Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I was reading a review of an old TNA PPV (Surrender 2006) and the one match that caught my eye was LAX vs Christopher Daniels and AJ Styles in an Ultimate X-Match for the titles.  I really enjoyed the action when I watched this match, but the play-by-play here made me notice something: it was just action.  I know this is TNA's MO, but the description of the match made it clear that there was little substance outside of move after move.  The syntax of the write-up primarily was a list of moves, mostly finisher level moves that had no build, except for the best move of the night, which was Daniels' leap onto the center to capture the titles.

The syntax and usage of just transitionless, non-linked moves reveals a core weakness in TNA matches: no story telling.  When there is story telling, it's pretty badly done on average.  But the X-Division gets special criticism from me as it's the division of the company's future (whatever that means, right?).  The moves without a doubt are cool, but I dislike the lack of logical linking between them.  And the lack of selling just kills the product in the end and makes people look like supermen stuntmen. 

The thing for me is that the guys in the X-Division have been wrestling each other quite consistently for the past few years.  Let them mature as a division rather than just having them pull off the same moves.  The X-Division's novelty in action can wear off fast once a new person familiarizes themselves with the people's in ring persona (meaning the moves they do, etc.).  After that point the wrestlers have to expand from just trying to execute a wrestling move, to learning how to create meaningful matches.  Take for instance Sanjay Dutt, Jay Lethal, Chris Sabin and Alex Shelley.  I think they just wrestle each other over and over again.  The matches are so repetitive after a while that people only are trained to expect larger-than life moves.  Great.  But they never ask, "What's next?" 

Compare their matches to the Liger vs Sano, Eddy Guerrero vs Dean Malenko, Booker T vs Chris Benoit, Misawa vs Kobashi/Kawada.  The key in those matches is that despite wrestling each other consistently, there's noticeable growth as their experience with each other deepens.  From a match perspective, these things are obvious: they learn how to counter key moves in each other's arsenal.  From an experience point of view, it's a matter of adding things to make the newer matches more interesting.  The layering of the moves, learning to defy expectations when a certain key move is performed, countering the biggest moves that cause a wrestler's defeat.  Of course in some cases like Misawa vs Kobashi/Kawada the announcers help augment this viewpoint by bringing up the history in the matches to provide more credibility and emphasis on the counters.  In TNA, Tenay (who should know better) and West barely allow their audience any time to digest a match's content, which means the strings of fights these wrestlers have go to nothing.

I know probably the wrestlers are more aware of this fault than many of us on the net realize.  And it's most likely a booking committee or company policy to enforce such ideas in these matches.  However, I think that if TNA wants to get more for their buck in re-cycling these wrestlers against each other, it has to advance the interaction between these wrestlers.  West as an announcer needs to go beyond a basic play-by-play in terms of just calling action as well as constantly and annoying reminding the audience how great certain wrestlers are to linking the matches together by concretely showing the history between the wrestlers.  For instance, he should not just say, "Oh, Shelley and Dutt faced each other numerous times."  He needs to historicize these accounts and demonstrate how a previous match works off the current one.  The bouts themselves have little to no linking so the matches seem even more thrown together than they are. A lot of wasteful drama and so-called onscreen character building could be devoted more towards intertwining matches together.  That way at the very least it makes TNA seem like they somewhat care that they've thrown Dutt vs Shelley vs Sabin vs Lethal together in a thoughtful way rather than the current message they're sending, which is, "Hey these guys work well together but we don't want to mess up the top storylines by mixing them up with people like Angle or Joe."