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Post by Kadaveri on Jan 27, 2018 23:19:06 GMT -5
I can't foresee any significant change of mind from myself about this match so might as well nominate right now. I've just finished watching it for the second time. This is the best NXT match ever and Johnny Gargano is one of the best sellers I have ever seen in wrestling. He manages to look totally destroyed just from facial expressions yet at no point does it feel hammy, just pitch perfect. The structure of this match is so excellent, it feels fairly conventional in the opening but then takes you on so many twists you really don't know what's gonna happen next. When's the last time a WWE match had so many believable nearfalls, and yet the match never feels like it's peaked too early? The multiple acts of interference from Zelina Vega really added to the match by adding more insurmountable odds Johnny is having to overcome, and Candice kicking her ass was a great resolution to it that delighted the crowd. You really feel how totally invested they are in the outcome of the match and they're totally behind Johnny, and not in a "I hope the booker made him win" way.
This is going on the list.
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Post by smartmark15 on Jan 28, 2018 2:08:44 GMT -5
Seconded.
So glad to find this here so soon as it might just be the best NXT Championship match in history and certainly a top level MOTYC for 2018. An old school sympathetic babyface fighting in a modern style against a dastardly heel and you have magic. It didn't feel like moves for moves' sake, it was entirely organic and felt like a real battle for the title. All the elements came together to create absolute wonder.
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Post by twfi on Jan 28, 2018 3:29:06 GMT -5
Third this. May be the best match in NXT and think of the ground that covers. Match went long but went quickly by. Best match of 2018.
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Post by tetsujin on Jan 28, 2018 18:11:48 GMT -5
Just watched this. Insane, insane, insane action, very smart wrestling, an incredible heel-face dynamic, great facial expressions and body language, and a perfect crowd. I like Gargano but I wasn't fully involved in his underdog story... until this match. And Andrade, what a vicious, clever bastard; he looked like one of the greatest heels ever here. This is one of those matches where stars are created. The only thing I don't like about this match is that, probably, we are not going to see anything better this year. *****.
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Post by elliott on Feb 4, 2018 1:21:40 GMT -5
I don't mean to comein and be super negative about a match that people are digging, but I just watched this and didn't care for it at all. I don't regularly follow the modern product at all so I don't have any sort of emotional connection to these guys. I've never seen Almas and I've seen Gargano in a few tags i've generally liked. I don't want to say this is just a case of the modern style passing me by because there are modern matches that I really like a lot. But that may be part of it.
I didn't see what any of you guys saw in terms of this amazing face/heel dynamic or great selling by Gargano. I thought his selling was really good in moments, but overall really up and down and uneven. I mean, I get having an adrenaline rush and blowing off damage, but for every single transition in a long match? Really? Almas I thought was fine. I didn't see an all time great heel performance on any level. The only way I really knew he was a heel was the commentary and the fact that his manager occasionally would interfere. The crowd was hot as fuck and clearly invested in the characters. But as someone unfamiliar with the characters, I don't think they did much to engage the viewer aside from work really hard. Which is certainly great. And granted, I'm not their audience. But I don't feel like I know either guy any better even though I just watched them for half an hour.
I don't want to be all negative. Their timing, execution, stamina, bumping etc is incredible. But this really just felt like 30+ minutes of countering shit until someone hits a move then coutering a bunch of shit until someone hits a move over and over for 30 minutes.
Not my thing, but I'm glad people like it.
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Post by shrike02 on Feb 4, 2018 3:46:38 GMT -5
I watched this having seen maybe two Almas matches and one Gargano match before. Like Elliott I really don't follow the modern product. I watch NXT takeovers and the big WWE PPVs.
All I can say is that my reaction was the opposite.
I'd have to watch it again to see if it holds up but I definitely think it's in the 5* range.
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Post by philschneider on Feb 4, 2018 12:07:14 GMT -5
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Post by Cap on Feb 6, 2018 8:38:39 GMT -5
I think Gargano deserves all the credit he is getting, but Almas deserves just as much for this match. Really, I think he has been very good for some time now. His timing is incredible. He moves with urgency. I think the real story here is the escalation of violence as Gargano's heart proves to be a lot to overcome. Almas has a deathblow though. This whole thing was excellent. It surpasses anything I saw in 2017 I think. I need to watch it again soon, but man I'd be surprised if this missed my list as of right now.
As a point of conversation I was talking to a friend of mine about this match. Both of us generally like Gargano, but neither think his offense looks particularly strong. I think his execution is fine, but it doesn't feel like Gargano kills a lot of the life bar with each move. Personally, I think this adds to this match. Gargano wins by surviving a lot of beating and chipping away at his opponents. Here Almas had a little extra help, but he really stepped it up in terms of his own heart and desire to keep the belt. Gargano couldn't put him away because he didn't really have that deathblow that Almas did. I thought that added a really cool dynamic between game plans and styles that drove the evolution of the offense in the match. It was a nice combination of indie style and wwe style in that way to me.
Additionally, I know a lot of people thought Gargano was the right choice and the internal logic of the match itself might say "yes", but I really think Almas was the right choice. He just got the belt and Gargano took advantage of his opportunity to take on a guy who has had his number. If Almas had the belt a little longer and they had built up Gargano's win streak on the way to the title longer, sure. Gargano was on a losing streak not long ago. As of right now, they could bring this match back at Summer Slam, add a wrinkle to Gargano and it would be face-melting hot. They also don't have to put the belt on him. They could let Gargano move up without another shot and I don't think it would seem out of place.
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Post by dkuchler31096 on Feb 13, 2018 21:46:23 GMT -5
I view this match from a different perspective since I was there live. I love how Gargano's selling in the match really works into how everything was done. Almas is great in his role too. I go back to the way I felt watching this match just biting on every fall and loving every minute of watching it. The best match I have ever seen live.
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Post by Kadaveri on Jul 14, 2020 21:53:38 GMT -5
Just rewatched this after hating almost everything Johnny Gargano did in 2019 and haven't even watched his "cinematic match" with Tomasso Ciampa as it sounds atrocious. But this is still top top top stuff. It feels even more of a miracle now I've seen how prone to ridiculous melodrama and no-selling kickout-fests Gargano is. I regret seeming to praise him for this match more than Almas two years ago, I'm now convinced Almas was the better performer here. He does a fantastic job of throwing brutal looking offense at Gargano BUT never really delivering a true deathblow till the end so none of Gargano's big kickouts break believability. Big contrast to the next year when Adam Cole is hitting Gargano with Canadian Destroyers off a ladder and Gargano kicks out at 2... Part of me wonders if what went wrong after this match is him constantly trying to recreate this magic without really understanding what made it work so well.
Still, this is *****
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Post by Cap on Jul 15, 2020 17:31:10 GMT -5
My theory has been that Gargano has been sat firmly under the HBK learning tree and is not quite sure how to make sense of the lessons, thus the melodrama that feels somehow less organic that HBK (for me at least). I just think that Andrade is an exceedingly talented wrestler who had a top notch night and was able to reign in all over Gargano's worst habits and make them work. I think Gargano was already on his trajectory before this match and it feels like an outlier to me. It isn't that I hate Gargano. I think he is really talented and passionate, but I really don't care for a lot of his worst tendencies/tropes and those have been amplified under the WWE banner.
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Post by jamesap on Jul 6, 2022 21:26:57 GMT -5
When I did the last GWWE Match project, this is what I had at number 1. I look at it as a success on every level. I'm going to rewarch it to see how it holds against my other noms in that neighborhood, but it's going to rank high.
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Post by tetsujin on Jan 10, 2023 9:23:50 GMT -5
One of those times when I can really say without exaggeration that this was an instant classic. Everyone loved this match when it happened, I almost never saw such unanimous five-star consideration for a match in my life. So it's hard to live up to the expectations on succesive rewatchs as time goes on.
While this match doesn't have a strong rivalry behind it (it's more of Gargano's individual journey, and Andrade happens to be the one holding the title at the time), they managed to make their fight feel important not only because of that bizarre, incomprehensible Gargano charisma, but also because they inmediately stablish that they are equals, they are on the same level and the match could go either way at any moment. So the suspense is right there from the very beginning and never leaves, because it's just a back and forth match from beginning to end. And I say that in a good way: some (most, I would say) matches relly on crafting different sections according to who's dominating at the moment (the face-in-peril segment, the comeback, the 50-50 nearfalls, that's elemmentary pro wrestling), specially the ones starring a babyface underdog. But not this one. Johnny Gargano is definitely an underdog, but his story here is not about overcoming the odds, there's no monster heel or powerhouse or authority figure in front of him to beat. His story is just about being purely the best wrestler at the moment, and for becoming that he must defeat the best wrestler at the moment, and both him and Andrade give us two monstruous performances that undenniably scream "we're the best wrestlers in the world for one night". They're just constantly attacking, countering, anticipating what the other will do, displaying athleticism and resiliance... It's almost as if there wasn't no heel nor babyface. Just two great wrestlers at their very peak, fighting for the main gold. As simple as that, maybe even too simple in a GME context (because there are a lot other matches with much more strong, emotional connection to the story and characters). There are some times where you can clearly tell they're collaborating for some of the biggest spots in the first half of the match, but normally it flows very well. And the usually narcisist hardcore crowd of Philly ates it all.
The second half elevates things, as it should. Now Zelina Vega is becoming nervous as fuck, so she starts to interfere, bringing the match to a more classic territory, and I really liked that. But, no matter what, Gargano will not fucking fall. His heroic resistance could have supposed a start making performance if he (or NXT bookers/agents, whatever) didn't use it for the rest of the big matches of his life, but here, just in this match, it definitely works. Candice taking out Zelina was a huge satisfyng moment and probably my favourite of the match (ironic considering it's the only one spot of the match not involving the two wrestlers of it), and it leads to a bittersweet ending with Andrade beating Gargano clean after a BRUTAL running double knees onto the turnbuckle and the upgraded version of his finisher. Yeah, Gargano still wasn't at the status of surviving that, not yet. But still, I believe he should have won here and the Ciampa rivalry should have been for the NXT Title, it was clearly the biggest program of the brand and Andrade ended up dropping the title to Aleister Black just to go to the "main" roster, so fuck it, I think the result kinda hurts the match a bit in retrospective.
Overall, a fantastic match. As I said, it's not GOATC territory for me (very few matches are), but I shall give it the highest score I can give to a match that is not GOATC. ****1/2
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