BRM Reviews the 6/11/2016 ROH

[Big Red Machine]

Kevin Kelly, Nigel McGuinness, and Mark Briscoe are on commentary.

TETSUYA NAITO vs. MOOSE (w/Stokely Hathaway)- 6.5/10
On commentary, Mark Briscoe told us that Roderick Strong had done something that annoyed him. That something is that apparently Roddy acts like he is Mark’s big brother and lectures him sometimes or something like that.
The match was good, but it really felt like a waste of Naito. Don’t get me wrong: I like Moose. I just think that they have been giving him (mostly) the wrong New Japan guys to work with. No one wants to see Moose work again Okada or Tanahashi or Naito. The guys from New Japan that ROH should be trying to book Moose against are guys like Ishii or Makabe or Bad Luck Fale or even Cody Hall. Moose is at his best when he is brawling and/or engaged in a good old-fashioned hoss fight.

ANX “MAKE WRESTLING GREAT AGAIN” PROMO- you know what? They have a point. I am tired of little boys like Cheeseburger getting so much attention, and I am tired of motherf*cking superkicks. I think these guys are babyfaces.

THE ALL-NIGHT EXPRESS vs. JUSHIN “THUNDER” LIGER & CHEESEBURGER- 4.75/10
ROH’s “Tale of the Tape” graphic lists ANX has having teamed together for six years. They seem to have forgotten about those three years where they weren’t teaming together because KENNY KING WASN’T IN ROH, which was a big part of multiple angles that have happened in the interim, including their entire return angle last year. The graphic should really say four years (and if you want to count it back from when they first started teaming, six years is still wrong because they started teaming together in very late 2008, so it should be seven or eight years).
This match is apparently kinda-sorta supposed to be revenge for “what ANX did to Cheeseburger” at the Vegas TV tapings. It’s been months since then, so I had completely forgotten what happened. I have vague memories of them cutting a promo with him in the ring where they seemed like they were being nice but then started being mean to him or something. Did they beat him up? The point is that I don’t remember and Kevin Kelly didn’t go into any more detail than what I quoted above in order to help me. Also, if this… happening… is supposed to be important, why hasn’t it been mentioned in MONTHS?

Mark once again resumed talking about his issues with Roddy. He said that “Roddy treats me like…” and then he just stopped there and started talking about how he would beat Roddy at the PPV (and it didn’t come across like there was a curse word he couldn’t say. It came across like Mark just couldn’t come up with a good description). Later on Mark finally said that Roddy was treating him like he wasn’t at the same level as a guy like Roddy or Jay. Okay… but again: why haven’t we been SHOWN this?

A WORD ON THE ANX “MAKE WRESTLING GREAT AGAIN” GIMMICK- I liked their earlier promo and I’ve been loving the things I’ve been hearing about them from live reports from the Road to Best in the World Tour (accusing Dalton Castle of human trafficking because of the Boys), I am concerned that the booking and/or announcing is going to kill it. If the booking leaves them alone and lets them cut their own promos, they should be fine, but Kevin Kelly’s commentary for this match made me worry. The match didn’t even go seven minutes, and if you count their own entrance they weren’t out there for more than ten (including some commercial time where Kevin Kelly wasn’t speaking to us), in that those ten minutes, Kevin twice told us that “they’re angry their voices haven’t been heard” and “they say they want to make wrestling great again. I thought it already was.” My fear is that this is the total extent of either what Delirious has planned for them or what Kevin Kelly will try to do to get the gimmick over (or both), and it that is the case, this will bomb.
A gimmick like this requires a deft touch. You need to have some fun with it because if you don’t it devolves into using racism (or allusions thereto) as cheap heat (which people tend to reject), but at the same time you can’t make it a farce without completely killing ANX. You need to find that fine line where the parody part of the idea still makes people chuckle, but they still boo the things ANX are saying. I think there is a lot you can do with this (one idea that immediately comes to mind is to wait until ACH and Page head to Japan and have them complain that ROH is trying to “replace hard-working American’s jobs with cheap foreign labor like Kamaitachi), but it requires a very measured booking approach and an announcer who can do more with the issues that spout catchphrases as talking points.

PPV MAIN EVENT COMMERCIAL- bad. Jay Briscoe was barely intelligible (especially the first half) and the spliced-together promos didn’t come together well at all.

RODDY AND MARK HAVE A CONFRONTATION- so now, over half-way through the show Roderick Strong comes out to complain to Nigel that “the Briscoe that doesn’t matter” is on commentary. This is SOOOO backwards. The adage is “show. Don’t tell.” You don’t get extra credit for doing both, and showing after you tell doesn’t make it feel that much less like you’re pulling it out of your ass (especially in this case where it felt like the entire purpose of Roddy showing up when he did was to justify Mark’s comments all night long).

BULLET CLUB PROMO- well… just Cole and the Bucks. Considering that we just got a graphic for next week’s main event, which is the Briscoes, Lethal, & Roddy vs. Bullet Club (Young Bucks & Guerrillas of Destiny) you’d think they’d want to hype that match up in some way, or maybe even hype the match these three are having at the PPV against Moose & War Machine, but instead we got Cole whining about not being in the PPV main event and the three of them being mean to a cameraman. This was a waste of time.

SILAS YOUNG PROMO- he comes out and says the stuff we’ve heard him say a bunch of times before. ACH isn’t a real man because he plays video games in the locker room. Also, ACH isn’t a real man because he think he’s “a superhero from some Japanese cartoon.” Then Silas goes over and gets into a physical altercation with a fan in an ACH shirt. Nigel McGuinness just sat there on commentary and said “oh no! We can’t have him going after a fan. That would be terrible. Someone should go stop this,” which caused me to scream at Nigel to get off his lazy British arse and do something about it.
Some security dorks came over and Silas backed down. While Silas was backing down, ACH came out to the ring and did a dive onto Silas and the security guys. This was an even bigger waste of time. Quite simply, this match did not need this sort of build (the promos they cut on each other on TV the past few weeks were fine), and considering that I was expecting the main event to start but got this segment instead, I was quite annoyed that they were cutting into my Kyle vs. KUSHIDA time. Perhaps more importantly, though, now that ACH has gotten the best of Silas, what do I need to see the match for?

KYLE O’REILLY PROMO- great.

KYLE O’REILLY vs. KUSHIDA- 7/10
So Kyle just cut this promo building this up as THE rematch from their EPIC Best of the Super Juniors finals from last year… and it got just eleven minutes of TV time. These two made the absolute most of what they were given (and I suspect the match may have been much longer live), but that doesn’t change the fact that I was disappointed with how little time this match got. ROH has a fifty-minute show when you factor out the (outside) commercials. There is NO EXCUSE for an eleven minute main event… and this was the only match on the show to even break ten minutes (total wrestling time on this show was about twenty-seven minutes). The people putting this show together need to realize that having the best wrestling matches you can (and that means showing us more wrestling action) is more important to the long-term (and probably even the short-term) growth of the company than commercials for t-shirts for the Women of Honor (if you don’t ever put them on TV why is anyone supposed to care enough to buy the t-shirt) or especially F*CKING CHEESEBURGER.

Throughout the show they kept talking about how this show as “all ROH vs. New Japan,” so why not save this show for the lame duck show next week that actually airs after the PPV and air the show that will air next week this week? Doing some sort of altercation during the ROH team’s entrance in the main event where Roddy is a dick to Mark by insisting that Mark hold the ropes for the guys who have already been world champion (or something like that) would SHOW us Roddy being a dick before Mark comes on TV to b*tch about it and will probably serve to build up the PPV main event more than the absolutely nothing that they did tonight. It will also keep the ROH vs. Bullet Club flow going as opposed to randomly interrupting it with this one random ROH vs. New Japan show.

The win for Kyle will still be building him up for his title shot at the post BITW tapings because that will still air after this would, Cole’s promo would feel more relevant, you could also keep Cheeseburger out for a week longer to really sell the damage that The Addiction’s vicious post-match assault at the PPV did to him, and use the ACH-Silas altercation to escalate their feud (which I doubt will end at the PPV), and use the post-BITW tapings to build that up to a blow-off at Death Before Dishonor.

Anyway, a very disappointing show from ROH, despite the great main event.

STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Kevin Kelly talks about how Mark is supposedly on “one of the most underrated big match win streaks” in ROH.
Well obviously not because his last two “big” matches were losses to Bullet Club in Dearborn and to War Machine at the PPV. Before that they won the #1 contendership match at Supercard of Honor X: Night 2, and if you want to count the main event in West Warwick as “big” I guess that would make it two in a row, but a streak (according to the great Lou Brown in Major League II) is “three in a row,” and Mark’s last big match before that was him and Jay losing to Elgin at Tanahashi at the 14th Anniversary Show. And before that the Briscoes and Yano lost the NEVER Openweight Six Man Tag Team Titles to the Elite, and before that… well… they won the NEVER six man titles at New Year Dash 2016 but they had just lost a match for those belts the night before at the Tokyo Dome. Then before that they lost the #1 contendership match Final Battle. And before that Mark lost his SOTF qualifier, and before that they lost to the ANX at the previous PPV…
Look. You could argue that there are some other “big match” wins peppered in here (maybe the eight-man main event in Indianapolis or the match with War Machine at last year’s Glory By Honor, but the fact remains that Mark has never been a singles champion (losing several matches for both the world and TV Titles in that stretch) and the Briscoes haven’t been tag champs in over three years (during which time they have not only lost many tag title matches but at least one for the IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Titles as well). I don’t even remember Mark being in any feuds aside from the Briscoes vs. Kingdom feud (which they lost the blow-off of) and then before that it’s all the way back to the Mark Briscoe vs. Silas Young feud that blew off at Final Battle 2013 in a strap match that Mark also lost.
But Kevin Kelly decides to make this blatantly untrue claim… why, exactly? For what purpose? To build Mark Briscoe up for his PPV undercard singles match with Roderick Strong which we just found out about? You don’t need this bullsh*t to build Mark up for that. He’s Mark Briscoe. He doesn’t need that sort of build for an undercard singles match! He’s over enough for that already.