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First, worst, best, last


JNLister

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Interesting that a few people now have mentioned long matches among the 'worst' they've seen live. Granted, most of these mentions are Corino vs. Snow which is a special case, but it makes me wonder - are long matches (40 minutes plus) generally just more boring to see live than they are to watch on TV?

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The majority of matches over 25 minutes tend to be shit. It's very rare that you can't tell your story in that time. There used to seemingly bit of a school of thought though that great matches have to be long, but now it's good to see that people deem that utter bollocks.

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I've just remembered a match that I think should replace my original choice of "Worst":

 

Multi-man elimination tag, AWA:UK Summer Legends show: This was hilarious, and the funniest thing about it, everyone involved knew it was awful, promoter John Chapman included. Poor old John had to deal with a lot that day, with Kendo being a cunt and a few people pulling out or re-scheduling; he ended up having to keep changing the line-up of this "IPW:UK vs. AWA:UK" multi-man match until it just got ridiculous.

 

Dropkixx' training ring, which is ramshackle and very small, in a 17-man elimination tag, which saw Dragon Aisu confused and coming out with the wrong team (IIRC, he got a lot of ribbing about it later), and both teams so big they surrounded the entirety of the ropes, and were right next to each other, not to mention the crowd couldn't see. And that was just the guys who could fit on the apron; there were guys having to swap places on the apron and on the floor just to tag in and out.

 

One good thing: it was the first time anyone had ever seen Spud play a heel, and he was basically Scrappy-Doo.

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The majority of matches over 25 minutes tend to be shit. It's very rare that you can't tell your story in that time. There used to seemingly bit of a school of thought though that great matches have to be long, but now it's good to see that people deem that utter bollocks.

 

My two favourites were definitely more than 25, and the Thunder/Simmons one was a good 40-45 (and all the better for it - it built perfectly in that venue on that night), but yeah, to take match length as an indicator of quality is ridiculous. Generally unless you're doing something really special and really important, main events should be inside 30 minutes for sure. If you can't absorb people, they'll get bored, even if it's something that's conventionally long like a rumble. There are indy guys out their with a hard-on for Flair/Steamboat and whatever else, which is no bad thing in itself, but they learn the wrong lessons and think that a 60 minute match makes them old-school geniuses. I don't think any wrestling fan on the planet would object to a 60 minute match if it was fucking great and needed to be that long to tell its story, but likewise nobody wants to shit through a match that's long for the sake of long, like that fucking dire Chickfight match that was on before an IPW show and was just 45 minutes of structureless brawling.

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that fucking dire Chickfight match that was on before an IPW show and was just 45 minutes of structureless brawling.

 

I remember a bunch of people going on about how this was an incredible match, at the exact same time that we all were stunned by the shite that we were witnessing.

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I wasn't there for that one but I saw it when RQW put it on TV. It was stunningly bad. Just the perfect example of context-oblivious NWA fetishism in modern indies.

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First: Some show at the Derngate in Northampton in 1992 which had the Rock and Roll Express on, which I naively thought would have been the WCW version (what with me being 12), but was probably Blondie Barratt. All I can remember about the first match is that it had some South African guy as the face, whose main gimmick was smacking the other bloke in the balls every time he lifted his arm up from a pinning position. Oh, and the referee didn

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Great idea for a thread and fun reading everyone's responses. It's gone 5am and, for some unknown reason, I'm still awake so I'll come out of UKFF retirement for this one

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The majority of matches over 25 minutes tend to be shit. It's very rare that you can't tell your story in that time. There used to seemingly bit of a school of thought though that great matches have to be long, but now it's good to see that people deem that utter bollocks.

 

My two favourites were definitely more than 25, and the Thunder/Simmons one was a good 40-45 (and all the better for it - it built perfectly in that venue on that night), but yeah, to take match length as an indicator of quality is ridiculous. Generally unless you're doing something really special and really important, main events should be inside 30 minutes for sure. If you can't absorb people, they'll get bored, even if it's something that's conventionally long like a rumble. There are indy guys out their with a hard-on for Flair/Steamboat and whatever else, which is no bad thing in itself, but they learn the wrong lessons and think that a 60 minute match makes them old-school geniuses. I don't think any wrestling fan on the planet would object to a 60 minute match if it was fucking great and needed to be that long to tell its story, but likewise nobody wants to shit through a match that's long for the sake of long, like that fucking dire Chickfight match that was on before an IPW show and was just 45 minutes of structureless brawling.

Match time man say Thunder vs Simmons is listed at 34.32 on the IPW:UK website, and I trust the source...

 

I plan on having a go at this thread at some point today.

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Best. Shingo Takagi vs Susumu Yokosuka III on DG UK's last tour. Just mental. It is not very often in these days when we as fans know so much that you can totally get into a match. I am not ashamed to say that I completely lost my shit during this match, especially the last 10 minutes. About as close to a religious experience as a non believer like myself is ever likely to get.

 

Brilliant little paragraph that. Same match that I picked for my favourite live bout too.

 

Best: Rey Mysterio vs Eddie Guerrero at the Smackdown Summer Bash outdoor show in the RDS Dublin in June 2005.Was just an incredible match with a brilliant atmosphere,also helped that I had seats in the front row!

 

Those two squared of in Manchester too on that same tour. I was actually quite disappointed with the result (as I was with most of the matches) as they just seemed to be standing, facing each other, circling around the ring for ridiculously long amounts of time, and stalling at every opportunity. Everyone seemed reluctant to lock up and get some action flowing that night, I felt. I know they don

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First: It was some shit little show at a Butlins, where the ring was about 30 centimetres of the ground. The heel was some fat bald bloke who stalled the whole time and the babyface was a young slim bloke who came to the ring with a fluffy toy fox that he talked to. One thing I specifically remember is the babyface looking like he had pissed himself when he came down to the ring because there were weird wet patches on his crotch.

 

Worst: A tag match with the UK Stone Cold & UK Undertaker vs. someone else from an All-Star show in Croydon. Strangely the UK Undertaker also earlier in the night had a match as the UK X-Pac. I guess because he was the only person on the card who had long hair. Stone Cold & Undertaker came out together to the "The Brood"'s theme music, their opponents to "I Feel Like A Woman". During the utterly tedious match that followed the ring announcer tried to get the crowd involved by saying "Come on, let's go Stone Cold!". Also it was filled with those fucking shit and ridiculous "public warnings" by the ref.

 

Best: Super Dragon & Davey Richards vs. Chris Bosh & Scott Lost from PWG European Vacation at Orpington. Seeing my favorite wrestler ever Super Dragon in the flesh was a damn near religious experience for me. Him & Richards are also probably my favorite tag team ever and seeing them in a brutal, hard hitting 30 minute scorcher with Lost & Bosh (who I also loved) was just amazing. On the short list: Jody Fleisch vs Jonny Storm from Revival, El Generico vs. Pac from an IPW:UK show.

 

Last: From the Smackdown taping in London this year, a post show match of Shaemus vs. Daniel Bryan that I didn't really pay attention to because I was packing my coat and bag up so I could fuck off home. Fun show overall though.

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Interesting that a few people now have mentioned long matches among the 'worst' they've seen live. Granted, most of these mentions are Corino vs. Snow which is a special case, but it makes me wonder - are long matches (40 minutes plus) generally just more boring to see live than they are to watch on TV?

 

 

The majority of matches over 25 minutes tend to be shit. It's very rare that you can't tell your story in that time. There used to seemingly bit of a school of thought though that great matches have to be long, but now it's good to see that people deem that utter bollocks.

 

 

I wouldn't say a long match is inherently good or bad. It's more a case that a good match is probably going to be better by going longer (to a point), while a bad match is definitely going to be worse by going longer. It can depend on personal context as well: a lengthy match that's great on video might not be so much fun if you're in the building and are worrying about missing the train.

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worst: cleethorpes at thorpe park think was when i was 9 or 10 but i realised the same people who put the ring up and wrestled on the same show in front of about 10 screaming kids even a old lady hit one with a bag lol

 

first: baths hall in scunny where british bulldog came short after he left wwf was in awe unfortunatly nothing like that will come here ever again

 

last: same place when i was 16 but a crappy wwe tribute show then i realised i would never watch ever again

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FIRST was Koko B Ware VS Kwang in Telford on the WWF 1994 post-Mania XX European Tour which we've established in several other threads that several other forummers went to various nights of same tour.

 

LAST was the aforementioned Hogan/Sting/Storm VS Angle/Roode/Bully Ray in Manchester. I wet me little keks.

 

WORST is hard for me because I've seen so many matches that were probably just really dull and failed to leave much of an impression. However the one that stands out in my mind as offensive, was the previously mentioned Snow/Corino match at A Cruel Twist Of Fate. It just meandered on and on and dragged so badly. I was practically falling asleep, and amazed I mustered any enthusiasm for the rest of the card. A dizzying procession of run ins, an unnecessary fake injury angle (which seemed to last ten minutes) and a general feeling near the end that they didnt know what they were doing or what the finish was meant to be. It really didnt help that since it was for the AWA title, it was perfectly bloody obvious that Corino would be winning from the opening bell to the final bell, which seemed to ring about three hours later.

 

BEST I honestly have difficulty with too because there are several that stand out of different match types in many different settings from different promotions and I find it hard to compare them. In terms of matches not televised in a mainstream (i.e. Western) sense, I'd probably have to say Daisuke Sekimoto VS Masato Tanaka in the final group stage match at last years Fire Festival. An intense, dramatic, 30-minute belter built around the simple story of "winner goes through" which gets hotter still despite the wrestlers fatigue as they edge nearer the time limit draw, which is enough for Sekimoto but not Tanaka.

 

In terms of wrestlers known to those of you that dont follow the Chinese scene, I got incredibly emotionally invested in the Danielson/McGuinness match at ROH Unified. My head is visibly in my hands during the final Cattle Mutilation, as I suspected it was curtains for Nige.

 

In terms of "no, never actually made it onto any telly anywhere ever" then an incredibly smooth sprint/spotfest pitting the Motor City Machine Guns against Petey Williams and Sonjay Dutt from one of the TNA Liverpool house shows. Took my breath away.

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