Monday, September 14, 2015

Fave Five 9/7/15-9/13/15

1) Jay Lethal: Much like last week, this was a pretty slow time for pro wrestling. However, one company provided excellent television this week and hat was Ring of Honor. Jay Lethal retained the ROH World Championship against Roderick Strong in the match of the week. They wrestled to an hour draw on ROH's last Pay-Per-View and I didn't love that match. This one was much better, with both guys going all out. I knew the result going in, but still bit on some near falls, especially on a sick kick from Strong. That is telling of how good the action was. Lethal retained here after retaining the Television Title last week against Hanson. Lethal has been doing the double champion thing for a bit longer and better than the WWE has had Seth Rollins doing so. Lethal deserves all of the praise he gets.

2) The Addiction: That episode of ROH TV I talked about; it had another pretty good match on it.The Addiction, Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian, successfully defended the ROH World Tag Team Titles against the most over hyped team in the world, the Young Bucks. I didn't love this match the way some others did, but still found it to be one of the better matches of the week. The Addiction continue to be pretty great and this was a good way to start the show this past week. It also set the stage for the Triple Threat title match coming at All-Star Extravaganza.

3) Finn Balor and Samoa Joe:  So far, the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic has honestly been better than expected. While Chad Gable and Jason Jordan stole the show last week, this time around it was two of the biggest names in NXT. Finn Balor and Samoa Joe were given the main event spot against former NXT Tag Team Champions, the Lucha Dragons. Not only did they work well as a team, but they picked up the win. To make things better, this match was treated like a big deal and was even taped before an episode of Smackdown, giving it the big arena feel. Joe and Balor came off looking great in this situation and really looked like stars.

            4) The Wolves: The only major title change in wrestling this week came in the TNA tag team division. After winning the titles for a fourth time after a really good best of five series, the Wolves' reign only lasted about a month. They would lose them to GFW's tag team of Brian Myers (the former Curt Hawkins) and Trevor Lee last week. This week, the Wolves got their rematch and won the titles right back. In reality, they only lost them for a day but it'll go down as a one week reign for the GFW duo. Despite the issues that TNA has, the Wolves continue to be one of their brighter spots and should be the team they build the division around. (Credit to: awesomebutternuggets for the gifs)

5) Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa: The other match in the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic this week featured Tyler Breeze and Bull Dempsey losing to Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa. It was pretty cool to see the crowd pop when they saw the names on the tron. The match itself was solid and gave Gargano and Ciampa a decent opportunity to show their stuff. I feel like Gargano was the more impressive of the two, but it was still solid for their first outing. I heard some reports that Gargano is still in talks with the company, but Ciampa rubbed some people the wrong way after complaining about getting stiffed. Unsure about that but either way, I would like to see both guys get signed to the company.