Thursday, September 24, 2015

Fave Five 9/14/15-9/20/15

1) Jay Lethal: I bring you this a bit late again due to the busy week of wrestling. It was an interesting week where two companies had a guy with two titles defend them both in one night. Jay Lethal did so with the ROH World and ROH Television Championships at All-Star Extravaganza. He successfully opened the show by defending the Television Title against Bobby Fish. Lethal has made half of the TV Title defense in the entire existence of the belt, which is sick. He then defeated Fish's partner, Kyle O'Reilly, with the World Title on the line in the main event. Both matches were good showings, and despite him retaining through cheap terms (a handful of tights on Fish and interference against O'Reilly), Lethal proved once again that he is the man in ROH.

2) Seth Rollins: The other champion to make two defenses in one night during this week was Seth Rollins.I'd say his performance was better than Jay Lethal's, as he had to wrestle back to back matches, but he did lose one belt. First, he faced John Cena in a good match. It was a notch below their SummerSlam outing and Cena won back the US Title. Now before anyone complains that Cena isn't my list, I preferred the matches of some other people on my list and chose to recognize people capturing their first taste of certain titles. Anyway, back to Seth, he then faced Sting and had a good match with him too. I mean, if you would have told me five years ago that Tyler Black would be headlining a PPV by facing Cena and Sting in one night, I'd have slapped you. The fact that he did so while putting on a great performance and beating Sting, is enough to put him on this list. 2015 continues to be the year of Seth Rollins.

3) Kevin Owens: Two months ago at the Battleground PPV, Kevin Owens should have won the US Title. I stand by that. At Night of Champions though, the WWE righted that wrong somewhat by having Owens defeat Ryback for the Intercontinental Title. I'm not one of those people who was very against Ryback being champion and I think if he didn't get hurt or have to feud with Big Show, he could have had a good reign. Still, Owens being champion could get us back to a place where the IC Title matches were the best on the card. My biggest wish for this is that Owens gets a rather dominant run with the strap and it leads to a match against Sami Zayn at WrestleMania. It would not only be a great match but would give an IC Title match a great storyline.

4) AJ Styles: During Ring of Honor's All-Star Extravaganza Pay-Per-View, there was a Four Corner Survival match to determine the next number one contender for the ROH World Title. Adam Cole, AJ Styles, Michael Elgin and Roderick Strong competed. While I don't believe the match was on a Match of the Year level, it was still my favorite of not only the ASE even itself, but the entire weekend, including Night of Champions.After a good back and forth match, Styles won after hitting Cole with the Styles Clash. This now sets up Styles as a future challenger for Jay Lethal, which should be interesting. The Bullet Club are heels, but get treated like faces in ROH. It's interesting that Styles has never held the ROH Title, but I see him losing to Lethal and putting him over down the line.

5) Charlotte: I was pretty torn on who would get this spot, between Charlotte and the Kingdom. The Kingdom has grown on me and they did capture the ROH World Tag Team Titles at All-Star Extravaganza, but I chose to go with the new Divas Champion, Charlotte. Charlotte was unable to end Nikki Bella's title reign before she broke the record to become longest champion, but in her rematch at Night of Champions, she managed to win the belt. She won a solid match against Nikki Bella to become champion for the first time. It's a pretty worth accomplishment to make the list this week.