FJBR

I liked the Joey/Candice vs Bucks gurilla warfare match, but even then it's not like it was particularly good wrestling, it was pretty much just a deathmatch with some fun spots, lots of blood, and a crowd which was really behind the payoff and the story. As far as peeves, I don't think I hate anything more than mat wrestling/fish out of water spots at the start of the match which lead to nothing and mean nothing, just for the sake of doing them. Modern NJPW does it a lot, and every time it makes me groan. What's the point? I can understand mat wrestling done for a reason, but Okada doing some transitions with no real authority or sense that he's doing anything is just time wasting.

By all accounts ICP are good people and wrestling promoters, it just happens that they make awful music and have a terrible fanbase.

The fighting spirit spot probably wouldn't be as bad to me if Shibata didn't do it in almost every match he has at this point. I still enjoy his matches a lot and think he's great, and I even thought the Ibushi match was four 1/4 or so, but jesus christ I will never understand why decided to take a spot which would be annoying if he did it once or twice for a big moment and made it part and parcel for his matches. There are situations where I can accept it, but seeing as he's doing it all the time no matter the situation any meaning behind the spend is rendered meaningless.

Was that their One Night Stand match? For whatever reason both guys were just off that night, I wouldn't really use it as evidence as far as Benoit's overall ability at the time.

The more I watch of his indie stuff the more I feel like if he cut 10 minutes off the majority of his matches they'd be far better. He had a match vs Chris Hero in PWG which pops to mind, the one right before he left to go to the WWE and won the title. It was going really well, they did a spot where Bryan came off the top rope to the outside and took a chair to the face, then after this spot which was sold like death they carried on wrestling a standard indie match for 10 minutes or so. He was never as bad as a lot of other guys for that sort of overkill, but at times watching his older stuff it felt like he was dragging out matches for no real reason aside from to do it, and a lot of fat could be trimmed. Just an observation more than anything.

Hey, I'm James. I'm 19, I can't remember exactly when I get into wrestling, but I remember it stemmed from getting Smackdown: Just Bring it on the PS2 for Christmas, which would place it at late 2001. Since then I've been on and off (More off), but for the last few years it's been on. In the past year or so I've ended up looking more into puro, territories, British stuff, and lucha, which for the most part isn't stuff which gets discussed in most parts of the internet so I decided to sgn up here after lurking and reading far too much for the past few months. I keep up with Lucha Underground and PWG as they come out and cherry pick NJPW (When they're great they're great, but I can't suffer through the endless Bucks vs Hooligans/Not Hooligans vs Time ReDragon shite and 30 minutes of Nakamura pulling faces), but generally just find myself getting interested in a wrestler/style/era and falling down a rabbit hole of watching 6 hours of Stan Hansen at 3AM or going through as much Onita as possible when I should probably be doing more productive things.