By Jason Powell
Impact Wrestling Hits
Eli Drake vs. Petey Williams for the Impact Wrestling Global Championship: A quality match and a good credibility building win for the champion. Drake came out of nowhere to win the company’s top title and he’s won most of his title defenses due to outside interference. He’s a strong personality and the right guy to hold the title, but he needs more clean wins like this one to be established as a true top guy and not just a flukey champion.
Gail Kim relinquishes the Knockouts Championship: The video package chronicling Kim’s Impact career that led up to her in-ring announcement was cool and brought back some great memories of her feuds with Awesome Kong and Taryn Terrell. Kim’s speech was well delivered and it was cool to hear her reference some of her WWE and Impact peers. Allie’s involvement felt a little out of nowhere given that they haven’t spent much time on camera together. I have no problem with Kim retiring as champion, but the company is sure to lose some additional veteran names due to their financial situation. Going forward, they need to take some of the equity they’ve built up in these wrestlers and transfer it to the right wrestlers who will be sticking with the company going forward. I guess the goal of having Allie out there was to give her some rub from Kim, but it really didn’t click, and that’s coming from someone who enjoys the Allie character.
Santana, Ortiz, and Homicide vs. Sami Callihan, Jake Crist, and Dave Crist: A Hit for a well worked street fight with LAX getting a measure of revenge to the team they lost the tag titles to at Bound For Glory. However, I’m not sure why they felt the need to race back to this match so quickly. Why not build to the rematch? Why not showcase Callihan to Impact viewers before having him on the losing side in only his second Impact match?
Sonjay Dutt, Dezmond Xavier, and Garza Jr. vs. Trevor Lee, Caleb Konley, and Taiji Ishimori: A good six-man tag match to open the show. It felt a little odd that Lee and Konley were teaming with Ishimori rather than their stablemate Andrew Everett. Even so, they did a good job of working in some awkward moments between the babyface and his teammates for the night and the match featured some quality action. It’s painful to watch Garza work despite his injured shoulder. Fortunately, they limited his involvement in the match.
EC3 vs. Fallah Baa for the Grand Championship: Here’s hoping this creative team has some good ideas that will justify the existence of the rounds format used for the Grand Championship matches. If not, hold a unification match with the Impact Championship and move on. That said, this was a good outing for Bahh, who showed more personality in the first round of the match than he had in all of his previous Impact appearances combined. EC3 made the big man look really good by showing fear of his offense in that opening round.
Impact Wrestling Misses
Dan Lambert and American Top Team: It was nice to hear the broadcast team mention the names of the ATT fighters even I still don’t have any sense of who is who. Lambert is a good talker, but this angle has spotlighted him at the expense of Lashley, who was the best heel in the company before this mess started. They really need to find a way to shift the focus from Lambert back to Lashley. On a positive note, James Storm cut a good promo in response to Lambert ripping on pro wrestling.
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