Tommy Dreamer & Badd Company vs The Tasmaniac, Kevin
Sullivan & Johnny Hotbody
Pretty decent six-man, albeit with an ending that makes
everyone look like an idiot. Thought this match had a really good Paul Diamond
performance, he looks terrific and has some real dynamism to his moves. His running
leg lariat in the corner was really nice in the opening minutes, and I liked
the touches like fighting desperately to escape when Hotbody had him pinned in
the opposing corner. The heels work him over nicely, good tag continuity.
Tanaka gets the hot tag, but his flurry of offence is short lived, as he gets
stopped in his tracks by Taz. Hotbody nails him with a sloppy superplex, and
from this point on Tanaka is basically just beaten down. The heel team even
take it in turns to pick him up on two counts, and Sullivan just repeatedly
rams his head into the mat. However, Sullivan and Taz both roll to the floor
and basically have a fit outside the ring. Hotbody goes for the tag, finds
no-one there and gets rolled up by Tanaka for three. So the heels look dumb for
throwing the win away, Tanaka looks bad for basically being dead for the final
few minutes of the match, just a baffling ending.
911 vs Chad Austin
Austin wants a match, so Heyman gives him 911. Chokeslam,
pin. There’s going to be a lot of these coming up, I guess?
Terry Funk vs Shane Douglas
I have to accept I was pretty naïve with this match. The
show is a “special” 90 minute long episode, and the match starts half an hour
into the show, yet at no point did alarm bells ring. I just assumed we’d get
some more matches after this obvious main event. It’s only when we were 10-15
minutes into the match, and all we’d seen is Funk work a headlock (admittedly in
an amusing manner) and Douglas apply various holds to Funk’s left arm (in a
less interesting fashion) that I realised this thing was going long. And it
felt loooooooong. Douglas especially doesn’t have enough stuff to fill this
time effectively, and Joey Styles’s commentary highlighting that “Douglas is
saving energy, just sitting back and working the arm” didn’t make the abundance
of arm work interesting. I’m a guy who loves guys working a hold, but that’s
different from lying down and holding the arm for a few minutes, then trying
another hold. We also get two different crowd brawling spots, with the second
one towards the end especially feeling like filler. Funk does a fun job of
selling here, even seemingly blading the arm during the first crowd brawl. As a
left-hander, he keeps trying to use his injured limb, the selljob of which
keeps giving Douglas openings. However, we also get Funk crawling out of the
ring after two piledrivers, Funk briefly working Douglas’s legs for the
spinning toehold which he never tries for, a false finish with the ref
restarting because Douglas used the ropes for leverage on a pin and then a
schmozz of an ending with the Bad Breed and Sherri Martell all involved. By the
time we got to the inevitable time limit draw, I just wanted this over.
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