Sizzle or Steak was the name of the catch-up review that I wrote when I got back into wrestling in 2018 after an eight-year break. I’m going to make this a semi-regular thing now to justify checking out matches that interest me that don’t fall neatly into any series that I’m working on. This time around it’s matches that are tangential in some way to said other projects.
August 18, 2012 – Tokyo, Japan
Kota Ibushi def. Kenny Omega {KO-D Openweight Championship Match}
From DDT Peter Pan. I watched this one while I was reviewing the KO-D Championship title changes, but this is a successful defense so it didn’t make it into that series. It’s definitely a spectacle and I can see why people who saw it in 2012 crapped the full volume of their pants. From the pop up German superplex to the Frankensteiner to the floor, these guys were able to do things that I think might have killed others. The match is also notable for being a very prominent time that someone kicked out of the One Winged Angel. The fact that Omega also got a massive kickout, to a Phoenix Superplex, makes the match that much more memorable. But I think they could have easily shaved off one-third of this thing and accomplished the same goals. Ibushi hit a Phoenix Splash for the win at 37:26. Addendum in 2022, I reviewed this match again and thought it was way way WAY better the second time around. ****
July 27, 2017 – Tokyo, Japan
Katsuhiko Nakajima def. Brian Cage {GHC Heavyweight Championship Match}
From NOAH Summer Navigation. I watched this while I was doing my NOAH title history because it just seemed dope. And it was dope. It was incredible, in fact. They played the striker vs. strongman formula perfectly, especially as Nakajima was smaller and couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. Every time he got too carried away, Cage would slaughter him. Cage only became vulnerable after Nakajima found creative ways to take control and then chained clever offensive flurries together. In something of an ironic twist, it was Cage getting cocky and making a similar mistake to Nakajima, trying to come off the top rope when his opponent wasn’t sufficiently incapacitated, that cost him teh match. Nakajima caught him up top with an avalanche brainbuster and then hit another brainbuster (after a few kicks) for the win at 22:14. ****¼
September 16, 2020 – Jacksonville, Florida
Trent & Chuck Taylor def. Santana & Ortiz {Parking Lot Fight}
From AEW Dynamite 50. This one is a cheat, as it’s not related to anything else I was watching but it seemed like a fun hang. As far as outside the ring street fights go, this was very good. Unlike most, the action never fell into a lull and some of the spots were downright wild for a cable TV show. You’d do best to ignore the “fans” on the outskirts, as their overacting can become very distracting if you let them catch your eye too many times. I didn’t like the finish so much, because a comedy character coming out (who to be fair didn’t do anything funny) at the end of a match this violent felt out of place. Trent hit a belly to back piledriver on Ortiz onto a wooden plank in the bed of a truck at 13:03 for the win. I also felt that the Best Friends getting in Trent’s mom’s minivan and his mom flipping the bird to end the show was too cute for this environment as well, but AEW is a cartoon so what can you do? I can look past the minivan mess and the annoying fans to give this thing some credit though. ****
October 25, 2020 – Orlando, Florida
Sasha Banks def. Bayley {Smackdown Women’s Championship Hell in a Cell Match}
From the 12th Hell in a Cell PPV, we get the 44th Hell in a Cell match. And it’s a doozy. I watched this one because I was already watching the show for the Drew McIntyre vs. Randy Orton WWE Championship change. Banks spends the first part of the match getting into Bayley’s head by throwing all of her weapons out of the cage and showing that she will dominate the champ with her bare hands. Things escalate and Banks begins to use weapons incidentally as a way of throwing Bayley’s attempts back in her face. And then things just get wild with stiff bumps onto the floor and into the cage. Bayley took gnarlier bumps into the cage than anyone else on this show. I tend to find Hell in a Cell matches boring these days. I thought that the Drew Galloway vs. Randy Orton match on this same show was a drag and that the Roman Reigns vs. Jey Uso match started well but turned into an NBC drama and lost its thread. This was exactly what I wanted from these two. They have such good chemistry. Banks put Bayley in a chair-assisted Banks Statement for the win at 26:29. ****½
November 7, 2020 – Jacksonville, Florida
Nick Jackson & Matt Jackson def. Dax Harwood & Cash Wheeler {AEW World Tag Team Championship Match}
From the second Full Gear. I watched this one because I thought Kenny Omega & Adam Page vs. the Young Bucks was a ****¾ match, and I reviewed FTR’s run up to the tag titles. Kevin Ford put it to me best when responding to my question of what people saw in this match that I didn’t when he said, “They decided it was five stars before it began.” This match was akin to a cover band playing the hits of other musical acts that you also like, but only throwing in one or two originals. The only thing giving this its own personality was Harwood’s hand injury. And AEW either needs to reign in Jim Ross or start listening to the criticisms he has for their matches. When he pointed out how the referee’s lack of enforcement of hold break rules made no sense, I was completely taken out of the match. I don’t mind if a wrestling company wants to go full on with their own vision of a wrestling universe. But having your commentator poke holes in the logic as the match goes on makes me realize that nobody in wrestling looks worse than does Rick Knox during a Young Bucks match. The match also felt like a bunch of very planned out vignettes. Especially the finish, where Wheeler went for a 450 splash for reasons that don’t even make sense and got superkicked out of the tag titles at 28:46 as a result. I get the dramatic irony in the finish, but there was no build to it and it felt totally out of character. Also, how is Matt Jackson hitting a superkick powerful enough to knock out Wheeler with a bad foot that has no boot? Nah y’all, this wasn’t it. Points for the effort and the ability to keep this from getting boring for thirty minutes, but that’s all. Addendum in 2021, I reviewed this match again and thought it was WAY better the second time around. ***¼
From Diamond Ring Kensuke Office Changes. They emphasize that Nakajima beat Dragon Gate wrestler Kenichiro Arai 
From Dynamite 131. This is a qualifying match for the Owen Hart Foundation tournament. Joe debuted at ROH Supercard of Honor, saving Jonathan Gresham from Jay Lethal (whose soul searching apparently led him to turn heel) & Sonjay Dutt after the main event. And now that ROH and AEW are the same thing, that seems worth mentioning. Caster’s pre-match rap was cute. This was real squashy, with Joe needing only two minutes to put Caster down with the Muscle Buster at 2:52. Lethal & Dutt pop up on the big screens and Lethal says he’d been trying to get a hold of Joe during his difficult soul searching time, and Joe never picked up. They have a present for Joe next week. N/A
From Dynamite 132. Jay Lethal & Sonjay Dutt were in the front row cheering on Joe. Sarcastically, probably, as they brawled with Joe at ROH Supercard of Honor XV. 
From Rampage 39. 
From Dynamite 137. 
From Dynamite 138. This is a 
From Double or Nothing. 
From PWF York Cougar Football Fundraiser. I didn't know that this match happened until over a month after the fact. This started out as a non-title match, but we'll get to why I've listed it as a title match in a moment. FTR have Mick Foley in their corner while their opponents have Bill Behrens. I’ve never actually seen Behrens do an on-camera gig before. He's holding a tennis racket, presumably as an Umaga to Jim Cornette. But it's confusing because there was actually a tennis player named Bill Behrens. They announce this match as having a 20-minute time limit. Only 11 minutes in, they say there are three minutes remaining. Until then, this was as run-of-the-mill as a modern FTR match gets. But the announcement snapped everyone out of their heat-on-Wheeler funk and forced them to go for desperate pins. They announce ten seconds remaining a couple of times, but no one can get the roll up pin they're looking for. The 20-minute time limit expires at 1
From NXT UK 183. McGuinness started by essentially saying that Fraser is going to pee or poo himself during the match. Unnecessary. Had Shawn Michaels been game to have a good match against Vader, this is what it would have looked like. Actually, a more appropriate and modern analogue is Brock Lesnar vs. Seth Rollins from SummerSlam. Much like that match, Frazer used quick strikes and avoided his larger opponent’s signature big move to stay alive. Here it was the powerbomb whereas there it was suplexes. Here, Frazer also successfully damaged WALTER’s knee, which slowed the big man down and made it hard for WALTER to hit the powerbomb. Unfortunately for Frazer, WALTER was able to bide his time and clothesline Frazer’s legs out from under him. An inevitable powerbomb followed and won the match for WALTER at 14:02. I hate to say this because I’m happy that he’s healthier, but the way WALTER has slimmed down has taken some of the magic away from his aura. At least for me it has. That said, dude can clearly still go as well as ever in the ring. ****
From NXT 659. Strong was feeling it here, which is thanks in large part to the crowd being maniacally loud from the get go I’m sure. His whole game was fast and devastating stick and move attacks. That worked pretty well, as WALTER was dazed from time to time. But as with all good WALTER matches (which is pretty much all WALTER matches), everything WALTER does is devastating here so it takes very little for him to take back control. And eventually he did just that and hit the powerbomb for the win at 9:46 (shown of 12:18). After the match, WALTER gets on the microphone and says that his name is Gunther now. I did not think WALTER would be a victim of the renaming curse this far into his run. What will they rename Strong?! ***¾
From NXT UK 185. Andy Shepherd helpfully announces from inside the ring that the reason for the stipulation is that the feud has gotten so violent that it wouldn’t be safe to have fans around. Devlin says during the match that it’s because he thinks Dragunov could only muster the energy to win if he had the crowd behind him. I like that explanation a lot more. The only real reason I could think of to do this without fans is that there was a scheduling conflict with one of the wrestlers for the regular TV taping date and they needed to get this thing filmed. We just had such a long stretch of empty arena NXT UK episodes that I can’t imagine anyone was dying to get another taste of it. This aired the day after Adam Cole vs. Orange Cassidy in a match that was also no disqualification and falls count anywhere, and this served up everything I felt was missing from that match. Now you might say, “Brad, Cassidy is not the same kind of character as Devlin or Dragunov, how could you expect the same level of violence or intensity?” To that I say, when Cassidy started his match by breaking his own sunglasses and rapidly punching Cole, he was indicating that level of violence and/or intensity. And instead the match was mostly wacky. Anyway, this was not wacky. It was stiff and intense and featured weapons that made sense and spots the didn’t take forever to set up. Dragunov got in trouble when his eye injury acted up. Devlin took control and beat the crap out of him. I wasn’t wild about how meek Dragunov was when Devlin was zip tying his hands, but I did like that in the end it turned out to be an error on Devlin’s part anyway because Dragunov’s finisher requires no hands. And indeed, a bound Dragunov jumped off the steel steps (which had been brought into the ring) and hit the Torpedo Moskau on Devlin for the win at 21:43. NXT UK is still sneaking in these dope matches that no one is watching. Y’all should watch them. ****¼ 
From AAA Triplemania Regia. FTR come out with Vickie Guerrero. This was supposed to be explained at an earlier AAA taping but FTR and Guerrero all missed them. AAA is notorious for having this kind of luck/being incompetent lately. FTR is also wearing Eddie Guerrero tribute tights, with American flags on one side and flames on the other, I suppose to pay homage to his Gringos Locos and Latino Heat gimmicks. This match mostly sucked, but one cool spot saw FTR tie Pentagon’s mask to the ropes and force him to unmask with his hands over his face to stop them from climbing the ladder. That would have been a very meaningful moment to lead up to the Lucha Brothers winning the titles back, but unfortunately instead it led into nothing. He just got his mask back and the match continued on in its lame, derivative way. At one point, Pentagon was the only man standing, but instead of climbing the ladder he grabbed a table from the floor. So the titles mean enough to him that he’d unmask to stop his opponents from winning, but not enough for him to get the titles when he had a clear path to do it? Vickie powered Pentagon, causing him to voluntarily jump through the table and Harwood grabbed the belts at 12:12. This was abysmal. *
From AEW Full Gear. Silver was hamming it up a lot more here than he was the year before in New York. That said, this had stronger just-a-match vibes than the aforementioned match. After Silver ripped out Cassidy’s pockets, Cassidy turned up the heat and these guys put on a middle of the row undercard match. Not bad by any means, but nothing memorable either. Cassidy hit the Beach Break rather out of nowhere for the win at 9:42. **¾ 
From the second Honor Reigns Supreme. The commentators sold this as Gresham getting a big shot against a top ROH guy after being an also-ran in the Television Championship division for a while. This was terrific. Both guys did a fantastic job selling their respective targeted limbs, and Gresham in particular played the role of the tenacious underdog perfectly. He didn’t just watch to see where Lethal would have trouble executing his finisher because of the damage he’d done to the former ROH Champion’s arm, he pressed the assault whenever he could, taking out the arm to make sure the Lethal Injection would never come. But what he couldn’t do was stop Lethal from battering his knee and ultimately winning with a Figure 4 Leglock at 17:54. ****¼ 
From the second Masters of the Craft. Columbus has way more Gresham fans than Concord did. That’s a neat little advancement to the plot, innit? They both went after the same limbs that earned them dividends in their previous match. And then they went ahead and built an incredible match out of that story. At first it seemed as though Lethal wasn’t going to be able to get Gresham’s leg to give out. But about halfway through the match, Gresham’s knee was in trouble. Gresham was able to escape the leglock this time by using the momentum of Lethal pulling him away from the ropes to shift to an armbar. But Gresham’s focus on the arm bit him in the ass. Lethal went for the Lethal Injection and collapsed again, but when Gresham went for a roll up after that Lethal cut back on it for the win at 18:27. This is one of the best American examples that I've seen of a match building on the match that came before. Rather than try to outdo the maneuvers from their first meeting for the sake of a big crowd reaction, they adjust their game plans in logical ways that, to me, were just as exciting. I think this match is slept on, by virtue of the fact that I’ve never heard anything about it before watching it. ****½ 
From ROH Wrestling 364. In real life, 
From Death Before Dishonor XVII. Gresham and Lethal had been teaming, but Gresham grew frustrated and started heeling. Ultimately, he turned on Lethal. It took them a little while to get there, but once they got into a groove this was exactly what I wanted from this match. It was back to their old tricks, with Lethal targeting the leg to set up for the Figure 4 Leglock and Gresham targeting the arm to block the Lethal Injection and set up for his Octopus. In the end, Lethal tried the cutback trick that worked for him in Columbus, but Gresham countered to a pin and then put on the gnarliest Octopus for his first win over Lethal at 17:20. This is the best kind of wrestling series. And none of it felt stale because it was a year after they’d wrestled last and because they found ways to energize the old tropes. And that’s not to mention Gresham busting out what I can only describe as a sumo-style assault. Gresham and Lethal make up after the match. ****
From ROH Wrestling 500. During the pandemic, ROH made the most of their empty arena shows by kicking them off with a tournament to crown a champion for the revived Pure Championship. Gresham won the tournament, and this was his fourth defense of the title. Lethal and Gresham were still allies here. In an interesting move, the other match on this milestone episode was two other partners fighting in Jay and Mark Briscoe. They cut to a commercial break about six minutes in, though the action didn’t get beyond (admittedly fast-moving) mat wrestling until the 10-minute mark. That had me thinking this was going to go long, but things took a different turn. Both guys had abused the other’s shoulders, and Lethal used that to his advantage best. He forced Gresham to use his first rope break to stop a pin, and his second to escape a crab. Then, he used the failed Lethal Injection to bait Gresham into a crossface, forcing the champ to use his final rope break. But he made the mistake of giving Gresham a breather and was quickly caught in a head scissor takedown giving Gresham the winning pin at 14:06 (shown of 16:40). For an empty arena match, this held my attention. It was totally different than their previous matches while still using a couple elements from the rivalry to elevate it just a bit. Not essential viewing, but if you’re working your way through their series you shouldn’t skip it. ***¼ 
