Monday, March 9, 2020

Elimination Chamber 2020: GULAK vs. BRYAN!

Daniel Bryan vs. Drew Gulak
This being a 15-minute WWE PPV match is pretty mindblowing. And it was exactly everything I would expect from a match between these two outstanding individuals -- to put it simply, it just LOOKED like how a Bryan vs. Gulak match should look like + the storytelling was superb throughout; the whole story leading up to this was Gulak informing Bryan that he knows the weaknesses in his game, and they played up to that story here pretty much perfectly. Even when you look at it without paying attention to the smaller details, it's mostly Gulak just dominating Bryan in every department & that's exactly how it should've gone. They do an amazing job with Gulak countering any & every move or hold Bryan went for, and one of my favorite things about the match was the whole head-scissors deal; at first, Bryan escapes Gulak's head-scissors w/ a little headstand, right? Well then when Gulak puts on the head-scissors for the 2nd time a bit later on & Bryan tries to do the same, Gulak does the little short-piledriver to stop that from happening! So good. This is easily my favorite match of 2020 up to this point & the first match since Bryan vs. Kofi from Mania that's actually made me want to re-watch it a couple of more times the day it happened. Bless this match for being a thing that happened. Pro-Wrestling, yay! ****1/2

Andrade vs. Humberto Carrillo
They had to follow one of the greatest opening matches in WWE history, but they managed to do that pretty damn well. Andrade was lovely roughing Humberto up w/ his excellently vicious looking strikes, and Humberto was real good himself, having to fight from underneath & busting out some very, very nice comebacks, as in him flying around. I have not watched any of their previous matches against one another, but this sure was very good. ***1/2

Tag Team Elimination Chamber
Lince Dorado's SSP sure was pretty wild. Other than that, the obvious highlight of the thing was Heavy Machinery's whole run & mainly Otis looking for that sweet revenge against Ziggler. After they got eliminated, the match lost a ton of heat & got uninteresting for a bit, but thankfully the last few minutes w/ JoMo & Miz vs. The Usos was solid. Good match. ***

AJ Styles vs. Aleister Black
Too long for sure & it had its dead moments + everyone & their mother knew that this was all happening for Taker to come out and further set-up the match vs. AJ at Mania, but all in all, I thought this was a nice lil' match. AJ was pretty compelling with his vicious attack on Aleister's leg, and while Aleister's selling got pretty questionable towards the end, he did sell pretty fine while AJ still had that big target on the bodypart. ***

Street Profits vs. Murphy & Seth Rollins
The only match on the show that didn't make me feel anything. Felt like a total RAW match. *3/4

Braun Strowman vs. Cesaro, Sami Zayn & Shinsuke Nakamura
This was actually very solid fun for what it was! Sami is a great chickenshit cocky prick & his new look w/ the longer hair + them pants & that hat = AWESOME. Him winning his first main roster championship is a big positive too. **3/4

Women's Elimination Chamber
This was all about Shayna Baszler, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. Her coming out & destroying the first 3 competitors in quick fashion is when the match really kicked off, and I enjoyed all of it -- in particular her completely destroying Natalya & then later on Liv Morgan was pretty great. The build-up to the final showdown vs. Asuka was very good too w/ that Asuka constantly talking shit through her pod, and they had a fun little, yet a bit rough in parts, fight to end the thing. The better Chamber match of the two we saw on this night. ***1/4

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