BRM Reviews wXw We Love Wrestling #11 (5/7/2021)

[Big Red Machine]

wXw We Love Wrestling #11 (5/7/2021)- Oberhausen, Germany


ANDY JACKSON INTERVIEWS RAMBO & EZEL- fine
They are working together because they are family. Rambo notes that he has history with Michael Knight and says that he will use his insight into Knight’s character and style to determine how to defeat him.

MICHAEL KNIGHT INTERVIEW- decent
Knight seems to think Norman Harras cheated to beat him for the Shotgun Title last week, but I don’t remember seeing anything. He says that because Rambo and he know each other so well, he will have to come up with some new tricks. He also says that he won’t let the numbers game beat him like happened to The Rotation a few weeks ago.

MICHAEL KNIGHT vs. RAMBO (w/Ezel)- 2/10
Rambo jumped the bell on Knight and threw him to the outside where Ezel beat him up while Rambo distracted the referee. They threw Knight back into the ring, and the referee gave Knight the option of postponing the match, but Knight insisted on wrestling despite the beating he had just suffered.
Once the match started, the same pattern repeated itself literally once a minute. Knight eventually made a VERY short comeback (about two or three moves) but got taken out by a sit-out powerbomb. This served its purpose in terms of getting over how Ezel operate, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was quite repetitive. It was fine to do once. I need to see it again.

MAGGOT & FRIENDS PROMO AND SEGMENT WITH TEAM FRANCE- mixed
Baby Allison is wearing Aigle Blanc’s mask and flapping her wings like a bird. Maggot is wearing Senza Volto’s mask and mocking his entrance. Heisenberg is again slightly downcast, perhaps uncomfortable with all of this.
This was billed as the heels giving us a “mission statement.” That mission statement turned out to be “we think masks are dumb, so we want to rid wXw of all masks.” That’s it? We don’t really know anything about why these three came together other than Maggot decided he was tired of Prince Ahura’s crap and decided to leave not just the Pretty Bastards but Die Raucherpause as a whole, and Heisenberg was depressed and felt left out of his old friend group when they won the tag titles without him and he failed to win the Shotgun Title, and Allison… well… we don’t even know why she’s with them. I was kind of hoping we’d get some substance here rather than just a promo randomly ascribing an old trope to this group in order to facilitate the apuesta match that the booker wanted to get to.
Anyway, Maggot cuts this promo and then gets some scissors and is about to cut Senza’s mask up when Senza comes out and yells at him to stop. This was a distraction so that Aigle Blanc could come up behind the heels and attack them. There was a fight which the babyfaces won and they reclaimed their masks. The fight wasn’t bad or anything, but it felt like it took way too little to put big Heisenberg down. Just a dropkick took him out for most of it. Not that it was that long, but it still looked more like he was staying down because it wasn’t time for him to get back up yet than like he had actually been taken out of the fight temporarily by that one move. So that could have gone better.
The babyfaces, having reclaimed their masks, put them back on triumphantly. That’s right. They came out without their masks on. They were wearing hoodies and COVID masks. I get that they wanted the big moment of them “reclaiming” their masks, but I had always assumed that all of these masked wrestlers have more than just one copy of their own mask. It just kind of seemed weird that they didn’t. Almost like they couldn’t afford more than one copy, which made them seem like lesser stars.
Then Senza cut a big babyface promo about respect and picked up the scissors and said (paraphrasing) “you want to use these cut our masks? Well, we want to use them to cut your hair” and challenged the heels to a mask vs. hair match in three weeks. I appreciated the artistic details that were put into this (especially the presence of the scissors as something to put the idea for the heels’ wager in Senza’s head, as I assume the plan was just to go out there and get their masks back, not challenge them to a lucha de apuesta), but there was also enough stuff that felt just a little too contrived for the sake of the artistic details that the segment didn’t quite work for me. I feel like I’m about two notches down on the emotional scale from where the booker assumed I would be.

After a commercial, it was announced that the above challenge had been signed and is thus the first announced match for the next big show: Drive of Champions 2021. Also, that match is actually going to be a handicap match Baby Allison involved as well (so her hair is also on the line).

MARIUS AL-ANI INTERVIEW- fine arrogant heel stuff

MARIUS AL-ANI vs. DENNIS ZINNER- 3/10
The dominant champ dominated an undercard wrestler.

ANDY JACKSON INTERVIEWS MARIUS AL-ANI- fine
Marius was arrogant an insisted that no one was in his league. Andy informed him that next week there will be fourteen-person battle royale for a shot at Al-Ani’s wXw Unified World Wrestling Title.

PARIS BALLIS vs. LEON VAN GASTEREN- 5.5/10
Leon won a surprisingly competitive match cleanly in seven minutes. He put Paris over after the match.

TRISTAN ARCHER INTERVIEW- bad
He decided to put over the angle earlier tonight with his fellow Frenchmen and… well… I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If the guy isn’t good at speaking the language you’re going to have him speak, limit the amount of speaking he has to do.
He then put out a plea for Emil Sitoci to please show up to the arena and talk to him because he has something very important to talk to him about. So important that he is willing to forgive the fact that Emil faked an injury to beat him the last time they wrestled. This came across like an idiot heel setting an obvious trap for a babyface.
In the only even passable part of this, Archer built up his match tonight against Fast Time Moodo. He has respect for Moodo’s striking ability. I legitimately laughed when he outright said “I don’ want him to f*cking touch me.”

TRISTAN ARCHER vs. FAST TIME MOODO- 7.25/10
Good stuff. Archer worked over Moodo’s knee and unlike in the Sitoci match, he didn’t let up when he saw his opponent’s knee was injured. Moodo looked good and showed more personality in the ring. Archer won clean, which surprised me at first, but feels like the right move the more that I think about it.

ANDY JACKSON INTERVIEWS TRISTAN ARCHER- decent
This was BY FAR his best promo.

GULYAS JR. INTERVIEW- bad
Gulyas Jr. comes across as half smelly slob who you don’t want to root for and half as a someone trying WAY too hard to be scary when we all know that he isn’t.

wXw SHOTGUN TITLE MATCH: Norman Harras(c) vs. Gulyas Jr.- 4.5/10
Gulyas Jr. grabbed Norman before the match and tried to give him the Nasty Boys Pit Stop. Norman escaped, so Gulyas grabbed Norman’s title belt and was about to rub that into his armpit, but fortunately Norman charged in to save the championship belt from being defiled.
Norman won a meh cleanly.

ANDY JACKSON INTERVIEWS NORMAN HARRAS- good
Norman was, as always, a great heel. Andy let him know that he will be facing Ayac of Ezel next week, and Norman was not happy about this, both because of the numbers game situation and the fact that Ezel will surely want to get revenge on Norman for taking the title from Metehan.

ARROWS OF HUNGARY INTERVIEW- fine

ROTT & FLOTT INTERVIEW- good
They’re annoyed that Avalanche was willing to hand Leon Van Gasteren and Tim Stubing a title shot but not them.

#1 CONTENDERSHIP MATCH: The Arrows of Hungary vs. Rott & Flott- 7.5/10
Great babyface in peril stuff ending in the Arrows getting the big win.

ARROWS OF HUNGARY PROMO- good


A solid show from wXw. The build to Drive of Champions is going pretty well so far, and we have seen more matches start to get more time, so I’m happy.