ROH on Sinclair – Episode 144 – 21st June 2014
I absolutely slaughtered last week’s episode as they chose to air Global Wars Road Rage footage and thus wasted valuable time they could have spent promoting this weekend’s ppv debut (whilst giving away some of the best bits of a previous ippv for free). It was inexcusable, not that I suppose anyone from Sinclair really cares as long as the episode was produced on the cheap. Thankfully tonight we do have a last ditch grab for Best In The World 2014 buys as Larry Mercer and Mandy Leon (a graduate of the ROH Dojo making her televised debut) host a preview show.
Mandy seems very wooden and nervous in her delivery during the show opening – but she’s a pretty girl so I’m betting very few people noticed that.
The first match spotlighted is Kevin Steen vs Silas Young, with highlights of the Steen/Nakamura War Of The Worlds match, and subsequent showdown with Silas shown. Young gets some promo time too.
Roderick Strong vs Cedric Alexander is announced for BITW. It’s their third encounter, they are tied 1-1 right now, and will settle the score in a Submission Match. Mandy vouches for Cedric and says he isn’t disrespectful like The Decade say he is.
reDRagon are claiming to be the best tag team in ROH history, and have a chance to cement that claim if they can defeat Frankie Kazarian and Christopher Daniels when they return to the promotion tomorrow night. Clips from The Fish Tank are shown, with them complaining that ROH are once again bringing in outsiders to challenge them because none of the core roster can beat them. O’Reilly is nothing short of brilliant in the segment.
To wet the appetite for Daniels’ return, highlights of the main event of ROH on HDNet Episode 93 are shown. That was the night he defeated Eddie Edwards to become TV Champion. Prazak and Hog were so much more fun than Kevin Kelly.
The Briscoes tell Matt Hardy that they’re ‘not from cartoon-land’ and aren’t like the guys he used to wrestle in the WWF. Jay wants his property (the ICONIC Title belt) back. Meanwhile Maria Kanellis calls them the ‘history’ of ROH, with The Kingdom being the present and future.
The next segment spotlights the Cole/Elgin World Title Match, and is included as a DVD extra on one of the ‘Road To Best In The World’ DVD’s (Night 1 I think). Quite sensibly the preview show ends by showing the entirety of the angle including Cole, Elgin, Maria, Bennett and MsChif from the recent ‘Road To Best In The World Night 2’ event.
Tape Rating - N/A - As a fifty minute infomercial for the pay-per-view this was a solid episode. It felt a lot like those WWE pre-ppv hype shows hosted by Scott Stanford (or whomever does that now), and I mean that in a positive sense. The clips were well organised, there were some nice video packages and a few strong promos too. Larry and Mandy were pretty corny as hosts, but they had plenty of enthusiasm which is the most important thing. Immeasurably better to promote your forthcoming pay-per-view than giving away one of your last ppv presentations for free.