BRM Reviews WCPW Stacked ‘17

[Big Red Machine]

WCPW Stacked ‘17 (8/22/2017)- Leeds, UK


THE PRESTIGE EXTEND AN INVITATION TO WILL OSPREAY- Joe Hendry tells Ospreay that he has until the end of the night to decide if he will join The Prestige and “fulfill your true potential and become the second-best wrestler in the world.” Good heel stuff.

HIROMU TAKAHASHI vs. “SPEEDBALL” MIKE BAILEY- 6.5/10
Hiromu hit Speedball with Darryl right in front of the referee and there was no DQ called. The referee didn’t even ask to inspect Darryl despite Speedball selling it like there was a lot more than just stuffing in there. Is it really that hard to just have the referee distracted while you do this? Or to just not do it at all because it’s dumb?
Other than that this was a pretty good opener. Speedball took a few scary bumps, and I really hope he was just selling his knees at the end rather than having actually hurt at least one of them with that spot on the apron.

THREE-WAY ELIMINATION MATCH: Drake vs. Angelico vs. Jay Lethal- 5/10
Drake and Lethal are feuding, so Drake jumped Lethal from behind while he was doing his pose on the apron to start things off. These guys did the best with the time they were given, but all they were given was about seven minutes.
The booking in the match itself was pretty interesting. Angelico was eliminated first when he went to give Lethal a vertical suplex but Drake grabbed his legs to trip him up and hold him down a la Heenan in the Rude vs. Warrior match at WrestleMania V. Angelico was understandably unhappy about this because his feet were under the ropes and thus the pin shouldn’t have counted but the referee didn’t see it. Drake then started to trash-talk him on the outside so Angelico grabbed him and tossed him back into the ring (which should have been a DQ, but if you subscribe to this dumb “no DQs in three-ways” rule then it isn’t one), and when he got up Lethal nailed him with the Lethal Injection for the pin. I like this because it gave Lethal a clean win over Drake while allowing Drake to blame it on Angelico (even though he brought it on himself by being a dick to Angelico), which both allows Drake to justify continuing his feud with Lethal and also sets up for a Drake vs. Angelico feud as well.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- Lethal grabs a mic and tells Drake that he just pinned him clean and their feud is now over and Drake should be a man and accept his loss and get into the ring to shake Lethal’s hand. Drake does so, but then, when Lethal turns his back, Drake jumps him from behind and beats him down a bit, then lays him out with a Brainbuster. If this was all that happened, this would have been great, but Lethal was such a dick during this, adding in little comments like “even though I just whooped your ass” throughout his promo. The one that really killed it, though, was that after Drake had been a good sport and done what Lethal had asked and shook Lethal’s hand, Lethal told him to “get out of my ring!” and then turned around, so it really feels like Lethal almost had this coming, and was provoking the attack. I don’t know if Jay said those things on his own or if the booker told him to, but whoever’s idea those lines were really f*cked up here.

BRISCOES PROMO- Jay was good, Mark was a little over the top and goofy. They want to win the tag titles tonight in their WCPW debut.

PENTA EL 0M vs. RAMPAGE- 5/10
Pretty good for the time it got, and quite the surprising finish as well.

WCPW HARDCORE TITLE MATCH: Primate(c) vs. BT Gunn- 5.25/10
This was pretty messy for the first half of it with pointless no-selling followed one or two bad phantom bumps, which made both look worse by proximity to each other. They did a table bump that didn’t go well, either, likely because of the sketchy nature of the table they used. It did start to get good towards the end, though.

TRAVIS BANKS vs. KUSHIDA- 8.25/10
AWESOME! Just a straight wrestling match that built and built and built until an excellent finish.

ALEX GRACIE vs. MARTIN KIRBY- 4.25/10
They had an okay match with a bit of comedy. It last about five minutes before Bad Bones ran in and attacked Kirby for the DQ. Gracie seemed angry that Bad Bones had cost him the match, but then decided it was better to make friends with Bad Bones than argue with him.

MARTY SCURLL PROMO- GREAT!
Short, sweet, and excellent.

WAR MACHINE RULES MATCH FOR THE WCPW TAG TEAM TITLE: War Machine(c) vs. Jay Lethal & Mark Briscoe- 7/10
“War Machine Rules” are just a dumb way of saying that there are no DQs or count-outs. This was supposed to be War Machine vs. Mark & Jay Briscoe but Jay came out and announced that he had an injured back and thus wouldn’t be able to compete, but he managed to find a different Jay- Jay Lethal- to be his replacement. This match suffered from the obvious problem of no one buying a replacement makeshift team having a chance at winning the belts, but the wrestlers did their best to work around it.

THE INTERVIEWER TRIES TO FIND OUT OF WILL OSPREAY HAS DECIDED TO JOIN THE PRESTIGE- Ospreay kept saying that he wants to be on his own right now, but it wasn’t clear if that was referring to not wanting to be in a stable anymore, or just wanting to be alone with his thoughts at the moment.

REY MYSTERIO JR. vs. RICOCHET- 7.75/10
They had a GREAT match that was built around Ricochet having various counters to the 619 until Rey finally hit it to get the win.

WILL OSPREAY vs. MARTY SCURLL- 8.5/10
Joe Hendry joined the commentary team for this match. With the angle going in, you’d think that this would be one of those matches that suffers because everyone is waiting for someone to run in (in this case Hendry and The Prestige), but it didn’t. And a good thing, too, do because Scurll won this match completely cleanly with there being no interference of any kind. Instead, all of that stuff was saved for the…

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- good
The Prestige attack Scrull after the match and Hendry once again makes his pitch to Ospreay to join them, but Ospreay attacks them instead, dropping both Coffey and Banks with a double Os-cutter and letting Hendry know that he wants the WCPW World Heavyweight Title.

A great show from WCPW, with some great wrestling, big match-ups, and important storyline developments… and the week is just getting started.