Welcome to the biggest CAGE in the world

[6.0] "I think I am in the minority with this but I never saw Danielson as a Main Eventer, I thought his mic skills weren't really upto snuff except when he teamed with Kane. I never saw the whole thing people go on about with him being as good or if not better than a HBK or Bret Hart, don't get me wrong, hes a great wrestler but I just didn't see him higher than the IC title division in WWE, and honestly when I saw him being made out to be a 'bad ass' in AEW, I couldn't buy it. That's just my taste."

[8.0] "Potentially the best WWF Hardcore Champion of all time. Steve Blackman was a no nonsense gimmick that was able to lean into the comedy side with his team with Al Snow 'Head Cheese', but his biggest success was in the Hardcore Division, as well as his feud with Ken Shamrock when he was a hired gun for the Corporation. Entirely underrated, if the Invasion Angle that *should* have happened took place, I would have loved to see him work with Ernest Miller or Glacier. Blood could have run cold again!"

[6.0] "Yet another overrated Takeshita match. He's a great athlete but one that has the exact same 'mega' matches against every single guy he faces, making sure to shovel in all the exact same spots and sequences and making sure they always devolve into mindless 50/50 trades and a tonne of near falls. It's never anything different with him. Finlay, meanwhile, is usually better at story-directed matches because his aggressive heel character naturally leads towards that, and he has some good power displays that work well with the traditional NJPW big-move trades. Neither guy has any real charisma either, so it was always going to be about the in-ring work here. We got a tease of a story initially, as Takeshita impressed early on but became dominated after Finlay went after his pre-injured leg and administered an aggressive beatdown on him. The first issue was that Takeshita's leg-selling was very poor. He'd sell it decently enough in real time with his pained facial expressions and cries (though I do think he's rather an 'ugly' seller with how he screws up his face and how he occasionally whines so oddly), but then his selling simply became "let me grab my leg once or hop around on it a bit despite how I somejow just ran full speed across the ring and deadlifted my opponent up into a big power move with zero issue". It's that sort of cheap, insulting type of selling where it's clearly just Takeshita ticking off a box for the absolute bare minimum to try avoid 'no-selling' accusations, because yeah sure, maybe he was jumping and flying around on the leg perfectly for a full 30 seconds, but then he took 5 seconds to grab it! That counts as selling! Sorry but no, I can't accept this 'pick and choose' style of body-part-selling, where the injury only limits a wrestler conveniently whenever they aren't immediately required to use that body part, and then it magically heals up to full capacity whenever they need to use it again. Anyways, that was a major annoyance. Finlay meanwhile tried to give the match some story as he went after the leg and then with his generally aggressive control work, though some of his more 'filler' type work sometimes didn't connect the best. At least all his bigger moves always looked really good at the absolute least, but then Takeshita would just eat a bunch of them and pop up to hit his own big moves, all while never selling the leg except whenever there was a break in the action. They then managed to get into full bomb-trading territory, which felt rather absurd because of how badly Takeshita had been beaten up and targeted, but whatever. He's the golden boy at the moment so excuses have to be made I guess. And to be fair, both guys' biggest moves in the final 1/3rd all looked good in isolation, since they had pretty good chemistry and worked at an exciting pace that had the crowd hooked. It's just the rapid 50/50 nature of them, plus Takeshita's gratuitous no-selling of his leg, that held them back for me. ***"