[2005-04-24-TNA-Lockdown] Jeff Hardy vs Raven

[GOTNW]

I'm not entirely sure why I'm continuing to watch Jeff Hardy's TNA matches. I've already reached a conclusion on how he was as a worker at the time and it's probably not going to change. Maybe I should stop.

 

This was fine. Jeff Hardy was my favourite wrestler when I was 12 and Raven was in that spot when I was 13. MVP was before any of them and inbetween were The Rock and Jericho. Then I discovered puro through my new favourite KENTA and eventually I stopped having a favourite wrestler.

 

As far as this match goes. Some good, some bad. I liked Raven avoiding Hardy's chairshots but literally the next spot had him stand there while Jeff set up his chair jumping. Then Raven avoided Hardy's chair jump spot which I liked but-urgh-why not just avoid it on the first try. You don't have to get all your shit in. This had enough violence in it to keep me interested throughout the whole thing but also some eye-rolling stuff like them doing a top rope-nothing (trust me it looks like exactly it sounds), the ref helping Raven set up tables, a blade job that went on forever etc. I liked the dramatic shots of the women in the crowd turning away, now that I think about it they could've been plants but I don't think TNA would be capable of using plants in such an efficent manner, more likely they had them chant for Kevin Nash or whomever old they signed at the time. **1/2

[El-P]

Jeff Hardy in 2005 is probably one of the worst, most useless, dumbest worker I've seen. And that covers a lot of ground. There's no way to have a good match with him. The "table match" gimmick is stupid to begin with. And hey, it's in a cage, since it's Lockdown, the first "all cage match" PPV, another dumb as fuck idea which was rendered even dumber with the added gimmick in every match. So you can have clusterfuckery on top of making the cage match irrelevant in one night. So there. Hardy. The cage at least prevents him from walking around for ever, but he's just worthless. When Raven is on offense you can at least get a sense of purpose. He sells too, and bleeds so to make the cage a palpable element for the first time since the beginning of the PPV. Hardy's offense looks like shit, he can't sell one bit, making comebacks on random. It's just painfull and predictable. Yeah, he does falls from high places, here the top of a cage, twice, but that's about it. One smart spot when Raven uses the big "door" to unbalance Hardy. But nothing leads to nothing, Hardy thrashing himself through a table from the top has him making a comeback two minutes later. Zero drama. Just a bad, overclusterfucky heritage of the Attitude Era-kinda gimmick match. Waste of time. It was however, still better than the Hardy vs Abyss matches the previous months. That's how godawful these were.

 

(and yeah, the usual bad TNA referee work coupled with Don West at an all-time terrible and annoying just made this even worst. The women looking concerned looked like shots from some other card, I have no idea why anyone in that smarcky annoying crowd would be concerned for Jeff Hardy, who is unable to showcase any "character work" except "look at me, I'm gonna fall !")

[Migs]

This sucked. Almost nothing of value between the highlight spots, which was a real theme for Hardy in his first TNA run (although maybe he understood the TNA fans better than anyone else?).