BRM Reviews the 10/21/2015 ROH (Page vs. Briscoe!)

[Big Red Machine]

ALL-NIGHT EXPRESS vs. THE ADDICTION (w/Chris Sabin)- 6.5/10
A perfectly fine wrestling match ruined by this stupid renewed “who is under the red masks?” angle. Cole’s back with the Kingdom, we’re still trying to figure out who these masked men are who are interfering in tag team matches… it’s like we’re back to where we were in the middle of the winter. And what’s worse is that Delirious clearly doesn’t seem to realize just how many fans utterly hated this whole “who are these masked men?” angle.
This whole thing just feels so very un-ROH. You’ve got two teams claiming to be the uncrowned champions: ANX who had to vacate the belts and were never beaten for them, and The Addiction, who lost the titles without ever being pinned. It seems obvious to me that the right way to book this not only for an ROH crowd, but also to differentiate yourself from WWE and TNA, is to have these two teams go to a time-limit draw here. Then The Addiction can lose their rematch in Kalamazoo, and then you follow up on the draw by doing a rematch where ANX win clean to build to their title shot (oh, and also don’t book both teams to lose at Reloaded Tour: California). But instead Delirious is giving us interference and distraction finishes and a “who is that masked mystery man?” angle FOR THE SECOND TIME THIS YEAR.

KINGDOM PROMOS- mostly bad.
First Bennett rips off CM Punk’s famous snake promo when he turned heel after winning the world title, except he did it worse. Maria’s promo would have been eh on its own, but the fact that she ripped off Heyman’s opening line made it look fourth-rate at best.
Taven was very good.
COLE EXPLAINS WHY HE TURNED ON KYLE- he says he did it because he deserves the title and not Kyle. Fine. Now how about you explain why you went through this elaborate ruse that included losing matches and then waiting for an opportunity to turn on him when you could have just attacked him three-on-one at every show?
reDRagon show up, but security and referees keep them away from the Kingdom. Fish says they want to beat up the Kingdom. Kingdom says they’ll fight them 3-on-2. Michael Elgin comes out and gets physical with the Kingdom, so we get a challenge to trios match, but that match doesn’t actually happen because Kevin Kelly tells us that Adam Page vs. Jay Briscoe will be on after this commercial break.

NO HOLDS BARRED MATCH: Jay Briscoe vs. Adam Page (w/BJ Whitmer)- 8.25/10
AWESOME weapons match. The only thing I didn’t like here was the commentary from Kevin Kelly, which made it feel a lot less like Page was an up-and-coming star and more like he was a chump who was in over his head. Like it would feel if Colby was in this match.

THE AFTERMATH- Whitmer attacks Jay with a crutch. Corino makes the save by punching Whitmer out. The only problem with this is that when Whitmer tried to interfere in the match, we saw Mark Briscoe come out to stop him… so where was Mark this time? Don’t get me wrong: this whole thing got an amazing reaction. It just would have been a lot better if they had Mark try to make the save first but get beaten down instead.

A great show from ROH, all on the strength of the AWESOME main event.

[Bulletclubfan2014]

COLE EXPLAINS WHY HE TURNED ON KYLE- he says he did it because he deserves the title and not Kyle. Fine. Now how about you explain why you went through this elaborate ruse that included losing matches and then waiting for an opportunity to turn on him when you could have just attacked him three-on-one at every show?

In ROH's defense Kyle got pinned a lot in the Future Shock matches so maybe he wanted to make Kyle fall down in rankings by making him lose and maybe he wanted to hurt Kyle even more than he would if he'd just attacked him so he tried to mess with him mentally before he screwed him over