Falls Count Anywhere

03-14-07

Blame Derek. Blame his Pavilion.

Welcome to Falls Count Anywhere! My name is Chris and I'll be eating like a King!!!

Destination X PPV Report
TNA did a no-no this week. They put on a PPV that wasn't very good at all. They took the expectations of the audience and they ignored then. The matches ranged from good to really weak, but all around the storytelling was pretty damn bad.

We opened with Team 3D and LAX facing off. The crowd loves The Dudleys and they react well to them, but they're hardly pushed, their act is getting stale again and they need a revamp and a renewed top of the card push. Sadly, I don't see them getting it. LAX is a good team which has gotten over and will probably continue to be a bright spot in the TNA tag situation.

This match was a brawl where all the guys that the two teams 'run with' interfered. Alex Shelley ended up being the difference-maker as he decked Devon with the video camera which allowed Homicide to get the pin. The problem here, as with all of TNA recently, is the booking. LAX are the tag team champs and need to either get clean wins over quality teams, or manage to cheat THEMSELVES to get pins. The gang warfare thing just doesn't work for a team in their position. Team 3D are not helped at all by this. Check one for bad booking.

You'd think that I'd be excited to see an Inter-gender Double Bullrope match between James Storm and "the Pride of Tennessee" Jacqueline Moore with Gail Kim and Petey Williams, but I was not. The women worked well, the men worked well, but the entire match didn't really come together. Part of that might have been the amount of time they were given, and some might be the fact that Petey is better suited to straight matches than these kinds of brawls.

What the women did was fine, but they didn't really add much to the match. Again, booking problems left and right here. They had Williams about to hit the Destroyer, but Moore gave him a low-blow and that allowed Storm to hit the Superkick for the pin. Meh.

OK, here's a fun match that I actually kinda like. Senshi beat Austin Starr in the Crossface Chickenwing match. They worked hard and told a very good story. These two have worked together in Ring of Honor and here they just went to it. The best stuff was Senshi knowing that to get the gimmick over, he had to constantly try and set up the Chickenwing, which he did remarkably well. Starr was good, too, even hitting a Corkscrew Splash that looked great!

The match ended when Bob Backlund yelled at the ref which distracted Starr long enough to allow Senshi to get the Crossface for the win. After the match, Starr got Backlund in the Crossface for a while. Nice touch and they'll wrestle on the next PPV.

VKM (The Former New Age Outlaws) beat The Heartbreakers, managed by Christy Hemme. Mr. Ass started things off with insults to our lovely Miss Hemme that weren't very good. I mean the material has to stand up. Someone get him a copy of The Dudley's performances from 1997 through 1999 in ECW. They did it right. The match was crap. The Heartbreakers play a good role but they can't really work. BG and Kip James are both over-the-hill. Just terrible since the Heartbreakers were put in control for so much of the match.

Chris Sabin is a great wrestler and so is my man Jerry Lynn. The two of them had a really solid Two-of-Three falls match that really had me. These guys are great and even after his long time off he's still excellent. This match was built to make Sabin look like a star, which he should be. I think that people forget how great Jerry Lynn was in ECW. The stint in WCW as Mr. JL probably didn't help. This was a lot like Lynn's old matches in ECW, especially the section out of the ring. Lynn managed a great Tornado DDT that won him the first fall and a wheelbarrow into the railing that was just flat out awesome! Sabin won the second fall and that left them working for the third. Traditionally the second fall has little heat because folks realize that there's going to be a third fall, but this did OK.

Lynn kicked out of CradleShock and went for his own Cradle Piledriver. But some guy in a mask came out. Guess who it was? That's right, Christopher Daniels. Sabin hit the CradleShock for the pin and then Daniels beat on the both of them. Really good stuff, though the insertion of Daniels like they did was kinda weak.

I loved scaffold matches when I was a kid. Yes, they were never great matches, but they had a certain kind of drama you didn't see that often. The Road Warriors vs. The Midnight Express was a classic. This one started on the floor and then the guys made their way up the scaffold. They did some falling teases that were really nice. Styles seemed to be trying to make Rhino made and he'd come close to falling off. Nice psychology there.

As is tradition in every scaffold match, white powder was introduced and ended up being put into the eyes of AJ Styles. That allowed Rhino to hit the Gore. Styles tried to climb down, but Rhino stepped on his hands and he fell. Not very good, but at least it was entertaining enough for what it was. Styles needs to be put into a serious feud and soon. Give him some real wrestling time.

Kurt Angle beat Scott Steiner. It's so sad that I'm writing the words Scott Steiner in 2007. The guy's not that mobile anymore, though he's still pretty over with the crowd. He can't do the stuff that made him one of the best wrestlers in the world in the early 1990s. Angle worked hard and I love him for it. Implicated in a steroid scandal and still putting on a show.

Sadly, they didn't feel like they could give him a real win and instead they had Scotty pinned with a Sunset Flip out of a Belly-to-Belly instead of having Steiner tap to the AnkleLock. They need to build Angle again as they blew it with the Samoa Joe feud and he's no longer nearly as hot as he once was.

Sting and Abyss had a match that had a Coffin Match kind of gimmick. I thought it was lame. I've never been a fan of Abyss, and Sting was great when he came back but has been treading water for a while now. I mean seriously, this match had candelabras in each corner. That's ultra-lame and the fans were letting Vince Russo have it in their chants. His booking sucks! Sting won, which was expected.

OK, here's where it all falls apart. Christian beat Samoa Joe. Now, I love Christian, but it's become very obvious that he's not going to be able to carry a company anytime soon. True, he could come to the point where he'll be able to, probably after 5 or 10 more years, but right now he's the wrong guy. The audience loves Samoa Joe. They've wanted him to have the title for a while now and this was supposed to be the time he got it.

The problem is simple: they never know when to pull the trigger. The right time to give Joe the title was before the Angle run late last year. They never should have gone to Christian, they should have put the title around Joe's waist and then had the Angle-Joe matches be for the belt.

The match was OK, but felt flat. The TNA Magic where every match feels like it's important has washed off, partly from having Russo booking. There was interference, though the story seemed to be that they were trying to keep Cage from running and keeping his title. Everything was over-booked, but when they just wrestled it was good. Christian knows how to work Main Event-style, but he doesn't have the charisma to draw in the main event slot. Joe has it, but they don't want to give it to him. My guess is that they'll put it on Angle shortly because he's what they think a champion should be.

The match ended with Joe putting the Kokina Clutch on Christian while he was on the ropes and dragging him down, but since Christian's feet were still on the ropes, he had enough leverage to pin him! What a stupid ending!

TNA needs a lot of work to get back to where they were at the end of 2005. They need new stars, they need new storylines and most of all, they need to fire Vince Russo!

That's all for this week. I'll be back Monday with news and views from around the world!

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Chris Garcia