Post by Baby Dogg on Sept 7, 2009 14:01:43 GMT -5
I don’t get to watch that much wrestling. I catch up with a couple of matches a week, at most. When I do, it’s usually the matches which have been particularly talked up by other fans to the point where I want to see what the buzz is.
So match of the week, the week before last, was pretty comfortably Jeff Hardy vs CM Punk, steel cage. I didn’t even see it and I can tell you that – it’s easily the match most well-received and which has generated the most buzz in ages, and I don’t want to fly that quite badly in the face of public opinion. But it’s not the match I watched. The second-most talked about match of that particular week was Daffney vs Hamada, and being the lover of women’s wrestling that I am, I had to see it. On a side note, where did the Ayako go from Hamada’s name? She should totally team up with Daniels, and they can call themselves “What the f'k happened to our given names? We only put them down a second ago!”
So anyway. Make no mistake, that was f'ing terrible match. In terms of blown spots, weak hits and general miscommunication, it’s roughly comparable to the Mickie James / Gail Kim match from a few weeks back. It was badly timed, badly paced, badly sold and just generally bad. It suffered from the exact same issue of James/Kim, in fact, of trying to tell ten or fifteen minutes’ worth of story in five minutes, and when you try to do that, you generally end up with a big pile of suck. To be fair, that’s mainly the fault of the booker. But so many spots fell flat, the worst culprit being the chair-around-the-neck-and-thrown-into-the-ringpost moment, which was a carbon copy of CM Punk doing the same to Jeff Hardy and very obviously TNA saying “Look, WWE, we’ll show what you won’t…” … except Daffney equally obviously threw the chair off at the last minute and it looked f'ing awful. Even the camerawork is bad in TNA and not just generally bad but specifically, noticeably, detractingly so.
Given the talent involved, it’s sad. Ten years ago, Daffney was one of best female wrestlers in the business, easily – and she’s still young. She has another decade in her at least, and she has the skills to be one of the top three or four women in America for that whole period. But in that match, as with everything else I’ve seen of her in the last few years – and I feel like a complete thingy for saying this, given that one of my friends knows her personally, but it’s the truth – she was completely phoning it in. Right now, she’s not in TNA because she’s a great wrestler, she’s in TNA because she’s willing to get thrown through tables and into piles of thumbtacks. And Hamada, although not as good as Daffney, is still talented enough for a place on the roster - but in that match, she was being sold as a face version of Combat Toyoda or Aja Kong, right down to the way she performed her chops, and sorry, but she is not Toyoda or Kong. Not yet. Maybe in five or eight years, but not yet.
So what if a woman went through a table? A table spot doesn’t make a match, and it shouldn’t be a big deal because women should be allowed to do the exact same things men do. Yet here we are where the simple fact it happened at all was considered monumental, no matter how badly it was done in this instance. For god sake, people were crowing over that match because it ended with a Michinoku Driver. Sorry. What? That’s how f'ing bad mainstream women’s wrestling is today, that a f'ing Michinoku Driver is a big deal? Ugh. It was an embarrassment of a match, and I wish I hadn’t watched it.
But here’s the really, really bad part: I can fully believe that it was the best match on Impact this week. TNA’s women’s division is probably their best asset, and it sucks. No, really. For all their talent in other promotions, TNA’s Knockouts put on painful, slow, poorly-booked and generally illogical matches. And they are, literally, the best part of any TNA broadcast I’ve seen in the last year. You honestly can’t tell me AJ Styles, Homicide or Samoa Joe are even a tenth as entertaining in TNA as they are in the indies. It’s not their fault; it’s just a general case of terrible booking, terrible production and terrible ideas that should never have made it to screen.
The last time I was this embarrassed to watch wrestling, it was the year 2000, and the show was called Nitro. TNA have gone from bright young upstarts to industry joke, but they skipped the part in between that WCW managed, where they were a credible threat to WWE. The sooner TNA keels over and a company which actually knows what it’s trying to do like ROH or NWA becomes the #2 promotion, the better.
So match of the week, the week before last, was pretty comfortably Jeff Hardy vs CM Punk, steel cage. I didn’t even see it and I can tell you that – it’s easily the match most well-received and which has generated the most buzz in ages, and I don’t want to fly that quite badly in the face of public opinion. But it’s not the match I watched. The second-most talked about match of that particular week was Daffney vs Hamada, and being the lover of women’s wrestling that I am, I had to see it. On a side note, where did the Ayako go from Hamada’s name? She should totally team up with Daniels, and they can call themselves “What the f'k happened to our given names? We only put them down a second ago!”
So anyway. Make no mistake, that was f'ing terrible match. In terms of blown spots, weak hits and general miscommunication, it’s roughly comparable to the Mickie James / Gail Kim match from a few weeks back. It was badly timed, badly paced, badly sold and just generally bad. It suffered from the exact same issue of James/Kim, in fact, of trying to tell ten or fifteen minutes’ worth of story in five minutes, and when you try to do that, you generally end up with a big pile of suck. To be fair, that’s mainly the fault of the booker. But so many spots fell flat, the worst culprit being the chair-around-the-neck-and-thrown-into-the-ringpost moment, which was a carbon copy of CM Punk doing the same to Jeff Hardy and very obviously TNA saying “Look, WWE, we’ll show what you won’t…” … except Daffney equally obviously threw the chair off at the last minute and it looked f'ing awful. Even the camerawork is bad in TNA and not just generally bad but specifically, noticeably, detractingly so.
Given the talent involved, it’s sad. Ten years ago, Daffney was one of best female wrestlers in the business, easily – and she’s still young. She has another decade in her at least, and she has the skills to be one of the top three or four women in America for that whole period. But in that match, as with everything else I’ve seen of her in the last few years – and I feel like a complete thingy for saying this, given that one of my friends knows her personally, but it’s the truth – she was completely phoning it in. Right now, she’s not in TNA because she’s a great wrestler, she’s in TNA because she’s willing to get thrown through tables and into piles of thumbtacks. And Hamada, although not as good as Daffney, is still talented enough for a place on the roster - but in that match, she was being sold as a face version of Combat Toyoda or Aja Kong, right down to the way she performed her chops, and sorry, but she is not Toyoda or Kong. Not yet. Maybe in five or eight years, but not yet.
So what if a woman went through a table? A table spot doesn’t make a match, and it shouldn’t be a big deal because women should be allowed to do the exact same things men do. Yet here we are where the simple fact it happened at all was considered monumental, no matter how badly it was done in this instance. For god sake, people were crowing over that match because it ended with a Michinoku Driver. Sorry. What? That’s how f'ing bad mainstream women’s wrestling is today, that a f'ing Michinoku Driver is a big deal? Ugh. It was an embarrassment of a match, and I wish I hadn’t watched it.
But here’s the really, really bad part: I can fully believe that it was the best match on Impact this week. TNA’s women’s division is probably their best asset, and it sucks. No, really. For all their talent in other promotions, TNA’s Knockouts put on painful, slow, poorly-booked and generally illogical matches. And they are, literally, the best part of any TNA broadcast I’ve seen in the last year. You honestly can’t tell me AJ Styles, Homicide or Samoa Joe are even a tenth as entertaining in TNA as they are in the indies. It’s not their fault; it’s just a general case of terrible booking, terrible production and terrible ideas that should never have made it to screen.
The last time I was this embarrassed to watch wrestling, it was the year 2000, and the show was called Nitro. TNA have gone from bright young upstarts to industry joke, but they skipped the part in between that WCW managed, where they were a credible threat to WWE. The sooner TNA keels over and a company which actually knows what it’s trying to do like ROH or NWA becomes the #2 promotion, the better.