By Darren Gutteridge
ROH TV Hits
Bobby Fish vs. Hangman Page for the ROH TV Title: I wanted to split this in two as I have done in the past, with a Hit going towards the match and a Miss going to the result. The match, while a little short, was very high in quality. However, it felt like Page’s time to get the title. Fish is heading towards nothing more than a rematch with Dragon Lee at Final Battle, and this was the last chance for ROH to load up the Bullet Club with all the gold prior to the expected dethroning of Adam Cole by Kyle O’Reilly. Ultimately, the match quality and the effort being put into making Fish (and by extension the TV Title) look fantastic made this a surefire Hit.
Dalton Castle and Colt Cabana vs. Keith Lee and Shane Taylor: An improvement on the match that preceded it thanks to better storytelling. After planting the seeds in their backstage segment prior to the match, I expected ROH to blow through the whole “Colt turns heel on Dalton” storyline in one episode. However, they held fire, and instead hinted at the cracks starting to show, with extra help from Steve Corino and Kevin Kelly fanning the flames via commentary. A Cabana heel turn may be tricky to do, but I’m willing to give it a chance.
ROH TV Misses
Team CMLL vs. The Addiction and Kamaitachi: It was hard to get invested in the CMLL guys with zero exposure, a task made doubly hard by the knowledge that ROH were unlikely to book a heel Addiction against a heel Kingdom in the next round. Though I did come away being impressed by some of the athleticism of Team CMLL and with Kamaitachi overall, those two problems were enough to make this match a Miss. Overall, the ROH Six-Man Tournament is even more underwhelming than the 2016 Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic, if you can believe that.
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