Hit or Miss Volume 17

Hit or Miss Volume 17 is here! Matt Waters and Chris GST join me once again for a wide range of discussion this week!

Hit or Miss: Austin Aries joining Blood Warriors

Matt Waters: Hit. Once you get over the irritation of them going back on the retirement stipulation it makes an awful lot of sense. Blood Warriors were ten members deep before Aries joined, but five of those guys are not brought over to the states regularly (Genki, Saito, Gamma, Kanda, Tanasaki) leaving them a five-man unit. Now consider the current DGUSA storyline; they’ve attacked World-1 (three/four man unit), and Ronin (three man unit). If those two could combine they’d be able to match the might of Blood Warriors. Adding Aries gives them an extra guy that they doesn’t need to be flown over from Japan, and it gives them another main event talent to stack the deck further. PLUS consider who Ronin faced in their first match as a trio: Austin Aries, Genki Horiguchi and Ricochet, foreshadowing the formation of Blood Warriors. And Ronin arguably formed at the expense of Aries and Cima, so you add all of these things to his given reason of finding a purpose with Blood Warriors and I think it’s a pretty damn good move.

Christ GST: Hit. I will have to say this is a minor hit for me as I just really don’t see the point.  Aries has enough to beat up guys by himself and now that he’s in a faction beating on the young guys obviously is built to build up Ronin. Ronin though, weren’t they heels.. ok so now they are baby faces.  I plan on re watching the 2011 shows to see how this would make logical sense.

1 for 1

Hit or Miss: The ending of Cena/Miz at WM27

MW: Miss. I’m struggling to remember a bigger Miss. This is Wrestlemania folks, not one of the randomly name-it-after-what-it-is PPVs or an episode of Raw. How you can close the biggest show of the year with a non-finish and then have it restarted only to end it in five seconds thanks to outside interference with one babyface attacking another is beyond me. This would have been wonderful if it happened on a regular PPV or episode of Raw, but at MANIA?!?! Uh-uh! I understand that it poured an oil tanker worth of fuel on the Cena vs Rock fire, but at the expense of the marquee match? No thank you. If you wanted to do this then at least put Taker/HHH on last so the last image we’re left with isn’t something we just saw for free on Raw the week before. The only glimmer of a positive is that Miz is still champion.

CGST: Miss. God I hated this ending just because it seemed so anti-climatic and no one cared.  The Rock should have meant something and really he didn’t at the end of WM and I do feel that some ppl are thinking that the response on Raw was bad but really they were burnt out maybe and of course why should they care about a match one year down the line in a different town.  Just a huge miss.

2 for 2

Hit or Miss: WGTT beating the KOW

MW: Miss. Purely to be controversial I’m going to say I don’t like Haas & Benjamin’s holier-than-thou attitude (ed. note I can personally attest to this attitude –MG), I didn’t think the title match was all that great, and I don’t like the idea of having champions that won’t be on every show, or half of the champions jumping ship weeks after they won the titles. This being said, the Kings’ time as champions was up and with a babyface world champion you can bet good money they’ll book Eddie vs Claudio and Eddie vs Hero on back to back nights and promote it as a big Kings Weekend or something. Plus we’ve got unfinished business between WGTT and the Briscoes, and a little with the All-Night Express too.

CGST: Hit. We are going to have a great arc going forward with this.  All 4 men can go in the ring and their matches will be fun.  Tag team wrestling is fun to watch when it’s done right and these 2 teams are the top in ROH and could main event shows that ppl will want to see.

2 for 3

Hit or Miss: ANX will be the team to beat WGTT

MW: Miss. Call me crazy, but I think ROH could do a PWG and put the belts back on the Briscoes. This heel turn has been immense and as far as most people are concerned made them interesting again. I’d rather see the ANX beat the Briscoes to take the belts further down the line than WGTT because that just doesn’t seem believable to me at this stage. Briscoes/ANX clearly has huge amounts of potential, so why not cap it off with the ANX taking the titles from them?

CGST: Hit. Kenny King and Rhett Titus are putting on decent matches.  They are the future of ROH and sooner or later they probably should be the team to up end Haas and Benjamin for the titles culminating in the obvious three way including the KoW for the belts.  ROH has generally been good about making their titles mean something and their tag belts for my money mean the most in pro wrestling in terms of Tag championships.  To clarify second on the list are the CHIKARA Campeones de Parajes.

2 for 4

Hit or Miss: Chris Daniels joining the HOT

MW: Hit. The Prophecy was cool and all, but Dan Maff, Donovan Morgan, BJ Whitmer, and Xavier were never setting the world on fire. If you break down the top singles stars in ROH it’s got to be Eddie Edwards, Davey Richards, Roderick Strong, Christopher Daniels and Homicide. Having two of the top five in the same group is a tantalizing concept and with Michael Elgin as their enforcer this faction could be the best in ROH in a very long time, and it comes weeks after I was thinking to myself I miss stables in ROH. Those three alone would make a dominating force, but when you consider they have this open door for recruiting new wrestlers to the group as disciples of Truth it makes me very excited. I just hope they keep both guys in the group rather than having Daniels oust Roddy to turn him back face, at least not for a long while.

CGST: Miss. What.. I just started watching All Stars vs Champions and somehow Roddy and Daniels are team mates.  He beat up Elgin earlier in the night so basically Truth manipulated his own team to have the TV Champion join the HoT because…  I just don’t get it.  I’m not sure where this is going though for my money Roderick Strong is much better as a face so perhaps we’ll see Daniels taking over and Roderick just not liking it til it leads to Roderick leaving.  This is not The Prophecy 2011 so really for me it means nothing.

2 for 5

Hit or Miss: Rock/Cena being booked now for WM 28

MW: Hit. Who doesn’t want to see that match? Ten years after Hogan formally passed the torch to The Rock, we’ll see Cena try to take it for himself. I say that because while I believe it’s a forgone conclusion that Cena will beat Rock, the fact the match will take place in Miami and Cena will be booed more than when he stepped foot in the Hammestein Ballroom if he wins has me second-guessing it. Booking it a year in advance is a good thing too, because even the staunchest Rock defendant can’t deny he looked absolutely exhausted on Raw last week after hitting a few moves. He’s clearly still jacked, but I doubt his conditioning is at the level it was when he was wrestling five nights a week, so this gives him adequate time to train for it. Plus they don’t even need to announce another match to sell that event out immediately.

CGST: Hit. No matter what, Cena is a big name.  The Rock is a big name.  They are going to face each other at the biggest show of the year.  End of story.  Sure the ending to Raw was weird because why are they now shaking hands and trying to one up each other.  They should have been trying to beat each other up and The Corre just got in the way.  But no matter what it is a hit because this could equal huge buy rates and huge numbers as we are almost garunteed The Rock is going to work in the ring.

3 for 6

Chris and Matt went .500 this week. Check back in a couple of weeks for another volume of Hit or Miss (but be sure to read everything else on the site too)!

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