1. Good opening promo from Aries and King. Aries, in his own smug way, makes perfect sense, as he usually tends to do: You’re only the best until someone better comes along and beats you. While I still find King a little too unnatural, he wasn’t bad either. I particularly liked his “try the hospital, maybe he’s still there” response to the crowd’s chants of Jerry. And as I’ve said before, his association with Aries will only help his credibility.
2. I don’t know about everyone else, but if someone put my mentor on the shelf, I’d come out sporting a bad vest-and-ballcap combo and . . . TALK! The idea of the lottery to pick Kenny King’s opponent tonight was clever though, and Tyler was better on the stick than I usually give him credit for being (which isn’t saying much, since I usually don’t give him any credit on the stick).
3. Not a good first match tonight. It made perfect booking sense to have four wrestlers split off into their respective feuds (Necro brawling with Ryan, and Dutt brawling with Delirious), but the match was pretty disjointed from the get-go and never got on the right track. The lone bright spot was Sonjay Dutt, who hit some pretty nice moves . . . but also ate the clean pin from Delirious for the second time in their three matches. Where does he go from here?
4. Rasche Brown’s promo doesn’t exactly have me staying up nights longing for his ROH debut. A generic, raspy-voiced promo about how he likes to inflict pain. Didn’t Snitsky and/or Mike Knox try that before?
5. On the other hand, I liked Eddie Kingston’s promo. Sure, his mind is still on Chris Hero, but if he can’t get Hero in the ring, he wants to take his aggression out on someone. Couple that with Kingston expressing respect for Lynn, and presto, you have motivation! Sure, doing your job should be sufficient motivation, but a little something extra never hurts.
6. I like this idea of running down Bryan Danielson’s top 5 ROH moments. I like it even more that they’ll have Danielson himself discuss the moments, as he can explain why each particular moment is special to him. But . . . he did just talk about how much loves going to the ring and doing whatever he wants for as long as he wants . . . he does know where he is going, right? Not too many 70-minute, 2 out of 3 fall matches to be had. Good money, though!
7. D’Lo vs. Albright started slowly and wasn’t great by any means, but it was actually better than I expected. I haven’t seen D’Lo do anything particularly good since his TNA work with AJ Styles about six years ago (and really, it doesn’t take a wrestling virtuoso to work well with AJ), but Albright seemed to carry things along well enough.
8. Kudos to Kenny King and Eddie Kingston for a nice bit of psychology to open their match. King used his superior athleticism to stick-and-move (all the way to the outside of the ring) on Kingston, but then getting overly cocky and turning his back on Kingston to gloat, thus making himself a stationary target on the outside – a bad move when facing a brawler like Kingston.
9. Adequate match between King and Kingston. I am not a huge fan of either guy, but both looked good here. I like Kingston’s suplex-based offense and think he should use one of those (maybe the Exploder, or the Backdrop Driver) as his main finisher instead of the backfist. And as I said last week, King definitely has the athleticism. It’s just a matter of putting the whole package together. In other words, I may not be a fan of his now, but I could be someday. The finish also made sense, as Hero got payback for Kingston interfering into his match against KENTA.
10. Pretty underwhelming show this week. A couple of things weren’t good (opening match, Rasche promo), and while everything else wasn’t terrible, even the better stuff wasn’t worth going out of your way to see. But hey, Cabana-McGuinness AND Danielson/Strong vs. Wolves next week! I think I can spare an hour.
