BRM Reviews the 2/25/2017 ROH

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews the 2/25/2017 ROH

Post by Big Red Machine » Mar 10th, '17, 02:12

CHRISTOPHER DANIELS PROMO/RECAP OF HIM WINNING THE DECADE OF EXCELLENCE TOURNAMENT- Daniels’ attitude came off as kind of heelish here. They really should have done a better job turning him and Kaz babyface over the past few months. I think a more humble babyface character would work a lot better for him right now.

Bobby Fish & Ian Riccaboni are on commentary.

OPENING SEGMENT- fine, I guess
Daniels cuts a promo that kind of reinforces my above thoughts about him not quite coming across as a babyface as much as he should until he is interrupted by Adam Cole. Cole cut a promo on Daniels to distract him so that Adam Page could jump him from behind. Bobby Fish was EXTREMELY annoying during all of this, often talking over the wrestlers as they were trying to cut their promos. Yes, I get that he is pushing his title shot at Manhattan Mayhem VI next weekend which could alter the title match this segment was intended to build up, but he was just so G-d damn annoying that he came off like an attention-hungry heel.
Kazarian eventually came out to make the save which led to…

THE ADDICTION vs. BULLET CLUB (Adam Cole & Adam Page)- 5/10
Fish was equally bad here,
Hidden text.
constantly insisting that Kaz was taking too long to save Daniels, which does nothing but plant a seed in our minds about Kaz’s upcoming turn when there is no reason for it to be there (and, if my understanding of the spoilers is correct, Kaz had no intention of joining Bullet Club at this point, so whatever Bobby’s saying here isn’t even kayfabe accurate in hindsight)
.
The match itself wasn’t very long and had an utterly baffling finish. Cole blocks the BME… and then pins Daniels clean in the middle of the ring. Really. They spent all of this time building up babyface challenger Christopher Daniels only to have him lose clean to the champion in a random tag team match. And to make this even more baffling, please remember that the current champion, Adam Cole, might well be off to WWE in a month, so why would you not take this completely organic opportunity to have Daniels pin him? It he does leave it’s an extra victory for Daniels over him, and if he stays around, it was a natural loss that was an important part of building up a challenger.
After the match Kaz yelled at Daniels about something and walked off. Whatever this is leading to, I can assure you there is no way in hell it justifies Daniels losing cleanly.

BOBBY FISH PROMO- he basically stood up at the commentary table and cut a promo to build up his title shot, but he just cut the promo into the headset so the fans in the arena had no idea what he was saying. The promo would have maybe been enjoyable if we hadn’t heard Fish spend the first fifteen minutes of this show talking up this same match in extremely annoying ways.

KAZ & DANIELS IN THE STAIRWELL- very bad.
We’ve now got TNA-style roaming camerapeople in odd places, such as the stairwell. If they had followed Kaz and Daniels in it would be one thing, but what we got was a shot from one flight above them on the stairwell, with the camera already set up so we could watch them walk in. At least they said this happened during the commercial break instead of going full-blown TNA and claim this was live (which would mean that they randomly decided to cut to a camera that was in a stairwell for no explicable reason… and yet it just so happened to be in the right place to catch this argument).
As for the content… that was bad, too. This one loss has made Kaz immediately determine that Cole must be in Daniels’ head and thus there is no way he can win at the PPV. Kaz is also angry because Daniels “isn’t the only one putting everything on the line for this. Did you ever thing about that?”
I’m sorry… I just don’t understand how Daniels winning or losing will affect Kazarian that much. It’s not like they can’t still be a tag team. Cole has wrestled tag matches all the time while he was a singles champ, as did Jay Briscoe, and many others throughout ROH history have managed to either chase both singles and tag gold at the same time or chase one while holding the other (Davey Richards, Tyler Black, Kevin Steen, and Roderick Strong all immediately come to mind), so why is Kaz so upset?

TOP PROSPECT TOURNAMENT QUATERFINAL MATCH: John Skyler vs. Sean Carr- 4.25/10
Bobby Fish has been replaced by “Brutal Bob” Evans on commentary. Skyler and Carr got to cut quick in-set promos before the match. Both were completely generic.
Brutal Bob stressed the importance of going to ROH seminars and training camps, saying “we hire from within,” which explains why any moderately-established indy wrestler who starts to get a lot of buzz winds up in Evolve. Bob also trained seven of the eight wrestlers in this tournament. Does this seem worrying to anyone else?
The announcers apparently both saw Carr wrestle at a recent show but are going out of their way to not name the promotion. This is exactly the sort of thing that drives people nuts about WWE commentary, so why are we repeating their mistakes?
These guys weren’t given much time, but they did what they could with it.

CODY RHODES T-SHIRT COMMERCIAL- he gets pissy because Jay Lethal’s t-shirt is next to his. Does anyone really believe that any wrestler would get that angry about this? They’re not even in that big of a feud, and LETHAL is the one with reason to be angry, not Cody!

KINGDOM PROMO- They built up their title matches with The Rebellion next week and Dalton & the Boys at the PPV. It started out well until they claimed that “no peasant has ever toppled a kingdom.” If you can’t use your metaphor without coming to a stupid conclusion, then don’t use it.
THE TEMPURA BOYZ vs. THE MOTOR CITY MACHINE GUNS- no rating, extreme stupidity.
They played through the entire MCMG video and entrance music but they never came out. Ian Riccaboni then got word that “there’s been an attack in the back” and asked “can we get a camera back there?” You have to pick one: either this is a televised sporting event and thus the cameras are not in place unless there is a specific reason for them to be there, or this is a regular TV show and the cameras are always where we need them to be. You can’t have it both ways depending on what you want to do in each individual segment because that hurts suspension of disbelief by inviting questions too readily.
Even worse, no one ever explained to the live crowd what was happening, so they all just booed because ROH told them they were about to see MCMG wrestle and then MCMG just didn’t come out, with no explanation. Ian Riccaboni said we had to go to commercial and we did and then when we came back Donovan Dijak was making his way out to the ring for the main event, as if nothing had been amiss when we went to commercial.

ROH TV TITLE MATCH: Marty Scurll(c) vs. Donovan Dijak- 7.25/10
Dijak offers Scurll a handshake before the match in accordance with the Code of Honor… and as Scurll considered accepting it the fans all chanted “NO! NO! NO!” What the f*ck happened to this company that someone could have possibly become enough of a fan to buy a ticket to a show but hasn’t yet been educated on what makes ROH ROH.
Lio Rush came out to watch from the ramp in the middle of the match, because we’ve got to use every stupid cliché we can. Why can’t we just have a match with no one doing anything to take any attention away from the guys in the ring wrestling?
This was a very action-packed match and very fun, and now I’ll be able to watch Dijak have matches like this except longer, and in a promotion where he’ll actually be given something to do instead of being left to aimlessly flounder around the mid-card.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT-
Rush came into the ring to have a stare-down with Scurll. Scurll went to leave, but when Lio turned around, Scurll came back and laid him out with the title belt. Marty went to continue the beat-down but the Rebellion made the save. If you’re wondering why (I know I certainly was), Ian Riccaboni says they’ve “been attempting to recruit Lio Rush over the past few weeks.” Really? When the hell did that happen? I went back to check my records, and it turns out they have had a grand total of TWO interactions since the beginning of the year. The first was six weeks ago when Rush & Dijak beat the Rebellion and the Rebellion attacked them after the match. The second was three weeks ago when the Rebellion interfered in a match to help Rush. I guess that second one counts as trying to recruit him, but the problem is that it happened three weeks ago and hasn’t been mentioned since, which does not in any way qualify as them “trying to recruit Lio Rush over the past few weeks.” Delirious has got to be the all-time worst in terms of writing a wrestling TV show simply because he fails to grasp the basic concept that if you want something to be your storyline then YOU HAVE TO PUT IT ON THE TV SHOW!

MCMG and Jay White come out, too, and the Rebellion leave. This entire post-match segment- the confrontation, attack, and then two factions running out, all happened with the span of about seventy-five seconds.

This show was mostly inoffensive and had a great main event. At this point, for ROH, I’m counting that as a win.

STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Ian Riccaboni claimed that the Tempura Boyz “have been racking up victories right and left here in Ring of Honor.”
They’re record in ROH is 3-10 (if you exclude dark matches, in which they are 1-1). They have never won two matches in a row. But yeah, they’re definitely “racking up wins.” In the exact same way that ROH has spent the past five years “racking up” good announcers.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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