Loki

Torn on this.  On the one hand, there’s a thirty year age gap and it’s unrealistic to expect Tyson to be competitive.

 On the other hand

Not sure I’d want to get in there with that!

It was like watching someone chop down a tree with one swing.

Before the match Hayes was talking about watching Joshua do padwork and how he was punching through the pads properly. Well, he just punched through N'Gannou's head there.  I doubt N'Gannou will remember anything of that round.

Fucking HELL.

Slightly fascinated that at 82 years old Kendo Nagasaki still pops up at All Star Wrestling and other events around the country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O29sIk9LAkI

And looking at this YouTube channel he seems to be doing something with LDN again this year!  Some wrestlers genuinely never properly retire.  What a unique character.

2 hours ago, JLM said:

Osprey and Takeshita was two super humans trying to one up each other and put on a show that nobody else could.

This is the only one I have a slight issue with. So Takeshita is a super human but Samoa Joe isn’t?  Swerve isn’t?

I’m not sure that matches like that genuinely can exist in a different reality to the rest of the card.   If it was the main event, maybe.  But some of the bumps in that match were insane for a midcard bout imo.

1 hour ago, air_raid said:

Guys are killing piledrivers and vertical head drops - if you do dropping someone on their head as a mid match move then it kind of makes it hard to suspend disbelief for finishes that AREN'T dropping someone on their head, does it not?? You got poor sods trying to get their backfist or knee strike over, and people are devaluing big moves everywhere.

That was the beauty of the piledriver ban in WWE.  If only the Undertaker ever does the piledriver, and it's his finisher, then it's this devastating final move that nobody kicks out of.  If Moxley was piledriving people in the middle of the match before and his opponents were kicking out at 2, then either he's shit at the piledriver, or his opponent is tougher than the Undertaker's.  It creates too much confusion.

I have no issue with no-selling, it has its place.  Legendary main eventer Sting no-selling in his final match - awesome.  Brian Cage no-selling in the middle of a throwaway match on Dynamite - less ok.  Context is everything and as with ANY move or spot, overuse diminishes its effectiveness.

Whenever this conversation comes up I think about the rise of hardcore - first of all you were hitting someone with a chair and finishing the match.  Then you kicked out of a chairshot so the next match you put them through a table.  And so on.  It really didn't take many years before you were having to throw someone through a pane of glass off a balcony just to get a pin.  And the actual real-world damage taken in each match increased alongside that.

AEW have become a lot better at pacing their cards than they used to be, but you still see instances of people in the lower card kicking out of finishers that will be used for the pin later on.  WWE had that massive reset in the early noughties where people stopped kicking out of finishers and it reset the whole finisher spamming issue quite quickly so that even now, kicking out of someone's finisher is a big deal rather than the end of every match (NXT excepted sadly).  I would love them and AEW to do something similar with dives to the outside which really should be something cool but is now something EVERYONE on the card does in every match.

32 minutes ago, Ronnie said:

The use of all-time

“I’m the greatest champion in AEW history”.

I have pairs of socks older than AEW.  

2 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

It's my old friend REPLY ALL.

Look after a shared inbox, and forwarded on a relevant email to colleagues. Because I don't want to start some REPLY ALL bullshit, I mention the email in the Teams chat, hoping it gets discussed in there instead, where I can easily ignore it.

Nope. It's ignored and people continue to reply to the email. Great.

We've also had the organisation of two peoples leaving drinks in the last week. That can be done over Teams right? I mean we're all in the group, so makes sense?

Nope. Email after email "your round" "oi it was last time" "lol" "😆😆😆" to everyone.

This country.

Teams is shit though.  Rubbish for actual chats.  Slack ftw.

11 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

WWE super fans.

Are there ANY of those on this forum, honestly?  Genuine question, it seems most people who still watch wrestling here, watch AEW as their first option and then some WWE when it sounds interesting.  

If you're moaning about hot takes on Twitter fair enough but 1) stop reading Twitter and 2) can we just all agree that all wrestling conversation outside of UKFF is uniformly shit and not bring it up here. 😛

20 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

I think a lot of it is WWE brain rot.

Why does it have to be tribal?  Why can't it just be a bad take on the AEW product?  Why is everything bad related back to WWE, and everything good related to AEW in this thread?

I suspect the same people who complain about this stuff are those who've complained for decades about the WWE product, even though they've watched religiously every week.  You know, us lot basically. 🤣

AEW's been around long enough to have its own smarks, tropes, and bad takes.  

Edit: that sounded aggressive to @LaGoosh, it's not directed specifically at you, more echoing what @DavidB6937 said earlier.

2 hours ago, thatvinylgeek said:

This might just be me...but also to the mainstream AEW fan, Okada might not BE that big of a deal. They are always told he is something special when he appears, but he hasn't really backed it up with any true Okada worthy performances in the promotion.

This is me exactly.  I've only ever seen Okada in TNA years ago and then in AEW, and he's been average at best.  Plus.. he's already BEEN on the show!  So it's not even a debut.  It's an underwhelming Japanese wrestler who I've already seen, appearing again on Dynamite.  The announcer's hype seemed well over the top as a result.  

When I'm watching wrestling online, I get very random adverts as I block all cookies.  

Oddly though I keep seeing multiple adverts for this - 

https://amzn.eu/d/8coy3dl

Paul E Dangerously - 26 years old

Jim Ross - 39 years old

I wonder what he’ll spend the money on.  

Can you imagine Vince buying TNA or MLW because he can’t stand being out of power?  

3 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

I don't think that's fair at all.

I’m going to be charitable and say that @LaGoosh meant the wider internet/Twitter rather than posters upthread.  I hated that spot and have been consistent about disliking deathmatch AND needlessly dangerous bumps for years so it’s definitely not bad faith here.

11 minutes ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

Turns out she is going to pack it in. So it's going to be Trump v Biden, the rematch that literally no one wants. 

Yeah, just saw that.  Disappointed but it costs an absolute fortune to run these campaigns, so maybe she figures that wins in two states is enough to have made her point.

Looking at polling and vox pops it seems that all these court cases are actually helping Trump with voters, to whom he is successfully able to spin a story about being the victim of a political witch hunt. US voters who are naturally suspicious of federal goverment (and that's a popular view) feel that Trump is being bullied just as they feel bullied by the state.

We're looking at a trial over the insurrection charge in, what, September?  The assumption of the liberal press is that this will negatively affect Trump but I honestly think it might do the opposite.  They need to turn this around, and push the message that the ONLY reason Trump is running again is to try and avoid jail.  If they can persuade voters that he's a criminal, they can beat him - otherwise I think he's going to win.

Just now, LaGoosh said:

Especially now Will Ospreay is in the company who can do every single one of Sammy's spots but better.

And you have Ricky Starks who is twice as charismatic and does the "Latin lover" gimmick way better.  Speaking of... where the hell is Ricky Starks?

2 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Bryan Danielson vs Eddie Kingston - I just hate this strong style shit and maybe I'll never see Kingston in a match I actually like. At least it didn't go on for hours like I expected. A personal thing, I can see why this would work for almost everyone else.

It's a tricky one.  I love the Eddie Kingston character.  He's the realist thing in wrestling today.  I love the way he stomps around, his brawling can be great and he sells well.

BUT there's definitely a law of diminishing returns with this style of match, where he plays the damage sponge and basically gets beaten up terribly for 20 minutes and then hulks up and hits a comeback sequence to win.  It's the old Hogan routine but he's not Hogan.  He's also not a particularly convincing "technical wrestler" mainly due to his body shape I suspect, so sometimes his offence doesn't seem likely.

I'd honestly like to see him win a few convincingly, looking like a dominant champion.  Maybe that's what he's doing on Rampage and I miss it.  At some point in each of his matches I do start thinking "maybe throw up a defence occasionally and stop letting people hit you, it looks like it hurts".

50 minutes ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

Super Tuesday is a big day. I suppose Nikki Haley will have to withdraw from the race after today. Trump will obviously be buoyed by thst but his problems are more financial in nature at the minute. 

I don't think she'll withdraw until the Convention, if she can afford to keep going.  She's gambling that Trump falls foul of the law somewhere between now and November leaving her as the only obvious alternate candidate.  So getting votes in all the states leading up to the Convention solidifies that claim.

53 minutes ago, DavidB6937 said:

I genuinely never had an issue with the Sting/WWE stuff. I didn't think they did that bad by him. BUT if he was unhappy with it then that's all that matters, and I'm damn happy he's had this last run. He deserves it. No one ever seemed to have a bad word to say about him and he's managed to go out on top. Not just as some kind of nostalgia kick but a genuinely decent run.

I don't think he was unhappy with the matches, just with the fact that once he was injured, they considered him retired and that was that.  He wanted to wrestle again for them, they said no.  Similar to Christian, who just got retired by WWE without much consultation.

This was a good send off, and nice to see Sting retiring whilst still relatively healthy.  Fun match, I enjoyed the Bucks trying to break the no-selling Sting to no avail.  I hated the Darby spot, I'm somewhat squeamish about blood nowadays and that was a spot guaranteed to lacerate you.  Not sure deathmatch wrestling had much place in Sting's last match, but I guess if he's ok with it, I am.  I briefly thought they'd killed Flair, but no.

Best other match of the night for me was Strong v Orange.  They are perfect for each other - Roddy's ridiculous strength and backbreaking moves were perfect for Orange and his counter-moves that he does.  Really excellent match and I'd love to see another go-around as a main event some time.

Kyle O'Reilly though, jesus christ.  He looked worse than Flair!

On 3/1/2024 at 6:32 PM, Supremo said:

Just in case you wanted to feel three million years old

Mrs Loki has a new colleague who just started.  Mrs Loki mentioned that something hasn't happened "since the 2008 crash" to which the girl replied "I was three".😢 

There's absolutely the factor that in professional sports generally, the retirement age has been pushed back a decade by improved physio, nutrition, surgery and so on.   Tennis players are retiring mid-40s where they'd be done by 35 in the 80s, sprinters can go on to 40, and so on.  And particularly in wrestling, injuries are taken a lot more seriously.

Then there's the eye of the beholder thing - we're all in our 30s/40s now so that suddenly doesn't seem like such a big deal!

But maybe it's a 90s thing, as there have always been older wrestlers around.  Harley Race was in his 40s as NWA champ, Bockwinkle was AWA champ in his 50s.  And in Japan, Billy Robinson was wrestling in his 60s, Lour Thesz as well.  Obviously those two were seen as "old" but it pushes back the boundary a bit.

Year Of The Dragon (1985, Michael Cimino)

This popped up on Amazon and I was intrigued as Cimino seems like one of those forgotten Hollywood directors, particularly since Heaven's Gate got retconned as a Great American Movie.  Plus, it's starring Mickey Rourke and I love his work.

You can see exactly what this film was meant to be - a kind of Chinese version of The Godfather, and Cimino creates and shoots a fantastic Chinatown, full of detail and characters.  It's a cracking cast too - not only Rourke but Raymond J Barry (Rayland's Dad in Justified), Eddie Jones, Tony Lip (Carmine from Sopranos), Leonard Termo - lots of great character actors.  And the female lead, Ariane, is one of the most attractive people I've ever seen.

There's lots of great action too - some wonderful chases and shootouts, and the film is very atmospheric with little music apart from that coming from the world.  But it's mainly a really BAD film, sadly.  The script is awful and hugely racist throughout - not just in a "these characters are racists" but with lots of awful racial stereotyping including Ariane, who exists in the film only as an Asian chick for Rourke to force himself on.  

The potentially really interesting story of the existence of Triads in New York is completely overshadowed by the main character played by Rourke who is a terrible, terrible person - cruel, racist, violent, out of control and utterly destructive to all around him.  About half of the film seems to revolve around his deteriorating relationship with his wife, which is honestly very boring and sits awkwardly with everything else.  He's probably meant to be an anti-hero but gets the Hollywood hero "walk off whilst snogging heroine" ending so who knows?  Everybody dies, nothing gets solved, it's a really awkward ending to a really awkward film.

You can see why Cimino slipped into relative obscurity.  Heaven's Gate was a huge flop and this was just a mess.

He's an oddity, Cody Rhodes.  His present form is the proto-typical WWE top face, taking vitamins, saying prayers, kissing babies, Make A Wish and so on - but he only got the opportunity to BE this character by leaving WWE and creating this character in a completely new company, that he founded.  A company he ended up leaving mainly because his character no longer fit that company!

He seems beloved by smart fans for his AEW duties, beloved by young WWE fans for being the teutonic hero character, beloved by the wrestling community because of his Dad.  It's like he's become a cypher for people's desires for the future of WWE, even though as @Shane O' Mac Version 2 points out he's REALLY WEIRD.  

I hope he wins, and wins clean at Wrestlemania.  But I do wonder what will happen to this universal support after that.  I  remember how AEW faithful here turned sour on him during the Codyverse era, and that's kind of what I expect him to be as a WWE face world champ.  Enjoy Wrestlemania season because I suspect in a year's time we'll have had enough of The Man Who Fell To Earth and be all in on Rock v Reigns again.

6 hours ago, d-d-d-dAz said:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C39z5cwuf7w/?igsh=MmNqZ3d3c2NudnF6

The nervous breakdown continues apace on ol' Dwayne's social media pages.

"It's all fake lads... yeah, scripted... I'm a good guy!"

As good as the TV may be between now and Mania, people better not retrospectively cast this as a great heel run in a few years time. It's at the point where he could actually learn a few things from Logan Paul and Grayson Waller.

What a muscly wally.

As much as I'm up for laughing at ol' Hollywood, which bit of this is him saying it's all scripted?  Isn't he saying exactly the opposite, trying to claim that it's actually got real and personal?  And the video is a normal hype vid as far as I can tell.

I generally hate the shoot-work bollocks but in this case their real life connections are the entire story so they can't avoid it.