Dear lord, are we actually diving into the dreaded period of TNA from the year 2010… again?
But yeah, see, they tell me this is a good show… and there’s a really good Kurt Angle match on this show… which is where we’re doing this show as part of Kurt Angle Appreciation week. Let’s dive in and check this show out.
Rob Van Dam defeated James Storm in what I thought was a fun little opener. RVD was his usual smokin’ self (pun intended, of course) and James Storm can more than hold his own and thensome when he needs to. Off to a good start in this 2010 TNA PPV. Now, of course, RVD winning means that Team Hogan gets the man advantage in Lethal Lockdown… basically in a Wargames match, a coin toss determines which team gets a man in first. More often that not, it’s the heel team that wins the toss because it makes for better drama. But in the case, Team Hogan is the babyface team, so them getting a man advantage doesn’t quite have the same effect. I’d be more upset about this if I actually cared and fortunately, we’re far past that point now.
Homicide defeated Brian Kendrick, Chris Sabin, and Alex Shelley in a four-way “escape the cage” match to be inserted into the X-Division title match later on. Homicide and Kendrick worked together for a bit before Homicide high-tailed it out of the cage for the win. That made me laugh. A bit on the short side of things, but it was fun while it lasted.
Kevin Nash kills Eric Young… sorry, I should probably rephrase that since Eric Young has been killed once too many in TNA… Kevin Nash SQUASHES Eric Young in a short, one-sided affair. I don’t get the heel distracting the refs for some reason; it’s a cage match, there are no DQs in a cage match… but then again, this is TNA; I’ve seen them pull off stupider shit here and there. Well, this show was fun while it lasted.
Knockouts Tag-Team Champions The Beautiful People (Velvet Sky & Madison Rayne) defeated Tara (a.k.a. Victoria/Lisa Marie) and Knockouts Champion Angelina Love to not only retain their titles, but since Madison scored the winning pinfall over Tara, she also wins the KO title… even though Tara was NOT the champion. If anyone ever wanted to know why TNA had the better women’s wrestling over WWE back in the day, don’t show them this match. This was dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL.
Frankie Kazarian defeated Homicide and Shannon Moore in a three-way cage match to win the vacant X-Division champion. Apparently, previous champion Doug Williams had travel issues and TNA saw fit to strip him of the title because… reasons, I guess. Anyway, a bunch of moves and Kazarian hits Homicide on his head with a sick move to score the win. My heads hurts as much as Homicide’s did just by watching this show alone. Not a fan.
Team 3D defeated Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, who went by “The Band” here because they couldn’t use Outsiders, Wolfpac, or nWo, for obvious reasons. Amazing that they got Kevin Nash to work twice on one show. So this is a falls-count-anywhere street fight on a show where every match is supposed to be a cage match and look, I’ll be honest; I had more fun with this match than I would’ve thought. Didn’t expect Scott Hall to take a 3d through a table and NOT kick out. That takes restraint or something.
Kurt Angle defeated Mr. Anderson… Anderson in an escape the cage rules that saw Angle choke out Anderson with his gold medals (the ones he won with a broken frickin’ neck) and getting out the cage door… but not before stomping Mr. Anderson’s Andersons for good measure. There’s some silliness with Anderson having the key to the door and Kurt tossing it out, but other than that, this was a tremendous match. And listen, I tend to not look upon TNA 2010 with much high regard or fondness – just go back to my Impact musings from those days to see how much disdain I had for that product when watching it on a weekly basis. Every once in a while, there’s something from those days that pique my interest and almost makes it worth sitting through what has been a largely dreadful PPV event. Angle/Anderson is a superb match; probably one of the best Ken Anderson matches I’ve seen in a good long while, and I don’t recall a lot of Ken Anderson matches that were THIS good. For as much shit as I give 2010 TNA, every once in a while, they’ll produce a wonderful gem and this is that wonderful gem. And had you ended the show on this note… yeah, it still would’ve been a bad show, but it would’ve been a bad show capped off with an excellent main event.
Unfortunately, the show continued…
TNA World Champion AJ Styles defeated The Pope D’Angelo Dinero to retain the title. The match was alright, sometimes even good… but it was following a far better match and these felt a bit… lesser. No sure way of making this WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP TITLE BOUT feel like an afterthought than seeing AJ Styles win the match and then we cut TO THE BACK so we can get a shot of Eric Bischoff – fresh off complaining about Dave Meltzer again – arriving at the arena.
Team Hogan (Abyss, Jeff Hardy, Rob Van Dam, Jeff Jarrett) defeated Team Flair (Sting, James Storm, Robert Roode, Desmond Wolfe… a.k.a. Nigel McGuiness) in a Lethal Lockdown match that saw Abyss (who may or may not still have Hulk Hogan’s WWE Hall of Fame ring of power – the less said, the better) pin Wolfe for the win. Oh, and Eric punched Flair at one point, causing him to fall into thumb tacks. This match was fucking horrible. It made my head hurt. The fact that Hogan’s team won shouldn’t be a surprise since it’s 2010, both Hogan and Flair are… fuck, I can’t even say the word “retired” with a straight fucking face knowing how THAT turned out. Yeah, Wargame-type matches are always going to be hit and miss, but there have been some exceptionally good ones over the years. This wasn’t one of them, obviously. This was off by a country mile or two.
If you can, watch the Angle/Anderson match if TNA has that match on Youtube and skip the rest of this show. It’s absolutely dreadful. Fortunately, we’re ditching TNA for a quality WWF PPV featuring Kurt Angle in the main event and a milestone of sorts in the great Kurt Angle career.
Unfortunately, it’s also during the Invasion angle.
Stay tuned, I guess…
dtm666 