ROH TV 12-15-12

It’s the go-home show for Final Battle, and this TV taping is finally over, thank GOD.

But first, a couple quick plugs: Are you a retro video game fan? Or even a modern video game fan? Then you need to check out the Video Game Console Library, which has everything thing you ever needed to know about every video game console ever made, even obscure shit like the RDI Halcyon, Casio Loopy, and the Funtech Super A'Can. This site has it all, right up to scans of original manuals and links to the emulators of all these odd consoles you've probably never heard of. NES fans also need to check out the NES Quester, where Mike Wright is reviewing every licensed NES game, in order, and I occasionally pop in and shit all over the garbage that Nintendo sued over to keep off the NES (Spoiler Alert!: They won the lawsuit but lost the war). Tell the kids, they need to know where the video games that they play these days got started.

Vinny Marseglia vs. Davey Richards: Why are they even bothering with this? Marseglia is from PWF (?) according to Seltzer and looks like a low(er) rent Jeff Hardy, so I hate him already. Totally different style wrestler though. The fight over a wristlock to start as Kyle O’Reilly and Bobby Fish appear in the isle to watch. Marseglia hits an ugly headscissors that both guys botch their ends of, Davey bails and Vinny follows with a plancha.  Back in and Vinny (much easier to just type his first name) gets a headscissors into a Russian legsweep, and follows that with some sort of odd submission hold I can’t really describe. Davey gets free and notices Fish & O’Reilly, Vinny attacks the distracted Richards from behind but gets kicked right down and put into a modified Texas Cloverleaf. Vinny makes the ropes and tries to come back with a rollup from the corner and an enziguri, but Richards counters with an inverted atomic drop and that sliding kick thing he does finishes at about 4 minutes. *1/2, not a bad little squash and I liked Marseglia’s style here (and I take back what I said before), though both the crowd and the commentators didn’t give a damn about this this match, and with this being the fourth squash of a random indy guy for the night I don’t blame them. This made one thing clear: trying to pack 5 hours of programming into one show when you have this small a roster is a bad idea. ROH officials must have seen this, as the next 2 TV tapings are only a month apart, as opposed to 10 weeks apart. I’ve been going on about how ROH needs more people, but seriously, even that guy from last week with the 60’s gimmick would be a good pickup. He was shitty, but at least he had something that would make me remember him. “He dressed like Billy Graham and wore sunglasses to the ring”. It’s really nothing, but it’s SOMETHING that would let me pick him out of a crowd…

Mike Mondo joins Kevin Kelly in the ring, and replays show that it was indeed the shot to the guardrail that broke his leg at Glory By Honor. Mondo gives the standard injured-guy “I’ve been dreaming of being a wrestler since I was a little kid” speech, and then goes on a quick but AWESOME angry rant burying WWE. When he comes back it will be on like “Donkey freakin Kong!” OK, that wasn’t too awesome…  For some reason Roderick Strong comes out, tells Mondo that no one cares about him (that promo made me care about him, despite the bad Donkey Kong thing), and takes out the broken leg. He tries to run down Michael Elgin, but Elgin is in the ring before Strong can even get the words out of his mouth. Truth Martini then comes out and tries to get between them, Elgin shoves him out of the way and Strong nails Elgin with Mondo’s crutch from behind and gets the hell out of there. The point here was to get face heat for Mondo and make Strong look like a total dickhead, and it worked, so it was a good segment overall. Seriously, I know I'm a total smartass reviewing this, but this was much better than I'm making it seem. You don’t really need great mic work if you can do good old-school heat. Now let’s see if they can maintain it…  

Inside ROH: Clips of the Jay Lethal/Kevin Steen match where Steen spit in Lethal’s mother’s face are shown, making me think that Lethal will be the deciding factor in the ladder match tomorrow. Rest of this is just standard PPV hype.

Veda Scott is in the back with Coleman and Alexander. Veda looks great, Coleman and Alexander are hilarious in their quick promo

Steel City Streetfight: Steve Corino vs. Jay Briscoe. In this case, “streetfight” means no DQ, no countouts. Corino wrestles in a dress shirt and slacks, which is certainly better than the one-piece swimsuit thing he’s been wearing lately. Jay attacks and dumps Corino, tosses him out, and both guys throw each other into the barricades a couple times. Jay gets a beer from a fan and nails Corino with it, but another fan holds up a chair and Corino sends Jay face first into it. Corino goes under the ring and grabs a table (and finds all the streamers that have been tossed into the ring throughout the night), but ends up on top of it and Jay double-stomps him through it. Out of all the ways to put a guy through a table that was the safest I’ve seen so far, IMO, and I mean that in a good way. And we go to break…

Back from commercial and Jay nails Corino with a sneaker. Really? A SNEAKER? The fuck? He kind of makes up for it by putting the ring bell near Corino’s head and hitting it with the hammer, giving us that nice satisfying “DING!” sound like if we were playing No Mercy. Back in the ring Jay wedges chairs between the ropes in all for corners, but here’s Jimmy Jacobs to distract Jay, and Corino nails Jay with the roll of quarters for 2. Jacobs tries to get in for the double team, but here’s Mark Briscoe out to the ring to whip his ass, and Jay sends Corino into all the chairs that are in the corners. Mark takes off to the back, but quickly returns with a fucking WHEELBARROW full of chairs, tossing about half a dozen into the ring and launching the rest into Jacobs, who’s still out on the floor. Jay is distracted by all these shenanigans however, and gets sent face-first into one of the corner chairs by Corino, and scoop-slammed onto the pile that Mark threw in. Mark carries Jacobs to the back on the wheelbarrow as Corino sits up Jay on a chair in the sitting position and boots him down. Corino just cracks Jay in the head with a tossed chair, then grabs another table and sets it up in the corner. Jay tries to get back to his feet but Corino kicks one of the chairs laying in the ring (there’s about 15 of them at this point) right into Jay’s face. REALLY cool spot right there, and yet so simple… Corino sets another chair upright and hits a brainbuster on it for 2. He sets up another chair next to the other one, but spends too much time playing to the crowd and Jay catches him and hits the Death Valley Driver on the two chairs. Corino is DEAD after that, and Mark returns with a section of the old style guardrail. Jacobs follows him out and nails Mark in the nuts, stops Jay from DVDing Corino, and Jay takes a belly-to-back suplex through the table. Jacobs and Corino try to set up the section of guardrail on a set of 4 chairs, Mark takes out Jacobs as the stooges finally get involved and take out the non-combatants, and Corino ends up getting superplexed onto the guardrail to finish it at about 16:00 aired. I don’t have my stopwatch/phone, hence the approximate match times, but THIS TIME the “Holy shit!” chant is totally justified. Coleman and Alexander run out and hit top-rope dives onto Mark and Jacobs (who are now with all the stooges out on the floor) as the pin happens in the ring. The finishing spot was botched, as Corino was supposed to hit the middle of the guardrail but ended up hitting the end of it and cracked a couple ribs. This was taped over a month ago though, and he should be fine for the PPV. I’m kind of torn on the rating here, as they did their best to pull off a crazy ECW-style brawl, but somehow it just lacked that intensity that ECW had, probably because of the somewhat burnt-out crowd and the lack of blood. Fuck it though, I don’t care, this gets ****1/2 from me. It’s not be the most technically proficient match of 2012, and I wouldn’t put it over my totally-dead-crowd MOTY in Styles/Daniels, or over Cena/Punk at NOC, or over Punk/Bryan at MITB, or even over Steen/Elgin at Glory By Honor. But I will say one thing: this match was the most fun I’ve had watching wrestling in a LONG time. Old-school ECW fans need to find this match online somewhere. Kevin Steen makes his way to the ring as we go to commercial.

Steen sits on one of the many chairs on the ring with El Generico’s mask and cuts a promo. He then heads outside and threatens Kevin Kelly, and really overstays his welcome, with all the high-pitched screaming of “YOU SHOULD BE TERRIFIED!” Kevin Kelly isn’t Michael Cole, that’s not going to work, and this whole segment just grinds to a halt. People who play EWR will know this as Sophie saying “You are pushing him too hard and fans are getting sick of him”or whatever she says. Just an AWFUL promo from Steen here… And we’re FINALLY done.

An excruciatingly long TV taping finally ends. This was actually a really good show, though stop after the Jay/Corino match is over. The card, and my predictions (in the order I think the card will happen), for Final Battle 2012: (And PLEASE, don’t post any spoilers or anything about the show in the comments. I’m not going to be home tomorrow to order the show, but I do plan to order the replay and have a review up ASAP, and I’m going to my best to avoid any sort of spoilers and results.)

Jay Lethal vs. Rhino: They will keep the ANGRY JAY storyline going here. Rhino wins, probably by DQ

Prince Nana vs. RD Evans: I can’t see this storyline going on any longer with QT Marshall as the only worker left standing. Nana wins, Ciampa likely makes an appearance, Marshall probably kills Evans after.

Roderick Strong vs. Michael Elgin: Truth Martini costs Elgin the win and gets annihilated.

Richards/Edwards vs. O’Reilly/Fish: Edwards shows up but walks off at some point, O’Reilly & Fish win the match

Jerry Lynn vs. Mike Bennett: ROH is the proverbial rock and the hard place here. If Bennett wins he’s not going to WWE, if he loses he is. Honestly, I got money on Lynn.

Streetfight: WGTT vs. Titus/Whitmer: Again, the WWE comes into play here, as Benjamin is also rumored to be headed up North. Either way, Haas and Benjamin win here, though don’t be shocked if Haas turns on Benjamin.

“Special Attraction” (non title) Match: Matt Hardy vs. ROH TV Champion Adam Cole: I’m thinking Matt is one-and-done here. Cole wins cleanly and relatively quick, if this goes much longer than 10 minutes I’ll be pretty shocked.

ROH Tag Titles: Sudden Death Rules (in other words, the champs have be involved in the fall): Steve Corino & Jeremy Jacobs (c) vs. The Briscoes vs. Caprice Coleman & and Cedric Alexander: I would be kind of stunned if either the Briscoes or C+C don’t turn here.  No matter what, S.C.U.M. reatains.

ROH World Title, Ladder War IV: El Generico vs. Kevin Steen (c): Generico hasn’t done anything thing to promote this match, isn’t scheduled for the next TV tapings, and hasn’t signed a contract with ROH as far as I know. Add that to the fact that Steen/Lethal is next up for ROH and Steen is obviously winning here, unless ROH wants to pull a SWERVE!, and I don’t see that happening. Jay Lethal will likely be a factor in the finish.

This will be the last ROH TV for at least the next 4 weeks, as the next TV taping will not be until the middle of January. I still plan on popping up every Saturday night/Sunday afternoon though, and while I know what I'm doing next weekend I need something to fill the next few weekends after that. So I'm open to requests, but if you want me to review something than you have to provide a link (YouTube, DailyMotion, torrent, whatever) as I have pretty much nothing on DVD.