Backstage Titus is on speakerphone with Tozawa, until Daivari rudly comes & hangs up on Titus. Daivari shouts out great Iranian wrestlers like Hassan Yazdani & informs Tozawa they're wrestling next. No shoutout for Hossein Khosrow Vaziri? C'mon.
Graves is wearing a mismatched shirt & jacket with a horrible pastel plaid pocket square. Vic Joseph sticks with his usual vanilla stylings (and announcing).
Daivari & Tozawa have a nice little match until Tozawa goes up top for the top rope thing-of-beauty senton & Neville comes out to attack him for the DQ. He does a Gollum impression & locks in the Rings of Saturn so hard Tozawa spits out his mouthguard.
Gulak - looking like he just came from his Bar Mitzvah - apologizes for attempting a top-rope move two weeks ago, and challenges Mustafa Ali to a two-out-of-three falls match. I'm into it.
Next we get a little Swann/TJP vignette, and then Swann is out for a match against... Mario Conners. How it's written is what it sounded like, as Vic Joseph doesn't bother to know who's in the match & has to obviously get the answer piped in. Graves acquits himself slightly better, but calls Swann's awesome silver sequined jacket "hideous" which puts him on my shit list for the rest of the night. We get a semi-surprise observer as TJP's music hits & he struts out acting very heelish. Swann gets the W with the Phoenix Splash after a nice little match.
TJP has the mic and challenges..... the jobber who Swann just beat? Didn't see that one coming. Jobber doesn't look that excited about it, but is game. TJP claims he can beat him in half the time of Swann. Turns out Swann did it in 3:49. TJP gets the job done with the detonation kick in 0:28. TJP cocky heels it up in the ring as we cut to Cedric Alexander preparing for his "I quit" match against Noam Dar. Darn, I was hoping they'd forgotten about that.
Gentleman Jackie G's music hits, but it's The Bryan Kendrick sporting a not-half-bad three-piece-and-bowtie outfit and the world's worst English accent. He heels it up for a while until Jack comes out. Wait a minute, The Bryan's outfit is actually better than Gallagher's. We get some fisticuffs & an umbrella beatdown by The Bryan on The Gent.
It is my dedication to you all, my loyal reader(s?), that I am staying for this "main event." We get a way-too-long recap of this feud, and Dar is out with Fox, followed by Cedric with no pop.
Eh, they try (as does Fox), but this match is a total heat sink. Ending comes when Alexander traps Dar's arm in a chair and stomps it for a while while Alicia Fox looks on from about 3 feet away & doesn't break it up. Dar then dumps Alicia which gets the most heat of the match. Then he cuts the world's most tedious promo on Alicia as she cries in the corner, and that's a wrap. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please let this angle be over.
Bad show. The good feuds got angle development instead of matches (Kendrick/Gallagher, Tozawa/Neville, Swann/TJP), the bad feuds got angle development AND matches. But looking forward to Ali/Gulak next week.
I'll visit next week NYC and can't see RAW. Anybody knows, where in New York City I can see Raw???? Too bad, that The World don't excist anymore. Was a cool place to be on Monday's and Thursday's. But thanks for the help and info.
Thread rated: 5.09
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