Review: ROH, 12th July

This week’s Ring of Honor kicked off with a recap of Necro Butcher’s angle that he was short of money and could not afford to pay for his medical bills, an angle which would not work in the UK with our glorious and highly communistic National Health Service. Anyway, so with Necro not being able to pay his bills, he decides to hook-up with one-time WWE jobber Price Nana and become part of his stable, the Embassy. Instead of a pauper entering, we see Necro dressed in a flashy robe and apparently wearing a Rolex. Nana describes Necro as ‘the crown jewell’ of the Embassy. Here in the UK, we use the term crown Jewells to refer to one’s testicular area, so essentially Nana is calling Necro a big testical.
After a bit of an incoherent promo, the match begins: Necro Butcher versus Bobby “The Jobber” Beverly. The match was under ‘Butcher’s Rules’ which, as far as I can make out, is exactly the same as Raven’s rules: basically a no DQ match. The match on the whole was pretty lame, with Necro dominating throughout. There were some pretty cool spots during the match, for example when Necro scooped up the Jobber using a steel chair and then slammed him down to the canvas, chair and all, Necro also did a chokeslam and a Sit Out Powerbomb onto two chairs (one is never enough) to get the pin. What was perhaps the nastiest move of the match came in the post-match beat-down, when Necro used a standing chair as an aid to a nasty looking Back Breaker.
Next up was Eddie Edwards in one of his Ten Minute Hunt matches to be in contendership for the coveted TV Title. If the videos remain on YouTube, you will notice the beauty and quality of the graphics for this segment. Every time I see Eddie Edwards I am always made to think of Olympic ski-jumper Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards. For this reason alone, I was gunning for Edwards. Edwards’ opponent for this match-up was the Andy ‘Right Leg’ Ridge, a wrestler famour for having a right leg. After questioning Right Leg’s sexual prowess, Eddies hits him with the mic and match begins.
Eddie spends much time during the match working on Ridge’s left leg, not realising that Ridge’s power is drawn from the right. Edwards hits a nasty Lariat and then Powebomb’s Ridge to an single-legged Boston Crab to get the win by submission. The match lasted around four minutes and was pretty mediocre.
The camera cuts to a promo with Austin Aries, dressed in a suit, wearing aviator sunglasses and smoking a pipe, alongside Rhett Titus and Kenny King. What I found out in this promo was that you need to have a licence to be a manager in professional wrestling, and that Aries has one, but states that he’s still going to wrestle. Aries made a sly jab at Jim Cornette, referring to him as a‘mama's boy with a tennis racket'. You tell him, Austin.
Back in the ring, Cornette brings Strong out for an interview. I was difficult to tell that Strong is a heel, because if he was in WWE or TNA, he’d be wearing a suit damn it. How do you know a guy’s bad if he’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt? The promo was pretty bizarre, it began with Stong going on about how he’s been screwed by everyone in the company, but has found someone to tell him ‘The Truth’ and introduced his new mentor Truth Martin (geddit?) who came to the ring with Christian Abel and Josh Raymond.
The mic is passed to Martini who rambles about being a Life Intervention Expert and says the Strong isn’t to blame: it’s all Tyler Black’s fault (now it makes sense). With a few more minutes of incoherence, the crowd were visibly and audibly getting bored. Cornette then referred to Martini as a ‘snake oil salesman’. Oooh.
Onto the main event: Tyler Black, Jerry Lynn and Delirious versus Austin Aries, Kenny King and Rhett Titus. The brawling begins before the match starts. You can tell that wrestlers don’t like each other when they fight before the bell rings, and with RoH’s code of honour, this just goes to underline this.
With King and Lynn in the ring, the bell rings and match starts officially. Thank goodness that the violence was now contained within the legitimate boundaries of a wrestling match. On the whole, this was a decent match, there were some great moments such as Black and Lynn delivering stereo F-5s onto King and Aries then take Titus up for a double F-5 on him. The match ended with what I think was a DQ due to Delirious throwing Aries onto a chair. The brawling continued outside, but there was no real ending to the match.
In summary, this was a mixed bag: there was far too much time spent on pointless promos which didn’t add much to storylines. The first two matches were squash matches which had very little purpose and the final match, though pretty good, lacked a sense of closure.