Ring of Honor Wrestling - 10/15/11

We were doing a TV show project lately where each guy on the team was going to review a TV ep but with Geo gone, that fell by the wayside; still, I wanted to give the new ROH show a go, so threw my hand in on this ep.

1) Briscoe Brothers v. All Night Express- 4
From clips and chatter on the 'net, these two teams have had some hellacious matches; this started to be one but ultimately didn't come through. One huge thing i noticed was Rhett Titus; dude bulked up considerably where as he has a completely different build and look now. I also really dug some of the innovative spots he was using. Kenny had a blazing hot fire comeback late in the match and while Briscoes can be great heels, they never got it to that level. Thought the ending was sort of sloppy as well.

2) Eddie Edwards v. Michael Elgin- 6
This is only my 2nd look at Elgin and i've recommended both matches now. When Frightmare takes a bunch of hellacious offense and still kicks out, it's pretty hard to swallow; when Elgin does, it makes sense; that's his gimmick "Unbreakable" so you can buy it. Edwards don't back down for shit in this either and seemed to assert himself as one of the top guys in ROH and I loved it. Nigel was good adding Edwards trained in the NOAH dojos to give a backstory why he's so tough and won't back down. They unleashed some crazy slap and strike exchanges here. And instead of the everyone kicking out of finishers, they simply teased executing it several times but it still worked once Eddie hit it; that's the way to turn in a match. Great stuff

This show is as talky as Impact or Raw, but they get more for their money; Impact's opening interview segment ran for 45 minutes this week, sure it setp up a lot of things but my god how can you expect true wrestling fans to wait that long. This one is very old school where people don't like each other and talk about it but it doesn't feel tongue in cheek like on Raw.