Against the grain wrestling opinions

[westlondonmist]

3 hours ago, BomberPat said:

I'm more thinking indie shows - your show doesn't need to have ten matches, particularly when six of them are functionally the same as each other. Less is more. Give me 4-6 matches where each one offers me something different to the others.

I remember I went to see a lucha show at the Royal Albert Hall, it only had 4 matches but basically all the matches were very different. You had a minis, an intergender tag, Penta vs Fenix Jr and then as main event you had a 6 man tag. It was a great show by the way, I'm sure I've seen better matches live but each one showed a different aspect of lucha libre. 

 

In the end wrestling has kind of been ruined by all the TV time they have to fill. They have to have a shit ton of matches to fill a shit ton of time. I enjoy a good match, but good matches are ten a penny but I don't think good feuds are. Good feuds are what make you think I have to watch next week. In hindsight some of the best matches are the ones that had great build.

 

[tiger_rick]

6 minutes ago, westlondonmist said:

In hindsight some of the best matches are the ones that had great build.

I think that's something that's become more obvious through the years. Not just the build but, the outcome are important to a match being great. That's not to say ring work can't be very good and create an enjoyable match that didn't have much riding on it. WWE PPVs for years were full of them and some of the minor AEW PPVs have relied on that too after being thrown together.

A truly great match has anticipation and a lasting impression that the others don't. Warrior & Savage was the first match I ever thought was truly great - and still do - and it's because the stuff in the ring is really good and tells a great story but the feud bubbling for months after Savage challenged Warrior and was rebuked before costing him the WWF Title with the greatest ever run in and the outcome with Warrior retiring Savage who then reunited with Liz is exceptional. Their feud drew really decently at a time when Warrior was struggling and Warrior had a ton of momentum going into the post-Mania run with Undertaker, which also drew really well. Just a fantastic example of how judging a match bell to bell doesn't tell half the story.

[BomberPat]

I think a match has to hold up on its own merits. Warrior and Savage is fantastic, and the build does so much to make it so, but it would be a good match without that build, while a bad match with good build remains a bad match.

The ideal for me is that someone who has never seen wrestling before should be able to follow the story of the match, should understand why the wrestlers do what they do, and they should understand who the face and the heel are, ideally before the bell has even rung. But that also requires seeing a "match" as curtain-to-curtain rather than bell-to-bell; the entrances are part of the match, the aftermath is part of the match, the reunion with Elizabeth is part of Warrior vs. Savage, and to rate the match without it is to miss the point. 

Televised wrestling obviously has the advantage of being able to give you a snazzy video package explaining the story up until now (and often cherry-picking that story to make it better; I've often said that WWE are better at booking a Wrestlemania highlight package than they are at booking a Wrestlemania), and of having a commentary team to (if they're doing their job properly) guide you through the story and explain how everything works, and generally all the other supplementary stuff and bells and whistles, so they can get a bit more involved than a little local indie can - I can always tell when an indie show is trying to book as if they had television, and it never works. 

I agree on lasting impression mattering, though. My most important metric is "did it work in the room?", and after that it's, "will it stick with you?". There have been so many five star matches in the last few years that I forgot about by the end of the week, while there are less critically acclaimed matches that have stuck with me for 20+ years.