BRM Reviews the 11/13/2020 ROH (a little worrying)

All ROH Related Reviews and Discussions
Post Reply
User avatar
Big Red Machine
Posts: 27378
Joined: Dec 16th, '10, 15:12

BRM Reviews the 11/13/2020 ROH (a little worrying)

Post by Big Red Machine » Dec 8th, '20, 20:40

BRISCOES vs. SOLDIERS OF SAVAGERY VIDEO PACKAGE/PROMO- bad
I know that I’ve been calling for longer matches and that merging the two long video packages into one short one will allow for that, but the Soldiers of Savagery are the wrong people to do that with. We know NOTHING about them, but ROH seems to want us to think they’re important because they’re aligned with Shane Taylor, so not letting them get a big video package is extremely counterproductive.


THE BRISCOES vs. THE SOLDIERS OF SAVAGERY- 6/10
EC III was on commentary with Ian and Caprice. He said that he had seen no evidence that ROH’s “honor” is “real.” Caprice asked him how he defined “honor,” to which he responded what it wasn’t something he could define, but rather something he knew by intuition. He then went off into his “control your narrative,” bullsh*t, and it’s all just a bunch of terrible mumbo-jumbo that has me hoping he’ll be out of ROH as quickly as possible.
If you don’t believe me that all of the crap he says makes no sense, consider the following quote:
“Jay Briscoe and I are very synonymous in a way: That we’ve been different. Jay Briscoes once had a two-year-long undefeated streak in Ring of Honor. I once had a two-and-a-half-year undefeated streak.”
If he’s trying to say that they both had undefeated streaks at one point, then he picked the most ridiculous and convoluted way to do so. Also, the whole gimmick of his streak is that it was bullsh*t and padded by being given tomato cans to beat up and by cheating. Trying to portray it as a real thing makes him a heel. You can’t pick and choose the parts of another promotion’s history you bring in.
When the announcers prompted him by asking if he was here to take on ROH’s top competition, he answered by saying the following:
“If I worked within the confines of this industry, yes, you would expect that: I’m here to fight. I’m here to fight the best. But I do not work within the confines of this industry. No longer will I be saddled by it.”
WHAT THE F*CK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? He’s “no longer saddled by the confines of this industry? What was being a pro wrestler previously preventing you from doing that you can now do that you’ve shed “the confines of this industry?” Get this quasi-intellectual hackery out of here!
If I was booking this, I would have asked Ian and Caprice to stay a bit and record new commentary for this match to be added in post-production. Then I would have told EC III that he won’t ever do any more commentary or cut any more promos until he learns how to say something that makes sense. And I would have started reshuffling my booking to make sure everyone I had him booked against was someone who I was happy to have beat him cleanly.

At one point the Soldiers of Savagery threw some chairs into the ring. The chairs were promptly removed by the referee, so they just got into the ring with the Briscoes and traded punches, making the chairs thing serve no purpose. Maybe if I knew something about these guys and could understand why not being in control of an otherwise clean wrestling match seven minutes in would get them so frustrated that they’d be willing to risk a DQ I could read something into this, but ROH hasn’t told us anything about these two other than that they’re only here because Shane Taylor got them contracts, so I can’t read anything into anything they do.
The Briscoes beat the Soldiers of Jobbery clean in a solid but unremarkable ten-minute match. Other than their six-man tag win teaming with Shane Taylor two weeks ago- in which Taylor got the pin, so this loss pretty much undoes that for them- the only win they’ve had against what could even generously be called “real” competition was a win over the team of Ryan Nova & Cheeseburger. At this time last year, they were losing a match in which their entire team was wrestlers, four of the five members of the opposing team were ROH Senior Referee Todd Sinclair, promoter Gary Juster, announcer Ian Riccaboni, and a random ROH cameraman. Why are they here? Their only purpose seems to be to give Shane Taylor an entourage, as if that will somehow make him look like a bigger star, but all they do is drag Taylor down by having him be associated with and trust in the abilities of these two jabronis.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- snore
We got a show of respect between the Briscoes and SOS. Then EC III went to stand in the aisle. Jay Briscoe seemed perturbed by EC III standing there stoically, and demanded to know “what’ch you doin’?!” Mark summed up my feelings pretty accurately when he came back to steer Jay away from EC III, answering Jay’s question to Ethan by saying “who cares?”
When the Briscoes left, EC III had… some sort of expression on his face. I couldn’t tell what it was- either disgust or amusement, or maybe some kind of “I’m in thought right now” look- and I really didn’t care.

MATT TAVEN VS. BATEMAN VIDEO PACKAGE/PROMO- GREAT!
Taven was particularly great here, but Bateman was good as well. What I liked the most was that while Bateman was talking to Taven, it was clear that Taven was talking to Vincent. It was a nice and artistic way to get across the points that 1) Bateman is just an obstacle on Taven’s way to getting revenge on Vincent, 2) Vincent thinks that he’s so above Taven that he won’t even address him here, and 3) it’s clear that the charge of cowardice that Taven is leveling at Vincent is accurate and the one that Bateman is levelling at Taven is bullsh*t.

QUINN MCKAY ASKS THE BRISCOES WHAT’S UP WITH EC III- great
Mark urges everyone to ignore EC III and says that he and Jay will focus on regaining the ROH World Tag Team Titles. Jay is fine with that… but he thinks he needs to get EC III out of the way, first, so he challenges EC III to a match next week. I loved how human the Briscoes came off as, here. This was almost wXw-level “we’re real people.”

SHANE TAYLOR VIDEO PACKAGE/PROMO- extremely frustrating
Taylor spoke well, but once he started talking about his wrestling career, just about everything he said pissed me off because within kayfabe it was utter bullsh*t.
The whole thing about how Raymond Rowe was (as Taylor put it) “able to get me in front of the right people” to get him into ROH REALLY pissed me off because it completely contradicts the kayfabe reason for Taylor’s (and Keith Lee’s) feud with War Machine, which was that Taylor was angry at Rowe because he felt Rowe “left him behind” by not getting him into ROH. Sure, telling the truth is nice, but not if it contradicts kayfabe!
He also had this whole spiel about the Pretty-Boy Killers name that was frustrating to listen to because if he and Keith Lee were two guys trying to that people who were “different” like them could be stars, you’d have thought that they would have actually mentioned it in a promo once. But they never did. The few times they got to talk, they were just big mean heels and Taylor hated Raymond Rowe for leaving him behind.
Then he moved on to talking about The Rebellion, which he described as “incredible for me” because “the message that we were sending then is exactly the same one that I’m sending now.” Really? Because I watched every single show that the Rebellion was on, and I still have no idea what message they were trying to send other than some vague complaint about having been “held down.”
I mean.. I guess that’s kind of what Taylor has been talking about in his most recent character (and it feels equally nebulous, although this time they at least gave him some concrete bullsh*t to complain about, like not being prominently placed on the posters), but if that’s all you’ve been saying for so long, it just makes you feel whiny (especially when you spent most of a year as the TV Champion even though you didn’t really do anything to earn your title shot and the majority of your defenses were against people who didn’t do anything to earn it, either).
And that also ignores the large period of time (OVER TWO YEARS) between the end of the Rebellion and the beginning of Shane Taylor promotions. Someone who didn’t know anything about ROH and watched this would think that the Rebellion had to disband, and then Taylor formed Shane Taylor promotions and then won the TV Title, when in reality, after the Rebellion disbanded he spent two years flopping back and forth between babyface and heel, sometimes as a mercenary selling his services to the highest bidder and other times as a father trying to be a good role-model for his kid. Then he won the title, and he didn’t for Shane Taylor Promotions until halfway into his title reign.
He also started to talk about Kenny King, his opponent tonight. He said that there was a match where he lost to Kenny, and Kenny hugged him afterwards and told him that he didn’t know how good he was, and that that was key to giving him the confidence to start Shane Taylor Promotions and find himself and so forth. I vaguely remember them hugging after a match, but we never even heard that Kenny had said anything to Taylor and no connection between the two of them has ever even been mentioned until now, so this felt like something that the booker was pulling out of his ass. Ditto for any closeness between them. If you asked me who on the roster knew Shane Taylor the best in the ring, in a million years I never would have guessed Kenny King. With a bit of thought, the answer makes some sense, but it only feels like it makes sense by default because no one else other than Kenny, announcer Carpice Coleman, and Rhett Titus- who I often forget is still employed- have either teamed with or feuded with him for any substantial length of time. It almost felt like this was some sort of alternate reality, or some sort of autobiographical fan-fiction, where Taylor took backstage pictures and clips of ROH footage and stitched them together to tell this story that was 95% untrue.
I think a big part of the reason this happened is because there seems to have been a push to let almost everyone come off like a babyface in these video packages, so they just went and excised any facts that worked against that… and obviously that’s not a good idea. A promotion needs heels! I’m sure there is an argument that can be that they are “letting the wrestlers speak their own truths” or whatever, and I’m not even going to say that that can’t work. I think last week’s video package/promos on Brian Johnson and Dak Draper were an example of that. But those only worked because those guys don’t have much history in ROH. Shane Taylor has been here on a regular basis for four and a half years! You can’t just ignore that history when it’s inconvenient!
The next thing Taylor said also left me baffled, which was that because Kenny had been so nice to him and given him so much confidence, he felt that he needed to beat Kenny to validate himself. To give some credit, Taylor would go on to explain that he has to create a reason for himself to get angry enough at someone to hurt them enough to beat them, and that not only works here, but also would retcon the feud with War Machine into fitting into the framing of it that Taylor gave us here (as opposed to what he said in his promos at the time)… but if that’s the case, then this Shane Taylor is sociopath, and thus absolutely not the babyface he is being portrayed as here.

KENNY KING VIDEO PACKAGE AND PROMO- mixed
Kenny thinking he got screwed in the Pure Title tournament with his decision loss was good. Claiming there has repeatedly been a conspiracy against him was bad. To support this claim, he pointed out that he had been screwed out of the TV Title at Supercard of Honor XII and never got a rematch. That’s not an unfair point to make… but I also have to point out that Kenny didn’t help his own cause by ever even asking the office for a rematch, either. He was more preoccupied with Austin Aries and Bullet Club.
The rest of Kenny’s promo was decent, although once again, the stuff with Kenny and Shane’s closeness felt completely out of nowhere.

SHANE TAYLOR vs. KENNY KING- 6.75/10
This was a very good big-moves match. Taylor won clean in a match that went the usual length we’ve been getting from ROH main events, which wasn’t much different than the length the undercard matches have gone. Taylor won clean, and they hugged afterwards.

Apparently EC III vs. Jay Briscoe is now official for next week.

This show… certainly gave a lot to talk about. And most of it wasn’t great. The wrestlers are working hard, but once again, it feels like the Creative is getting in the way. This was the first show since ROH has been back from the pandemic shutdown that it felt like I was watching the Frustrating/Lazy Delirious Era again. I’m trying to be a bit lenient because of the restrictions on who they can use due to COVID, but I saw a number of things that had me worried because they reminded me why I have found so much of the past five years of this company very hard to watch. People with nonsensical points or points so vague that they are completely generic, revisionist history, main event matches not getting time to stand out, and the use of undercard wrestlers who get no character focus and who never seem to win. I hope these are just growing pains while they get their feet back under them, but I’m getting a little worried.




STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. I’ve thought Ian has been excellent this year, so it really pained me to hear him try to tell me that SOS took the Briscoes “to their limit” in this sub-ten-minute match where there was literally one moment where it seemed like the Briscoes were in any sort of trouble.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

Upcoming Reviews:
FIP in 2005
ROH Validation
PWG All-Star Weekend V: Night 2
DGUSA Open the Ultimate Gate 2013
ROH/CMLL Global Wars Espectacular: Day 3

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 32 guests