BRM Reviews wXw World Tag Team Festival 2022: Night 3

[Big Red Machine]

wXw World Tag Team Festival 2022: Night 3 (10/3/2022)- Oberhausen, Germany


EARLIER TODAY, AN INTERVIEW WITH PRINCE AHURA WAS INTERRUPTED BY BABY ALLISON & MAGGOT- great!
The interviewer asked Ahura about skipping such an important match last night to attend his brother’s wedding. Ahura said that he was taking care of family. While the culture up until relatively recently in pro wrestling has been that you put the business before family things, I think that most people, even if they are big pro wrestling fans and know about this aspect of the culture, would find it hard to get upset at Ahura for this. In fact, just a few weeks before this show took place, my own brother got married smack-dab in the middle of by far the busiest time of the year for me at my office… and it never even would have occurred to anyone in my office to say “I’m sorry, but we really need you around. You can’t spend a few days on the other side of the country for your brother’s wedding.” In fact, they even let me spend personal days I technically hadn’t accrued yet in order to go.
For this reason, it is critical that wXw has framed this so that it is not the decision to go to the wedding that people are questioning (and that Maggot it outright upset about) but rather all of the decisions Ahura has taken around it. It’s not “why did you go to your brother’s wedding instead of wrestling on the show?” It’s “why did you enter this three-day round robin tournament in the first place if you knew you were going to have to miss one of the days?” and “Why didn’t you tell anyone until the day before?”
And now Maggot shows up and is upset at Ahura not just for all of this, but for coming to do an interview before even going to talk to the partner who he left high and dry. Once again, the issue is Ahura’s flippant attitude towards things and relationships that should be important that is at issue here.
Maggot continues, telling Ahura he is fed up with his crap, and we got a nice callback to their original dynamic in wXw, where Ahura was the party animal and Maggot was the responsible one. He also calls Ahura out for still carrying around a replica of the Shotgun Title belt (still claiming to be the rightful champion of the title hat was stripped from him last year), something Maggot- the current rightful champion had tolerated up until now, and once again laid into him for leaving him on his own last night. Ahura responded to this (and to a comment of “what did you expect from Ahura?” from Baby Allison) by taunting Baby Allison for losing her title last night.
Baby Allison and Ahura yelled at each other more, with Baby Allison finally deciding to be the bigger person and walking off. This gave Ahura another chance to be a dick, telling Maggot that he needs to control his woman and that “she can’t talk to me like that.” Maggot responds by telling him to “be happy that you’re keeping all of your teeth,” then goes to calm Baby Allison down. Once Maggot left, Ahura blew the whole thing off, saying “I’ll take care of it later.”

WORLD TAG TEAM FESTIVAL 2022 BLOCK A MATCH: CDK(3) vs. Pretty Bastards(3)- 7.75/10
Pretty Bastards made “their” entrance, by which I mean they entered together, but Prince Ahura had no interest in doing any of their usual stuff. These two did a great job of making it clear that Maggot was trying to be conciliatory and that Ahura was being a dick.
I thought the stuff they did with Ahura drinking a fan’s beer and them getting drunk because he was still hung over from the night before was too goofy, but other than that, this a great opener that got extremely exciting down the stretch. They did a wonderful job of creating a real sense of desperation to get the win as the clock wound down in the final two minutes. In the end, neither team would get the win, as this match went to a twenty-minute time-limit draw, almost certainly ending both teams’ hopes of winning the tournament and the wXw World Tag Team Titles.

WORLD TAG TEAM FESTIVAL 2022 BLOCK A MATCH: Frenchadors(3) vs. SAnitY (Eric Young & Axel Tischer)(3)- 5.75/10
SAnitY continued with their slightly heelish ways. The Frenchadors picked up the win in a relatively short match, so I guess they’re saving a lot of energy for the finals, which this win secures them a spot in.

DAN INTERVIEWS THE FRENCHADORS- fine
They noted that they have issues to resolve with both Rott & Flott and Amboss, so you can probably count the other two teams out. And that’s fine with me. Give the big spot to one of the full-time teams.

TRISTAN ARCHER’S IN-RING INTERVIEW IS INTERRUPTED BY LEVANIEL- great
Archer was asked about last night’s wXw Unified World Wrestling Championship defense against Speedball. He put Speedball over as being an “exceptional” wrestler… but not as good as him. He was then asked about his likely next challenger, Levaniel. He started to talk about Levaniel, but was interrupted by the Prince of the Stars himself.
Instead of his usual robe, Levaniel was dressed in a suit. He said this was because he was making a big announcement: He is cashing in his title shot on December 17th at the wXw 22nd Anniversary show! After this, we got the typical nose-to-nose, followed by Archer taking a swing at Levaniel, who avoided the punch and laid the champion out with his finisher, then posed and laid the belt on the fallen Archer’s chest. Very paint-by-numbers stuff, but it was done well, and when you’ve got a babyface as over as Levaniel is, you can just stick to paint-by-numbers stuff and it will work great.

WORLD TAG TEAM FESTIVAL 2022 BLOCK B MATCH: Fuminori Abe & Shigehiro Irie(3) vs. Rott & Flott(3)- 6.5/10
Abe & Irie won here, which I probably should have seen coming, seeing as how a Rott & Flott victory would have assured them a place in the finals, and I would be shocked if VIF got the beat Amboss, who are the top heel stable. The announcers made a big deal out of how this officially ends Rott & Flotts title reign because the winners of the tournament get the tag titles, even if they never faced the tag champs. I spoke in my review of night one about how much I dislike the idea of the tag titles being on the line I a tournament, and this added a whole new dimension to this, as if Amboss win the next match, then your new tag team champions will either be the Frenchadors- who never even faced the current champs- or Amboss… who actually LOST to them in this tournament.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- meh
Rott & Flott looked like they were showing Abe & Irie respect after the match, but it was just a ruse to get them to let their guard down so that they could kick them in the nuts.


WORLD TAG TEAM FESTIVAL 2022 BLOCK B MATCH: Violence is Forever(3) vs. Amboss (Robert Dreissker & Icarus)(3)- 6.5/10
Ku was taken out early on with a head injury, playing off of his bleeding everywhere last night. He eventually came back out, of course. Icarus eventually won the match- and the block- for his team by choking Ku out.

16 CARAT GOLD 2023 QUALIFYING MATCH: Masha Slamovich vs. Killer Kelly- 6.75/10
This was great for the time it got. Doing this match six months before the tournament felt quite odd. If I had to guess, they wanted there to be more stakes for this so that Kelly being so “devastated” after her loss would feel more natural. My guess is that this will lead to her leaving wXw (her husband is a trainer at the WWE Performance Center, so I assume she is living in the US now and is an expensive bring-in).

PETER TIHANYI vs. MIKE BAILEY- 7.5/10
These two agreed early on that Tihanyi would “stay away from” Bailey’s injured leg. If the wrestlers want to make this agreement between them then that’s fine, but I hate the announcers putting it over as some sort of moral thing to do. It’s not. This is a combat sport, not a friendly sparring match. It is moral to do everything within the rules to win the match.
Soon after that happened, Tihanyi went for said leg, and Bailey got quite angry. The announcers excused Tihanyi, saying it was probably just instinct and the heat of the moment… and that’s yet another reason why claiming that there is some moral imperative not to work over an injured limb is silly. Even the idea that Tihanyi wants to prove that he can beat Bailey with “no advantages” doesn’t make this work because even if Tihanyi never touches Speedball’s leg, it’s still going to effect Speedball’s ability to do his usual running, kicks, flips, etc.
Even more annoying, this whole thing had no effect on the match, to the point where I think the announcers might have misinterpreted Tihanyi’s gesture, which seemed to me to be more of a “I’m going for your leg.”
Anyway, the leg story didn’t come into play much. Instead they had more of a “flips and kicks” match, but with a good pace, and with both men also using other moves to target the head. Bailey won cleanly, but I do think Tihanyi got something out of this strong showing.

#1 CONTENDERSHIP MATCH: Ava Everett vs. Iva Kolasky vs. Michelle Green vs. Orsi- 3.75/10
Iva and Ava tried to work together, but that failed as quickly as you would expect with two such petulant and selfish heels involved. Iva stole Orsi’s pin on Ava to pick up the win.

WORLD TAG TEAM FESTIVAL 2022 FINAL MATCH FOR THE VACANT wXw WORLD TAG TEAM TITLES: Frenchadors vs. Amboss (Robert Dreissker & Icarus)- 8/10
They were having a solid match until we got a double count-out. The officials got together and decided that this match was too important to end like that, and thus it would be restarted with no count-outs… and just to make sure they didn’t have to have this conversation again, no DQs. Also, they decided to make it a Tornado match, I guess because when there are no DQs, you might as well just make everyone legal, too. This was the rare instance of me liking this sort of thing, and I think the main reason for that was that unlike in other promotions, where people will blatantly break rules and the referee will unilaterally decide not to enforce the rules because “this match is too important to end like that,” in this case, the referee actually follow the rules, and then a committee got together and decided that the match was too important and had to be restarted. Also, in this situation, the match would have been a draw in a tournament final, rather than what you’ll often see other places where it is only one side breaking the rules, and thus that person is essentially being rewarded for their cheating and the other person robbed of what should be a DQ win.
The change of the rules allowed them to, of course, use weapons, which they did very well, if only in a limited capacity. It was a fine example of how less can be more. They also Laurance Roman to interfere for Amboss and then Peter Tihanyi to take him out, so they didn’t ignore this obvious thing that should be happening.
The other big thing it let them do was have Avalanche rip off Senza Volto’s mask. They had subtly built up this by having other teams go at the Frenchadors masks a bit, and by having Avalanche rip at Aigle Blanc’s early on, but ripping off Senza’s mask felt like a bigger moment because in pro wrestling, that is essentially a finish. We’ve all seen it a million times: the wrestler goes to cover their face, thus leaving them vulnerable to whatever move the heel hits them with, or makes them not want to kick out of a roll-up or whatever. And Senza did instinctively drop down and cover his face here… and then he decided that the tournament victory and the wXw World Tag Team Titles were more important to him than people not seeing his face. So he got up and fought back and his team got the big win they’ve been chasing. The Lucha thing has always seemed a little silly to me (especially with non-Mexican luchadors like Aigle Blanc and Senza Volto) so I LOVED this, but I’m curious if there are any Lucha fans out there who really hated it.



This was a good show from wXw, with a good undercard, some good storyline segments, and a good payoff to a long journey in the main event. In an ideal world the tournament finals would have been a blow-away match, but what we got here was certainly acceptable. 8/10 is nothing to sneeze at.