Usually, when I go to an ROH on HDNet taping, it's fun. I can get into it. Even if there are a lot of squash matches, there's usually a good atmosphere.
Not tonight. Three things ruined the tapings for me. One was that they seemed to string all the squash matches together. Like, it was overkill. They waited until the very end to do main events for tapings 2 and 3, and usually, having a great match to intersperse the interviews, segments and squashes makes the flow great.
Two... oh man, you're going to shit yourself when you read this, but they went and turned Necro Butcher heel, and not only did they turn him heel, they had him join the Embassy. The stable he'd been fighting for the better part of a year. Just up and joined them. I mean, yeah, the visual of him coming out in a suit draped in a Ghanan-style tapestry with no shoes on was awesome, but c'mon now, there are certain people you don't turn heel. Necro is one of them, unless you turn him into a legit axe-murderer.
Three, and this was the most important thing, the crowd sucked. There were way, way, way too many fucking delinquent little shitbreathing rugrats running around, standing on chairs, crowding up on me, screaming in my ear when Tyler Black came out, cheering Sara del Rey as "Shana" and just being generally irritating. Seriously, if you're a parent, one, don't fucking bring your kids to a ROH show. It's way dirtier than they need to be exposed to. The action itself is fine, but these people chant "You fat fuck!" at senior ref Todd Sinclair (for reasons I have no clue... any hardcore ROH fans wanna fill me in on that?). Two, if you do bring them, CONTROL THEM. Don't let them crowd up to the front and get all up in the people who paid to be up there's business. Of course, if ROH could sell out their front and second row tickets for these tapings, it might not be a problem. Ugh.
The tenor of the evening just wasn't fun at all. IT was so bad that I really didn't get into any of the matches until the very end, when they trotted out a pretty decent main event in Roderick Strong and Christopher Daniels vs. the American Wolves. Ugh. The pacing was all off the crowd sucked. Hopefully, tomorrow is better.
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