After a brilliant edition of Impact, TNA presents Victory Road with a card that has a lot of potentially excellent matches. But I think TNA has a timing problem. As the number two promotion, they can’t do a fatal four way title match less than a month after WWE had two, and an Ultimate X & steel cage match one week before WWE has two MITB ladder matches and a championship cage match. It doesn’t matter if TNA may have booked those matches first, they will still look like they’re copying WWE, which is bad and sad. As for the roundtable, only two of us are sitting at it this week, but it’s not the quantity that counts. Enjoy.
Rob Van Dam (C) vs Mr. Anderson vs. Jeff Hardy vs. Abyss
Mark Allen: The endgame to Angle’s climb up the top ten has to be a BFG match with RVD. Plus Van Dam has many more one-on-one money matches waiting for him, namely against Joe and Hardy.
Winner – RVD
Raffi Shamir: TNA hasn’t even started tapping the potential of RVD as champion, and dropping the title to any of these three contenders will be so underwhelming. RVD keeps here and continues his championship run until Angle becomes #1 contender.
Winner: RVD
Douglas Williams (C) vs. Kendrick
Mark Allen: Williams has been on a role in his anti-X Division crusade. I’ve always been a fan of Kendrick but now isn’t the time to take the belt off of Williams.
Winner – Williams
Raffi Shamir: As good as Kendrick can be, he’s just disappointing in TNA, and I just don’t get his new persona that came out of nowhere. Williams, on the other hand, is a great X champion.
Winner: Williams
Beer Money vs. The Motor City Machineguns
Mark Allen: Now is the time to finally give the Machineguns a long overdue Tag Title run.
Winner – MCMG
Raffi Shamir: MCMG has been compared to the Rockers on so many levels. One of them is that neither team has held (officially) the tag titles of their respective promotion. This ends this week.
Winners: MCMG
Madison Rayne (c) vs. Angelina Love
Mark Allen: This is Love’s to win and the perfect way to actually have a satisfying ending to a long running story.
Winner – Love (new Champion)
Raffi Shamir: How about this scenario – with the stipulation that Love wins the title if any of the Beautiful People interferes in the match, it would make perfect sense for them to actually interfere in order to give Angelina the title and lead a new version of this stable.
Winner: Angelina
Mark Allen: If Flair is going to come out of retirement then he must be there to put over a hot new talent and make them a superstar. This has to be a Lethal victory here.
Winner – Lethal
Raffi Shamir: What would be the point of this whole feud and match if Flair wins?
Winner: Jay Lethal
Mark Allen: Pope is just the next rung up the ladder for Kurt. Look out #7 Jay Lethal, which won’t get a PPV shot, but merely a mid-card Impact slot.
Winner – Angle
Raffi Shamir: It’s really nice to see Angle wrestle talented young guys on his way to the champion, but when everyone knows that each of these guys (So far we had Kazarian, Wolfe and now Pope) is nothing but a stepping stone for Angle and the result is telegraphed, is anyone being elevated here? I think not. But at least we get good matches out of it.
Winner: Angle
Matt Morgan vs. Hernandez
Mark Allen: Let’s go with Hernandez on this one. That would make them one-on-one in PPV matches and set up a rubber match.
Winner – Hernandez
Raffi Shamir: It’s a nice little feud, but it’s time to move towards resolving it.
Winner: Hernandez
Mark Allen: Doesn’t really matter who wins this one as this sets up a tag match between Ink, Inc. and 3-D next month where Jesse Neal turns on Shannon. Somewhere the ECW old guys have to make an appearance too. This looks like the best spot to put them.
Winner – Jesse Neal
Raffi Shamir: I’m so not interested in this, and Devon’s promo from the last Impact didn’t do much to help matters. Bring on the tag match to blow it off.
Winner: Jessee
Mark Allen: Well looking down the regular roster, Generation Me and The Band are the two real teams not included on the show but if were to be one of those two it would just be announced as such. It would be great synergy for a couple old Horsemen to show up but all the good ones are under contract to WWE, Sid is playing softball and Paul Roma is terrorizing 411mania. Off the top of my head I’m thinking a combination of WCW mainstays to work as their opponents, a combination of Booker T, The Steiners, Buff Bagwell and Animal. Whoever AJ and Kaz face they should win if things remain logical, but being this is TNA logic is out the window. Team WCW wins this when AJ takes the fall, setting up AJ’s return to a good guy and positioning Kaz as Flair’s top guy.
Winners – TBA (I’d say The Steiners for fun)
Raffi Shamir: I hate mystery opponents because they so rarely are a good surprise or someone that the crowd is actually excited about. Too bad there are still 10 days left on Shelton Benjamin’s no compete clause, since I’d love to see Styles/Kazarian take on Benjamin and Haaaaaaaaas. It doesn’t really matter who TBA are it’s all about breaking up Styles and Kazarian, so TBA have to win.
Winners: TBA
And now that we’re done, I want to make clear that Mark and I did not coordinate our answers, it’s just that we both seem to think logically. In the past TNA defied common sense simply for the sake of surprise, and I hope they will not do that this week. Come back to Pulse Wrestling on Sunday night for full live coverage of TNA Victory Road 2010.
About Raffi Shamir
