BRM Reviews ROH Honor United: Doncaster (disappointing)

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews ROH Honor United: Doncaster (disappointing)

Post by Big Red Machine » Jun 20th, '18, 18:17

ROH Honor United: Doncaster (5/27/2018)- Doncaster, South Yorkshire, UK


TENILLE DASHWOOD IS SPECIAL GUEST REFEREE: The Addiction vs. Kenny King & Toru Yano- DUD!
Tenille apparently asked to be the referee for this match so ROH is just letting her do so. Can we at least get her a referee’s shirt?
It turned out that her role here was to engage in stupid comedy. Even worse, all of this comedy included her hurting the heels, including even giving them hip tosses, which gave you the feeling that this match was completely unfair. This was not helped by the finish, in which she almost certainly would have seen Kenny King- a babyface- hit Daniels in the nuts, allowing Yano to roll him up for the pin (yes, Toru Yano just pinned a man who was the ROH World Champion one year ago).

ROH TV TITLE MATCH: Silas Young(c) vs. Doug Williams- 6/10
The match was good for the mere eleven minutes it got, but it was once again another completely pointless dirty finish that not only makes the champion look weak, but also will never be followed up on, and happened against someone who ROH has no reason to protect… and they couldn’t even think of a different heel finish than a low blow, so we’ve now had two matches and two straight low-blow finishes.

DALTON CASTLE & THE BOYS vs. BULLY RAY, SHANE TAYLOR, & PUNISHMENT MARTINEZ- 3.25/10
The heels attacked Dalton before the match, with Bully hitting is injured legs with his chain, resulting in this being basically a Handicap Match. We then got several minutes of Bully for once managing to successfully manipulate the crowd (although getting them to cheer for guys they were going to cheer for already anyway isn’t much of an accomplishment) before the bell finally rang.
Martinez was in his street clothes and was acting a lot more like a random Bully Ray henchman than like his usual stoic monster self. The match was slow and boring for a while as the heels dominated for a bit. Dalton came back out at the right dramatic moment to receive a hot tag, leading a nice little period of action until Bully and Dalton brawled away to the back, leaving Martinez and Taylor alone with the Boys, who they then squashed.

JAY LETHAL vs. MATT TAVEN- 6.5/10
These guys had a disappointing match for two people as high up on the card as they are. Lethal beating a guy who has an outstanding world title shot should set him up for a world title shot, but there really hasn’t been any movement in that direction since, and there was no need for Taven to lose when a time-limit draw would have sufficed.

ROH WOMEN OF HONOR TITLE MATCH: Sumie Sakai(c) vs. Chardonay- 4.75/10
They tried, but there’s not much you can do with only eight minutes and when absolutely no one believes the title will change hands because the challenger is a random woman getting a title shot for no explained reason who isn’t under contract to the company. Also, I could have done without Sumie spanking Chardonday. That’s exactly the opposite of what they should have been doing.

SCORPIO SKY vs. CODY RHODES (w/Brandi)- 5.75/10
Cody was playing the total babyface early on and Scorpio was playing the total heel… and then they randomly did a spot where Brandi spit water in Scorpio’s face and totally flipped things. Then, a few minutes later, they did a spot where Scorpio hit Cody with a foreign object. If they were going to both be heels then why start off with Cody being a total babyface (even letting fans kiss his stupid ring gimmick). They switched several more times throughout the match, before ending in a obnoxiously overbooked finish involving Brandi, Kazarian and hairspray being used to give Scorpio Sky a false finish before Cody just hit his finisher and won. This was a decent match brought down by overbooking.

HIROSHI TANAHASHI vs. ADAM PAGE- 6.75/10
They only went twelve minutes, which is a lot less than a guy like Adam Page needs to really be able to benefit from a loss to Tanahashi. The finishing sequence was great, but the match seemed to be stuck in second gear for a lot longer than it needed to be.

TAG TEAM FOUR CORNER SURVIVAL MATCH: The Young Bucks vs. The Briscoes vs. The Kingdom vs. Los Ingobernables de Japon (EVIL & Sanada)- 7.5/10
The match was just fast-paced spots. It was fine because we hadn’t really seen that yet tonight, but it wasn’t even close to anything special, either. The Bucks winning makes sense, but the pin on The Kingdom makes it feel like we’re trying to go around in circles after we just had them lose to The Kingdom in last night’s main event for the ROH World Six-Man Tag Team Titles. I think it would have made a lot more sense to have them either pin The Briscoes, who the announcers already told us they would be challenging for the tag titles at Best in the World, or have them pin LIJ to give us an even better set-up for them challenging EVIL & Sanada for the IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Titles, which NJPW had them challenging for at Dominion anyway.

A very bland show from ROH, with pretty much every match under-delivering. The whole show honestly seemed pointless, with almost no storyline relevance, no stand-out matches, and a good number of things which detracted from some of the on-going stories in my opinion. It felt like ROH booked three shows on this tour but then only had two nights’ worth relevant or interesting matches, and the random title matches on tonight’s show (especially the Women of Honor Title match) felt like they devalued the titles simply by happening (and the TV Title match would have been the same if Doug Williams wasn’t such an important name in British wrestling and didn’t have such a connection to ROH’s early history. A very disappointing end to this tour, especially after last night’s excellent show seemed to get things back on track.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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