BRM Reviews wXw 22nd Anniversary Show (good wrestling, but disappointing)

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews wXw 22nd Anniversary Show (good wrestling, but disappointing)

Post by Big Red Machine » Mar 21st, '23, 20:10

wXw 22nd Anniversary Show (12/17/2022)- Oberhausen, Germany

OPENING VIDEO PACKAGE- epic

16 CARAT GOLD QUALIFYING MATCH: Bobby Gunns vs. Metehan- 6.25/10
Director of Sport Norman Harras came out right before the bell and added the 16 Carat Gold qualifier stipulation. They had good intensity, but you could tell that they were holding back. The reason for that became obvious by the finish, which saw Gunns setting up for the Ehrenmann Driver when all of a sudden the lights pointed at the ring went out. Someone focused a spotlight at the area where the production controls are (and a suspiciously well-placed camera… although, in their defense, it’s an area where wrestlers often wind up brawling) and we saw Norman Harras there, apparently having ordered the lights shut off. He ordered them turned back on, but by that point Metehan had managed to recover, and he immediately poked Gunns in the eye and hit his own finisher for the win.
I really don’t like this kind of heelish finish, but wXw has earned the benefit of the doubt from me. I suppose this could be Norman essentially paying what he feels is a debt he owes to Metehan about how the agreement he brokered between Bobby Gunns’ Die Raucherpause (of which he was a member) and Metehan’s Ezel back in 2020 was essentially sabotaged by Gunns’ not wanting to hold up his end of the bargain, and that resulting in Harras winding up taking Metehan’s wXw Shotgun Title from him. Norman is certainly known for holding grudges and was not happy with Bobby over the breakdown of that alliance (and the way the rest of Die Raucherpause treated him), and we know that Metehan also holds grudges, but seems willing to allow debts to be settled in ways that don’t involve him kicking the sh*t out of the person he thinks owes him a debt.

VINCENT HEISENBERG VS. KEVIN LAZAR- squash
This was a very quick squash. Its real purpose seemed to be to give them a chance to quickly plug Heisenberg’s unsanctioned match against Jurn Simmons at Dead End next month. I’m not sure why they’re not doing that at this show. I guess Jurn either hurt or unavailable. I wouldn’t have booked this on such a big show, but it went so fast that it didn’t slow the show down or make it feel like it went too long.

wXw WORLD TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: Frenchadors(c) vs. Rott & Flott- 6.75/10
They seemed to accidentally start playing the wrong video package before this match. Twice.
That “grab the referee’s arms so he can’t count” spot is so stupid. Can you imagine if a pitcher walked in the winning run, but the catcher turned around and grabbed the umpire’s arm before he made the signal?
Other than that spot, this was a very good tag team match. For any other show, it would have been perfectly fine for its spot on the card, but on one of the biggest shows of the year, I was expecting more.

AXEL TISCHER vs. CARA NOIR- 7.75/10
Cara Noir worked over Tischer’s arm, but when that didn’t work, he started cheating. That was not a heel turn I saw coming. I’m not really sure how a heel Cara Noir would work. Tischer got the win here in the rubber match.


LADDER MATCH FOR THE wXw SHOTGUN TITLE: Maggot(c) vs. Prince Ahura- 8.25/10
They tried to have a relatively different Ladder match than we usually see nowadays. A large part of that was probably because there was so little room at ringside that if you took a big spill off of a ladder, there was a good chance you’d land on a fan. Their ladders were very rickety, which made things feel a lot more dangerous and made bumps onto them look very brutal, and these guys did a great job of making each one count.
They told a good story about Ahura working over Maggot’s arm, and Ahura’s arrogance often leading to his downfall, and the fact that they set the latter up so well throughout the match was the only reason why I didn’t hate the way they set up Ahura’s ultimate downfall as much as I normally would. What happened was that Ahura had taken Maggot out on the stage and went to go climb the ladder, taunting the whole way. Baby Allison came out to check on Maggot, and Ahura saw her and started taunting her, too, so she made her way to the ring and he hopped down and started taunting her more. She slapped him, so he beat the crap out of her. It was pretty darn brutal. During this beating, he went and got the crown of thorns that Maggot wears to the ring and put it on his own head. When he finally went to climb the ladder again, he wouldn’t stop taunting the fans, and all of this gave Maggot enough time to recover and get back to the ring to stop him from winning, take him out, and ultimately get the belt himself.

DAN MALLMAN INTERVIEWS AMBOSS- GREAT!
All three were great, but the highlight of this was Anil Marik interrupting them to have a little stare-down with Dreissker. Apparently he wrestled on the pre-show and lost to Massimo Pesca. If that’s going to be important (and it certainly was here), put that on the f*cking main show instead of the Heisenberg squash.
Dreissker called Anil- his former prized student and world tag team championship partner- a “nobody” and said that he was clearly training with The Rotation too much if he managed to lose to someone as green as Pesca. I assume this is setting up Anil getting involved in the next match or getting involved in its aftermath, but I can see him going to either side, so that will be interesting.

RELAXED RULES TORNADO SIX-PERSON TAG TEAM MATCH: Peter Tihanyi, Elijah Blum, & Orsi vs. Amboss (Robert Dreissker, Laurance Roman, & Icarus)- 7/10
Relaxed rules here just means “no DQs.” The babyfaces won a great brawl when Orsi pinned Avalanche.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- fine
Amboss attacked Orsi and Pillmanized her arm. The Frenchadors came out to chase them off. Peter Tihanyi grabbed a microphone and challenged Amboss to a Kafigschlacht. I was wrong about Anil getting involved here (it’s nice to be wrong about interference), and it doesn’t seem like he’ll be involved in the Kafigschlacht, either, as management made Tihanyi & the Frenchadors vs. Amboss official. Maybe if Dover is able to return for Amboss, Anil will be the babyfaces’ fourth man. The only negative here is that we’re already done enough arm-breaking after matches in this feud that rather than feeling thematic, it just felt redundant. They shouldn’t have smashed Orisi’s knee or shoulder or ankle instead?

BABY ALLISON vs. IVA KOLASKY- 5.75/10
Baby Allison’s head was heavily bandaged. Kolasky worked it over, and also chased hitting the moonsault. Allison fought valiantly, but Kolasky won cleanly in the end. The match was very good for the time it got.

wXw UNIFIED WORLD WRESTLING TITLE MATCH: Tristan Archer(c) vs. Levaniel- 7.25/10
The story of the first match of this match was Archer working over Levaniel’s injured neck, and it was very good. Eventually Levaniel hit his finisher; one, two… Norman Harras pulls the referee out of the ring. Then Norman punches the referee, takes off his dress shirt, and reveals a referee’s shirt underneath it. In a detail I liked, the other two referees came out to protest, but Norman ordered them to the back.
From there we got your standard biased referee stuff, with Levaniel fighting through it all and getting the win when he had Archer pinned for so long that Norman just gave in and counted it. So the underdog babyface overcame all of the odds and won the world title… and I thought this was a bad idea.
Yes, when first Norman and then Archer gave Levaniel low blows and Archer hit Levaniel with a Galactic Facecrusher and Norman fast-counted and Levaniel STILL kicked out, I popped loud enough to wake up my roommate. Yes, I was extremely happy when Levaniel won, and was happy when Norman got his comeuppance after the match via Galactic Facecrusher… but from the moment Norman put that referee shirt on, I started despairing, and I went right back down to despair after the aforementioned kickout because I was still sure that the babyface was getting screwed.
This is probably the first one I’ve seen in a long time, but I’m just so over heel authority figure/heel referee angles that I don’t think they’re ever worth doing unless you have a extremely well-crafted payoff like what we got with Derek Sabato in CHIKARA, and this wasn’t that. After all, in that case, there was a heel conglomerate who had taken over the company and that’s why the abuses were allowed, whereas in wXw it has just been management inexplicably deciding to hand power to people who every fan in the building could have told them would abuse it. And they have let this go on for so long that Norman giving in and doing the right thing in the end makes no sense, either. He can’t be worried about getting fired because not counting a pin would be crossing a line because 1) he already did that earlier, and 2) pulling the ref out of the ring when Levaniel had things won has already cross that line, and if it didn’t, then assaulting the referee certainly should (and that’s ignoring what he did in the opener). This should be the end of Norman as Director of Sport. If not, what does he have to do to get fired?



This was a disappointing show from wXw. This is their biggest stand-alone (i.e. not part of one of their big weekend tournaments) show of the year, but it didn’t feel like it. Yes, we wrapped up a few stories, but that big feeling of completion wasn’t there throughout most of the show. Even the story that was just starting in earnest with a much-anticipated first match (Gunns vs. Metehan) didn’t have that special feeling of “we’re now seeing something we’ve been waiting a long time to see.” Yes, the Ladder match was very memorable and Levaniel’s title win was memorable, but despite some great wrestling, this show did not feel as big as it should have.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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