Board 8's Match of the Week - Some More Good Matches [MOTW] [APWT]

Board 8

NXT 4-Way
The longer I watch wrestling, the less I like multi-way matches, especially the way modern WWE does them. There's an honest-to-God minute-long rest hold halfway through this match. A rest hold! Neville and Breeze are laying on the ground outside of the ring and Kidd has Zayn in a rest hold. There's just no reason to do things like that in a match with four wrestlers - despite what a lot of dumb Twitter weirdos will tell you, headlocks are not inherently good storytelling simply by virtue of being headlocks.

The match definitely picks up from there, though. Kidd plays a pretty good heel for the first bit and gets the benefit of being the smart one dissolving the temporary alliance with Breeze as soon as he recognized it was getting contentious. It's not a hot take to say his career was really on the upswing at this point - it's too bad he had to retire so soon afterward. Sami Zayn is and always was the consummate underdog. It's too bad he's retired now too. Breeze is a guy who was probably never as good as a lot of people claimed but was certainly much better than he's gotten to show in the years since this run, and he had some fantastic flurries down the line. Like Bidoof said, the most unassuming participant is the champion, but that's obviously by design, as his slow-burn heel turn finally starts coming to a head when he pulls the ref out.

Ultimately, a very good match with a lot of moving parts to work with that mostly manages itself well. It's held back in my mind a bit by the fact that multi-man matches have a bit of an inherent ceiling for me and that general WWE malaise has me looking back on even good things like this with an attitude that's not exactly conducive to enjoying myself to the fullest. But yeah, there's a lot of nice stuff there.

PS: If I'm permitted a quick aside rant, there are few things more annoying to me in wrestling commentary than someone trying to sell something that happens literally all the time by saying something like "I've never seen anything like that before!" That happens in this match with a Tower of Doom spot. Literally, it's a spot that happens so often that it has its own name, and we've got supposed experts screaming at us about how insane and unbelievable it is. It's such a credibility undermining thing - how little wrestling could you possibly watch if you've never seen a Tower of Doom before?
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