is Prince Nana’s protégé” (news to me), then you need to spend the time to SHOW US THEM INTERACTING. No one is going to care about a relationship if you don’t spend the time to MAKE us care… and that is doubly true for background characters like Stokely and Nana.

ADDICTION PROMO- they said absolutely nothing of any consequence and did nothing to build up any matches. This was literally just a waste of one minute of TV time.

QUICK VIDEO HYPING THE LETHAL VS. CABANA MATCH- THIS is what they should be doing if they have extra time on the show.

THE CABINET PROMO- and this is the exact opposite of what they should be doing, period. They can’t possibly think at ANYONE gives even a fraction of a sh*t about this angle. It’s just not possible.
They said that they want to “build a wall around the Young Bucks” and “make the Young Bucks pay for it.” Get it? Because that’s like what Trump says, except instead of “Mexico” they said “Young Bucks.” Isn’t that so clever?
They also buried Will Ferrara and Moose. Their comments about Moose were actually very funny, but two good lines about Moose don’t make the other minute and fifty seconds of this promo worthwhile.

JAY LETHAL & THE BRISCOES vs. BULLET CLUB (Young Bucks & Adam Cole)- 6/10
Matt Taven is on commentary, and buries the fans that cheered for the Young Bucks after the Bucks ruined a perfectly good PPV main event. Join the club, Matt.
I guess Taeler Hendrix is just completely gone with no explanation now that Lethal is a babyface. That’s dumb.
They made a big f*cking deal about the ring being surrounded by security, who were under strict orders to stop the match if anyone started to use chairs or the like. Mark Briscoe got shoved off the top rope by whichever Jackson had the broken ribs and landed on a table, although the table didn’t break well, so Mark pretty much landed right on the floor. It was decided that Nigel McGuinness would then have to personally take Mark Briscoe the back for the sake of Mark’s health, because I guess they didn’t have any medical personnel backstage. There were some spare referees at ringside, too. It was never explained why one of them couldn’t take Mark backstage. At the end of the show, it was completely transparent that the only reason for this was to get Nigel McGuinness out of the way, as if Nigel being there would somehow prevent the heels from doing the dastardly thing they were doing to do, even though that hasn’t ever stopped them before.
So now it’s basically a handicap match with Bullet Club taking on the pair of Jays. Brisoce and Lethal won completely cleanly, despite this disadvantage, completely burying Bullet Club. COME THE F*CK ON. Our big main event got just thirteen minutes when you factor out the thirty seconds of stalling at the beginning.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- bad.
Bullet Club beat the babyfaces down. Those security guys Nigel was talking about are nowhere to be found. Because using a chair during a match must be stopped, but apparently it’s perfectly okay to attack someone with one after the match is over. Say… didn’t they do a big angle last week where someone got in big trouble for doing exactly this?
No one comes out to help Briscoe and Lethal. Not Cabana, not Bobby Fish, not MCMG, not the House of Truth. Not anyone.
The Bucks knocked Lethal out and Cole shaved his head. Okay… SO WHAT?! I’m being serious here. Sure it’s probably a bit embarrassing for Jay, but really: why should I care? Kevin Kelly is reacting like this is the ultimate humiliation. Meanwhile, we just saw a match featuring Mark Briscoe, who voluntarily shaved his head a short time ago, and Kevin Kelly even said that this was a very fashionable look earlier on in this match. And while the shaving was going on, they cut to a shot in the crowd of a young African-American boy with a very closely-cropped haircut, and he didn’t seem humiliated by his lack of hair at all. Earlier in the night, we saw Stokely Hathaway, Christopher Daniels, and Moose, all of whom are bald, seemingly voluntarily. Let’s not pretend this is some sort of major humiliation here.
One aspect of storytelling that appears to be completely lost on Delirious is the idea that if you want something to be important, you have to MAKE IT IMPORTANT. If Lethal had been cutting promos for years (or even months) about his beautiful hair then this would have been a good angle. But that hasn’t been happening. At least with Elgin’s mullet they had been merchandising it. I don’t think Jay Lethal’s hair has even been mentioned by anyone in ROH ever. This wasn’t a “big” angle. This was just a random angle; one more random occurrence in a series of random barely-connected occurrences that Bullet Club have instigated since their big storyline began.

A very bad episode of ROH. Sh*t booking, logic/continuity issues abound, and yet another completely random occurrence that Kevin Kelly is reacting to like it’s the biggest thing ever.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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