BRM Reviews the 2/8/2019 ROH (very disappointing)

[Big Red Machine]

COREY HOLLIS, JOHN SKYLER, & JOSEY QUIN vs. VILLAIN ENTERPRISES- 2/10
This did not need several minutes of pre-match promos to set it up. Something else that didn’t need to happen was these three dorks getting offense on Villain Enterprises. Villain Enterprises is a new top faction, and these three guys are dork jobbers. This should have been a squash (and a quick one at that).
Ian Riccaboni told us that PCO “sleeps with a casket.” I really hope Ian meant “in” a casket. Ian also claimed that Josey Quinn was from the “inaugural class” of the ROH Dojo. I’m pretty certain that’s not true, or else I would have seen him on countless pre-shows over the years. Either that, or all of those Punk/Dragon/Aries/Delirious/Daizee trainees don’t count.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- an infuriating waste of everyone’s time
Balloons came out from under the ring, so Marty Scurll goes to check for Vinny Marseglia. He doesn’t find him, and instead we just hear obnoxious laughter. Then all three members of The Kingdom come out onto the stage. SO WHO LET THE F*CKING BALLOONS GO, THEN?! WHAT PURPOSE DID THAT WHOLE THING SERVE?! To trick us into thinking Marseglia was under there when he really wasn’t? What does doing that actually accomplish? NOTHING!
The Kingdom then proceed to cut the same f*cking promo they’ve been cutting for what feels like months at this point, where they say they have no problem defending their titles, anytime and anywhere… but they’re not going to do it tonight because *INSERT BABYFACE HERE* isn’t worthy. Please note that Taven does the same f*cking thing with his “Real ROH World Title.”
Also please note that they did this SAME THING on TV two weeks ago, also with Villain Enterprises. Also please note that ion that segment they even cut this promo to somehow GET OUT OF AN ADVERTISED TITLE DEFENSE AGAINST VILLAIN ENTERPRISES… AND MANAGEMENT STILL HASN’T DONE SH*T ABOUT IT! You’ve “empowered the referees to enforce the rules more strictly.” GREAT! Now how about you do something to empower the wrestlers to not have their matches switched out on them without their consent because Matt Taven feels like being a whiny baby, and empower the fans to NOT GET SCREWED OUT OF THE MATCHES YOU’VE ADVERTISED!
And it’s even worse than that because there was ABSOLUTELY NO REASON AT ALL FOR THIS SEGMENT TO EVEN TAKE PLACE! The Kingdom came out, completely unbidden, just to troll the fans… except that this point no one has any reason to believe that the match would happen in the first place because THE KINGDOM ALWAYS DO THIS, so in reality, ALL THIS ENTIRE SEGMENT DID WAS WASTE OUR F*CKING TIME!
And I really, truly, do mean “waste our time” because despite all of this heavy TV build to Villain Enterprises challenging The Kingdom for the six-man tag titles, no such match has happened or been announced for any of the EIGHT SHOWS that took place after this taping. ROH has one hour of TV a week. There is absolutely no excuse to waste a quarter of that time on what was, AT BEST absolutely nothing (the squash served no purpose other than as an excuse for Villain Enterprises to be in the ring so The Kingdom could come out and do all of their stupid time-wasting, plot-hole-exposing dull, bullsh*t).

THE KINGDOM CUT A BACKSTAGE PROMO- utter sh*t.
OH MY G-D THE KINGDOM ARE SOOOOO LOW RENT! Calling them early-90s cartoon WWF heels isn’t fair because at least those guys were TRYING to be cartoonish. The Kingdom is three guys trying to be deadly serious and still coming off as cartoonish. They said basically the same f*cking sh*t they said before: they have the belts and they run ROH so everyone must respect them and they get to decide when they defend their titles. Why did this even air if they were just going to repeat the same sh*t? Also we’ve now upped our “time wasted on pointless Kingdom/VE crap” to almost ONE THIRD OF THE SHOW.

JAY LETHAL PROMO- Jay’s delivery was good, but it’s been THREE WEEKS since Lethal’s confrontation with Taven, several months since the first time Taven attacked him from behind, and over half a year since Taven claimed to be the “Real ROH World Champion.” Shouldn’t he have had your attention before this, Jay?

A video aired telling me to go to Honor Club to see Kelly Klein defend the Women of Honor World Title against some debuting jobber. So ROH Management is happy to keep booking Kelly Klein against random jobbers knowing that it will be a title match, but they won’t actually force The Kingdom to defend their titles in a match that ROH Management themselves specifically booked to be a title match? How does this make any sense?

NWA WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Nick Aldis(c) (w/Kamille) vs. P.J. Black- 7/10
The match eventually made its way to being just barely acceptable for a main event, but when a match goes as long as this one did, I expect a lot more. The heel vs. heel aspect of this match also totally failed for me. I get that Aldis is a heel, but P.J.’s heel antics didn’t line up with the story Ian briefly mentioned. If the idea that P.J.’s slide into heeldom is due to frustration, then P.J. played this all wrong. He came across like someone who was doing heel stuff in a Yano-esque attempt to funny kind of way, not like someone who was in any way frustrated. Both guys being heels did absolutely nothing to help me care about the outcome.
The crowd was also quite annoying, with their WWE chants and random “THIS IS AWESOME!” chant when Kamille got bumped. Colt’s reaction to Kamille’s bump wasn’t much better.

JUICE ROBINSON ANNOUNCES THE FORMATION OF LIFEBLOOD- extremely underwhelming
“ROH was founded by guys like Samoa Joe, AJ Styles.” Samoa Joe? Founded seems like quite the stretch, considering that AJ didn’t show up until the third show and Joe until the eighth. Am I nitpicking? Yes. But this is your big f*cking speech that is supposed to connect you to the history of the promotion, so I do think it’s important to make sure that you get that history RIGHT in your speech. Perfectly good “founders” to mention would include Low Ki, Bryan Danielson, Jay Briscoe, Amazing Red, Brian Kendrick, and even Eddie Guerrero. You can still mention AJ and Joe later when you talk about guys whose “hard work” went into this company and who cared about honor, but if you want to position yourself as the successor to the legacy of the history of this company, you need to show that you really know that history.
Juice says that ROH’s honor has been missing over the past few years but he is going to help restore it. Then the LifeBlood graphic pots up on the screen, as well as a message declaring that this is “A New Beginning,” and when we come back, the lights go back on and Tenille Dashwood, Mark Haskins, Bandido, Tracy Williams, and David Finlay Jr. are in the ring with Juice, who declares them to be ROH’s “LifeBlood.”

I found this to be extremely underwhelming for several reasons. First is that the group feels rather eclectic. It’s just Tenille and a bunch of the new guys (or, if you prefer, “The New Guys and Tenille”). It would have been nice to hear why they have joined this group: what ROH means to them. Since the time this was taped (and ROH but the video up on Honor Club soon afterwards) there have been FOUR ROH shows, plus one TV tapings, and the only person other than Juice who we have heard from is Tenille, who we heard from in the form of an interview with Kevin Eck on ROH’s website. Wrestlers in this group should be able to tell me what ROH means to them, and they need to be given the opportunity to do so.
Another reason this felt underwhelming was the combination of knowing not just that it was coming (which ROH themselves told us all about soon after it happened) but also the manner in which they did it. We were told Juice would speak on TV this week, but right before the commercial, they told us exactly who would be in the group. Then they had them all magically appear for no reason, which came off as a lamer version of the same magical appearance debut that Villain Enterprises got on the preceding taping.
Third, it would have been really nice to have Juice give some actual specifics of the stuff they were here to put an end to. On this very show we saw cowardly heels refusing to defend their titles and we saw a world title match where both wrestlers cheated several times. We have now had several shows since this has happened, and LifeBlood have come across no different than any other babyface faction. This idea of “restoring honor” to ROH feels like a general idea rather than something with actual thought and details to it, and just running with general ideas without putting any thought into the details has been one of the biggest flaws of Delirious’ booking, so it’ shard for me to get too optimistic about this.


This was a pretty disappointing episode of ROH on just about every level. I really hope the show gets better.