BRM Reviews PROGRESS Chapter 92: Entertaining Friends (WALTER VS. ILJA!)

[Big Red Machine]

PROGRESS Chapter 92: Entertaining Friends (7/7/2019)- Manchester, UK



CHUCK MAMBO vs. LJ CLEARY- 6.75/10
Cleary starts things off by charging right at Mambo, building off of last night’s DQ between their respective stables. The story of the match was Mambo working the leg, and they had a number of good little spots throughout that put over the idea that the feud between More Than Hype and DNR is increasing in intensity. That being said, my favorite thing about this match might well be the simple fact that someone did a Canadian Destroyer and it was actually the finish.

HOLIDEAD vs. LANA AUSTIN- 6.5/10
Solid, action-packed professional wrestling

JORDAN DEVLIN vs. CONNOR MILLS- 6.75/10
Another very good match. This one was designed to get the crowd behind Mills and want to see the upset, and the play worked just the way they drew it up.

EDDIE KINGSTON vs. JONATHAN GRESHAM- 7/10
The story of the match was each man playing to their strengths, with Gresham trying to keep it as a wrestling match and Kingston trying to turn it into a brawl. Kingston would try to goad Gresham into having a striking contest and Gresham would have to recognize his mistake and go back to his strengths. Gresham picked up another win by count-out, but it wasn’t disappointing because it was done in a clever way that played into the story of the match.

PAUL ROBINSON vs. TRENT SEVEN- 6.75/10
The first two thirds of this or so were a great story that was a cleverly inverted version of the previous match, with the bigger stronger guy being the wrestler and the smaller guy being the brawler… and when the wrestler threw a chop on the outside and hit his hand on the ringpost, the striker found himself in the position of the best strategy being to work over a body-part, which he did with a combination of strikes and the occasional wrestling move. Unfortunately, they mostly abandoned that story after that point (Seven didn’t really sell his hand at all once Robinson stopped working on it) in favor of a story of big moves, and a big chunk of their big spots did not go off as planned. Either the contact looked awkward and weak or there was clear daylight on a DDT on the apron or even just a spot where the guy who everyone thought was the one who got hit with a move popped right back up and the guy who everyone thought hit the move stayed down and sold. It was very disappointing to see what had been such a great match fall of a cliff like that.

MORE THAN HYPE (Darren Kearney & Nathan Martin) vs. DO NOT RESUSCITATE (w/Spike Trivet & William Eaver)- 7/10
DNR came out of the crowd and jumped More Than Hype from behind. This was a great, fast-paced action-packed tag team match. DNR got the win, and Eaver put an extra beating on the man on the outside just to be a dick.

PROGRESS UNIFIED WORLD TITLE MATCH: WALTER(c) vs. Ilja Dragunov- 9/10
These two are a match made in heaven, as the thing WALTER does best is brutalize people, and the thing Ilja does best is take insane amounts of punishment and keep getting up and coming back at his opponent. There were some other story elements here, too (WALTER working over Ilja’s head and WALTER seeming to have Torpedo Moscow scouted and Ilja having to shift away from it), but the “WALTER is the most dominant champion ever and Ilja is the best babyface ever” thing was the real thrust of it.

This was very good show from PROGRESS. It was a bunch of solid matches moving the pieces into place for the future, concluding with a fantastic main event, which is all you need to make one of these little building block shows feel like it was more than worth a fan’s time to watch it.