McXal's Reviews

This week our character profile TV special spotlights Matt Taven. He is one of the most decorated athletes in ROH history having held the World, TV, Tag and Six-Man Championships, and also boasts a Top Prospect Tournament win among his successes as well. 

Taven comes off as quite dorky and almost sweet as he talks about starting 2016 injured, having destroyed his knee at Final Battle 2015. It gave him the time to evaluate his career, and he looked at how former ROH stable-mate Adam Cole had become a World Champion used Cole as a template for elevating himself to the next level. He briefly touches on his singles match with Cole at Masters Of The Craft 2017 (and rightly calls it a really under-rated bout). 

His friendship with Dalton Castle is briefly touched upon, albeit largely with Taven staying in character. He says beating Castle before he went to CMLL made him believe he truly was a 'Real World Champion' and credits his Final Battle 2018 win over Dalton with making people truly believe he was a main event player.

He calls his one-hour draw with Jay Lethal at the 17th Anniversary his proudest moment in ROH, even above winning the title at Madison Square Garden. It is a great match, which ROH really over-hyped at the time, but it would actually go on to become pretty under-rated. More people should check it out.

My interest is piqued when Taven talks about his World Title reign. Obviously he has to be selective with what he says, but he complains that he defended the title so often that 'so many matches flew under the radar'...which is a diplomatic way of saying that his body of work was really under-appreciated. He is completely right on that. I will go to my grave thinking that him winning the belt at MSG was a TERRIBLE decision, but people hold that and ROH's nose-dive in quality in 2019 against him personally, to the detriment of their ability to recognise that most of his title reign was very good when it comes to in-ring match quality. He lists his defence against Haskins as a prime example of this.

A TV edit of Matt Taven vs Mark Haskins for the World Title at War Of The Worlds 2019: Grand Rapids is shown.

We jump around Taven's ROH timeline a little, heading back to 2018. He touches on his history with Ultimo Guerrero in CMLL, and was happy he got to work with him in ROH as well. He thinks his TV match with Guerrero in 2018 was the night that people started to think he could become World Champion. If you checked out my review, you'll see that that certainly wasn't my take-away (although I did really like it)...

A TV edit of Matt Taven vs Ultimo Guerrero from ROH TV Episode 354 is shown.

Matt tries to end on an uplifting note, talking about the hard work and rehab he is doing to heal from the ankle injury that was keeping him out of action at the start of 2020. Vincent interrupts the broadcast (this does look like new footage self-shot by Vincent himself) and taunts Taven for being arrogant and spending an hour talking about himself. He says that historians may look back on 2019 as 'the last great year of society', and is delighted that it ended with Final Battle 2019 where he beat Taven and put him on the injured list...

Tape Rating - N/A - This was perhaps the most interesting of these character profile specials thus far. It moved at an incredibly brisk pace, it skipped over the entirety of the House Of Truth/Hoopla-era Taven (which wasn't great at the time and has aged incredibly poorly) to talk about Matt's more recent history...and contained just enough nuggets of what I perceived to be 'legitimate' sentiment in amongst the corporate platitudes. The way he talked about being under-appreciated during his title reign, or trying to emulate Adam Cole as someone who had forged a path which he felt he could follow all felt very real. It helps that we also had a Vincent promo at the end, providing the first 'new' content that we'd seen in some time. That is significant; self-shot content that set the ball rolling on the two of them stretching out a feud which wouldn't get settled until the summer of 2021.