Cero Reviews Impact Wrestling No Surrender 2022

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Cero Reviews Impact Wrestling No Surrender 2022

Post by cero2k » Feb 20th, '22, 22:57

Impact Wrestling No Surrender 2022
February 19, 2022
Alario Center, New Orleans, LA

** Countdown to No Surrender **

Trey Miguel vs John Skyler - 6/10
Good short match, no much to it. Miguel has been gone for personal family reasons since Hard to Kill, so this felt more like a showcase to bring him back. I'm guessing they were not sure if he was going to be able to be at the show and since he didn't have a match or story going in, they just stuck him here. He won with a Meteora.

Team Impact Interview - Ok, they're all hyping each other up but Eddie still doesn't trust Maclin. I feel like I've seen Rhino, Swann, and Eddie do this promo about 10 times in the last year.

Havok (w/Rosemary) vs Tenille Dashwood (w/The Influence) - 4.5/10
Another match that felt last minute since Dashwood had also missed the last set of tapings and I'm guessing her presence was also not 100%, making it hard to finally book IInspiration vs Influence. Match was mostly a Dashwood match with a lot of offense thanks to Kaleb and Rayne outside, but in this case, it ended with Havok getting the win with a piledriver after Kaleb got a call from the IInspiration and it distracted both Rayne and Dashwood, they've been suspecting that Kaleb is jumping shift to the IInspiration.

** Main Show **

Impact X-Division Championship #1 Contendership Four Way Match
"Speedball" Mike Bailey vs. Ace Austin (w/Madman Fulton) vs. Jake Something vs. Chris Bey - 8/10
Really great opener. It was all action, crazy spots, and just good looking wrestling. Match had all the tropes of a X Division multiperson match, with people taking turns to pair up, tons of dives, tons of 3/4-person spots.

This was a match were you can't really say that one person was the MVP over the rest, everything had their thing going on for them and everyone got a couple of spots that made them stand out. Chris Bey for instance, hit one of the highest jumping kicks I've seen in wrestling, he connected with Bailey's head, WHILE Bailey sat on Something's shoulders, and Something ain't a small guy. Finish saw Something catch Austin mid-Fold and turn it into the Void, which is an impressive feat in itself.

Eric Young Promo - Awesome, he talked about being the best pro wrestler and it being his reason to fight, while he said that White had nothing to fight for. Delusional stuff, but great.

Black Taurus (w/Crazzy Steve) vs. JONAH - 7/10
Really good hoss fight, it's not often that Taurus is the smaller and faster wrestler using lucha to take down his opponent, but that's just how big JONAH is. They played their parts well and Taurus got a lot of offense in, but at the end JONAH managed to take Taurus down, hit Tsunami, and get the win.

Jake Something Interview - It built Miguel and Something vs Austin and Bailey for Thursday. Miguel came off a big heelish here, which may end up being a thing if Something is the number one contender.

Eric Young vs. "Switchblade" Jay White - 8/10
Really good, and surprisingly competitive. I'm sure I wasn't the only one that kinda expected White to get a strong win over Young, but he ended up having some trouble towards the end. A lot of the match was a strong style exchange of chops, but as they got closer to the finish, White started chasing the half-and-half and the Bladerunner, while EY kept going for the piledriver, which he actually managed to hit on the apron, but with White falling to the floor, he wasn't able to capitalize. At the end, White landed both the half-and-half suplex and the Bladerunner for the win.

ROH Women's World Championship match
Deonna Purrazzo (c) vs. Miranda Alize - 6/10
This was the second of Purrazzo's champion-champion open challengers, where the challenger gets to choose what title they're going for just prior to the match starting. The surprise challenge was from ROH's Miranda Alize, making her Impact debut. I kinda figured that she'd may go for the AAA title since she's a luchadora, but understandably, she went for the ROH title. I do wonder if AAA hasn't green lit defending the title to random people.

Anyway, match had good energy, but some spots were not perfectly landed, to the point that I started wondering if Purrazzo was working stiff after a missed spot or something. Match saw Purrazzo work the head towards Queen's Gambit, but after Alize locked in the Miranda Rights, Purrazzo responded by rolling her over and turning her approach towards Venus de Milo, which she used to tap out Alize.

Impact Digital Media Championship Match
Matt Cardona (c) vs. Jordynne Grace - 6/10
I personally thought this was a well wrestled match, I liked it more than the first title match between the two, but I do agree that the finish to this one was really weak. Last time they wrestled, Cardona was still a babyface and trying to not hurt Grace, but now he was all heel and using her size advantage to get the better of Grace. Having said that, it wasn't easy, Grace is a true powerhouse, she straight up suplexed Cardona while Cardona was on his knees, she got a lot of offense in, which eventually became the reason why we got the weak finish.

Cardona tried to use a chair like he did on the first match, but Grace caught him and tried to use the chair herself, being sold that her emotions had gotten the better of her and she was fed up with Cardona's shenanigans. The referee took the chair away from her, but when Cardona picked it up, the referee kinda just stood to the side, so Grace low blowed Cardona for the DQ. It's the fact that the referee just stood there while Cardona had a chair that fucked the finish, this could had been ok if the referee was down or something, but now it just seemed like a crooked referee.

Post-match - Grace took down Cardona and hit him with the chair anyways.

Tasha Steelz Interview - Steelz's interview was great and all, but the purpose of this was to interrupt the interview and show us that Eddie had been taken out backstage, just like Gresham had some weeks ago.

Impact World Tag Team Championship Match
The Good Brothers (Doc Gallows & Karl Anderson) (c) vs. The Guerrillas Of Destiny (Tama Tonga & Tanga Loa) - 7.5/10
Well, this is gonna be newsworthy. Let's cut to the chase, the Brothers won because Jay White and Chris Bey turned on the Guerrillas. First, we saw Bey distract them in an unsuspicious way, but then White straight up came down, hit a Bladerunner on Tama Tonga, and allowed the Brothers to hit the Magic Killer for the win.

Obviously, this decision came all the way from Japan, it's already been making the rounds around the Japanese news sites. The Guerrillas babyface turn was somewhat telegraphed since the G1 Climax where Tama Tonga was a total babyface and Tanga Loa focused on showing he can go and go clean. What I didn't expect was that they'd be betrayed by White. During the G1, everything pointed to House of Torture breaking away from the Bullet Club, and since the United Empire were the new foreigner heel group, then White and company could turn babyface without a problem. This nows makes White, Bey, and the Brothers the new heel Bullet Club, while Tama Tonga and Tanga Loa will be left outside as babyface, but we still need to see what happens when Hikuleo, Fale, Owens, and the rest meet up. NJPW has already announced a 48 person New Japan Cup, I think it's expected that some of these guys will be going to Japan. Before that, we can at least see what happens between them on next week's Impact.

Annnyway, the match was good, Guerrillas were on FIRE throughout the match. Tama Tonga was mostly the babyface in peril, and Loa was made to look like a total hoss, at one point overpowering Gallows. Everything came down to both teams chasing the Magic Killer when Bey and White came down and we know how that ended.

Impact Knockouts Championship Match
Mickie James (c) vs. Tasha Steelz (w/Savannah Evans) - 7/10
Really good match that felt shorter than it actually was. It clocked around the 10 minute mark, but it still felt somewhat rushed because of how intense these two went. Their feud so far hadn't exactly been super heated, just a bunch of promos on each other, a lot of trash talk and some interference here and there, but Steelz just has a natural skill of making her fights feel intense, and James was the perfect mirror to bounce that energy back at Steelz.

The match was dirty, they went straight for each other, they locked up and only released it after they both stumbled to the floor, they did a test of strength and again, only released it when James forced a pin over Steelz. They continued back and forth until Evans and Chelsea Green started to get involved, and it was there that after some O'Connor roll attempts, James clutched Steelz for the win. I think there's an argument that Green and Evans' involvement gave James the win and maybe Steelz will try to get a rematch, and hopefully so, because that pin wasn't all that strong.

Sometimes you think about all the other women that came up in the business along with MJ and not many of them in their prime were as good as James is right now.

Post-match - For a single second, Green celebrated with James in an overly enthusiastic way, which leads me to think that they're going to build a "hot mess" Chelsea Green vs Mickie James story down the line, where Green will be to James, what James once was to Trish Stratus.

Team Impact Meeting - They figured they were going to have to go out there 4-vs-5, but Swann brought recruited Willie Mack, who was supposed to be in Veracruz for Rey de Reyes.

Impact World Championship Match
Moose (c) vs. W. Morrissey - 7.5/10
This was pretty great, but also kinda scary, and I guess in a way, kinda surprising that it was so good. Moose is great and Morrissey has been proving that he can go, but I just didn't expect it to be this good. I honestly believe that Morrissey wouldn't have challenged in this show if not because he got really over in the last couple of months and the fans kinda forced him into tweener territory.

This was a hoss fight through and through. The match literally started with two Lights Out by Moose, a BQE bomb from Morrissey, before they brawled all over the place, it wasn't more than two minutes and Moose had already Uranage Morrissey into the time keeper's table. In the ring, it was a lot of clotheslines, chops, dropkicks and big boots, all back and forth. Part of the story was that both Morrissey and Moose kept hitting their signature moves, but neither could get the win, so everything in-between those moves were simple strikes and such. At the end, Moose ended up getting the win with the fourth Lights Out of the match, where Morrissey couldn't kick out, couldn't reach the ropes, and was simply pinned.

The one scary thing about this match was when, somewhere closer to the finish, Moose took a clothesline that kinda looked like a mix of Will Ospreay's Pumping Bomber reversal where he flips over the arm, but also a bit of Moose doing the moonsault sell, problem was that Moose straight up flipped and rotated over Morrissey's shoulder before falling, it's like he was Mascarita Dorada doing spots over Demus666. A minute later, they did something similar and once again Moose went flying all over the place, at which point I started thinking that maybe Moose had been knocked out and was bumping without controlling his body. Everything ended ok, but for that minute, things got worrisome.

Honor No More's Future with Impact on the line
Chris Sabin, Rhino, Rich Swann, Steve Maclin & Willie Mack vs. Honor No More (Kenny King, Matt Taven, Mike Bennett, PCO & Vincent) (w/Maria Kanellis-Bennett) - 8.5/10
Considering this was a match with ten men, this was great and surprisingly good at keeping things in some sort of order and escalating appropriately. It was definitely chaotic at times, it as bound to be, but they did a good job at laying out when the brawls would take place, and who should be taking most of the in-ring time. I'm honestly giving the MVP of the match to Taven and Bennett, both guys killed it and dominated the ring perfectly, both in offense, and when they had to sell for the hot tags. Most people looked really good, but OGK did it for me. Vincent, Swann, Sabin, Maclin, and Mack were all great. PCO and Rhino played their parts perfectly, being the monsters of the match, but that also meant that they were mostly there for spots. The one guy that I wasn't impressed by was King, and that's 3 matches in the last couple of months were King just looks off to me, like the energy is not there, it's kinda how I feel about Yujiro Takahashi, where the work is mostly well executed, but the energy is non-existent.

The match had a lot of spots for me to describe, but what is important is that it all led to Eddie Edwards making his return after being taken out, he had his kendo stick in hand and seemed set to help Team Impact get the win, he took Maria by the hair and set her off for Rhino's gore, but alas! he suddenly turned on Impact, took out everyone from team Impact, and left things open for King to pin Rhino for the win.

If anyone tells you that this was hinted for weeks, it's bullcrap, it wasn't, we knew that an angle was coming, be it Gresham, Maclin, Riccaboni, or someone else, but it was never specifically obvious that Eddie was turning. It wasn't until the morning of the show, knowing all the story, that it seemed possible for Eddie to turn since he was the only ROH guy from Team Impact, Eddie had always been a ROH guy and surely had nothing left to do on Impact other than turn heel.

The best thing about this is that as a heel, Eddie can rekindle some old feuds with a different dynamic. We COULD see Moose vs Eddie, or Callihan vs Eddie, or Morrissey vs Eddie, but now with the idea that Edwards is somewhat an 'invader' to Impact.

OVERALL THOUGHTS
Top to bottom, this was a great show from Impact. Most matches delivered, and the ones that didn't were not exactly bad matches. We also had two big angles, one of which will have repercussions overseas, and just comes to show that if you're sleeping on Impact, you're missing out.
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