BRM Reviews PROGRESS Chapter 99: With A Flake, Please (AWESOME!)

[Big Red Machine]

PROGRESS Chapter 99: With A Flake, Please (12/15/2019)- Sheffield, UK


MARK ANDREWS vs. PRIMATE- 6.5/10
Good opener. Andrews wins clean.

GRIZZLED YOUNG VETERANS PROMO- The standard dullness. It gets interrupted by the Anti-Fun Police, leading to silliness that I’d rather not see. That leads to…

GRIZZLED YOUNG VETERANS vs. ANTI-FUN POLICE- 6/10
Oh my G-d these two teams had an actual match with no dumb sh*t from the Anti-Fun Police… and the ANTI-FUN POLICE WON! This has got to be the biggest upset in any promotion this year.

ROBBO’S RULES MATCH FOR THE PROGRESS PROTEUS TITLE: Paul Robinson(c) vs. Chris Ridgeway- 6.5/10
Not as great as we usually see in these matches, but still great. The drama was very good, but Robinson should have sold his ankle better after being stuck in that ankle lock for so long.

2 OUT OF 3 FALLS MATCH: Ilja Dragunov vs. Cara Noir- 9/10
Ilja has Cara Noir-esque face paint on to… get in his opponent’s head, I guess? I don’t know.
This was a brutal and fantastic match with great work on the heads by both guys and some genius spots and a lot of artsiness… and two big spots that I REALLY didn’t like.
The first came relatively early on. Ilja had the chance to punch Cara Noir full force in the back of the head but stopped for some reason. He then held his fit at Cara Noir’s head for a while and acted wacky. Mind games are nice and all, but if given the choice between getting in your opponent’s head metaphorically and a clear shot where if you punch hard enough you might wind up with your fist literally in your opponent’s head, you should always go for the latter.
Then Ilja basically put himself in a wristlock for Cara Noir and then tapped a fall away. The announcers did a good job of explaining it- Ilja was trying to get in the overly artistic Cara Noir’s head by denying him the artistically “perfect” win he had envisioned (imagine driving in the World Series-winning run on an error instead of the homerun you always dreamed of hitting)- but tapping away a fall in a two out of three falls match is going too far for me.
The other spot I hated came right before the finish, where they just hugged each other for a while. It was weird and pointless and made the match seem fake.
Other than those two spots, this was pretty damn brilliant. Yes, there was a lot of physical weirdness, to the point where I thought some of the stuff they did looked too goofy and was trying to be too artsy, but some of that does work with these two characters due to their particular eccentricities, so it didn’t annoy me quite as much as it might have if, say, Timothy Thatcher was doing it. Your opinion may very well vary, so I encourage everyone to check this match out for themselves.

PROGRESS WOMEN’S TITLE MATCH: Meiko Satomura(c) vs. Jinny- 7.75/10
Other than the finish, I loved this match. This was a fast-paced battle of absolutely VICIOUS strikes. These two seemed like they were legitimately trying to knock each other out. Jinny won the title. Also, she has somehow managed to turn babyface. I don’t like it. Cheering for Jinny just feels… wrong.

KASSIUS OHNO vs. TIMOTHY THATCHER- 8.25/10
Thatcher’s gear was stolen so he wrestled in shorts and sneakers. It looked very weird.
The match itself was AWESOME! Ohno basically brutalized Thatcher’s knee, which in addition to being a potential path to a submission victory, also left Thatcher as almost a sitting duck for Ohno’s strikes. These were the challenges that Timothy Thatcher had to overcome in this match. Would he do so? I urge you to watch the match and find out for yourself.

PROGRESS UNIFIED WORLD TITLE MATCH: Eddie Dennis(c) vs. David Starr- 8.5/10
Dennis hit Starr in the nuts during Starr’s intro to start things off. He then tossed Starr to the outside, grabbed the microphone, and proceeded to kick Starr a bunch of times while mockingly reciting Starr’s nicknames. Dennis got arrogant while doing this, of course, and gave Starr the opportunity to get off his own nut-shot to even things up. That was a fantastic way to start off the match (keep in mind that the bell has not actually rung yet).
They proceeded to brawl all over the arena for a very long time before finally making it back to the ring so we could get the opening bell. The match was very dramatic, but it had a little too much stuff in it that should have been a DQ or a count-out but wasn’t. In the end, they found yet another way to screw David Starr. The crowd, which had been 100% behind Starr just three months ago at Chapter 95: Still Chasing, is now about 70-30. This situation is reminding me a lot of Tyler Black in ROH, where they waited too long to put the belt on it, and each successive title match where he didn’t come out as the champion hurt his fan support more and more.


An AWESOME show from PROGRESS. Absolutely awesome. But not giving Starr the belt REALLY feels like a mistake here. Nothing on the Unboxing show looks interesting to me, so the next show I’ll be looking at is going to be Chapter 101: Dalmatians, the first show without Jim Smallman.