POST IT NOTES
**We have an extensive rundown of Friday night’s PWG Mystery Vortex event up on the main page, courtesy of Marc Raimondi. The major news coming out of the show was Ricochet dropping the PWG title back to Chuck Taylor and then giving a farewell speech to the audience in Reseda, California. The Mystery Vortex event is PWG’s annual show with no matches or participants announced ahead of time so that every entrance is a surprise. A lot of the talent on the show had to fly to New York today in time for the EVOLVE event.
**The 2018 MMA Prediction Show with Ariel Helwani and myself will be posted late tonight and available to everyone on the site and through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and the TuneIn Radio app.
**We will be releasing all of the details for the POST Wrestling “Royal Rumble Pool” on Monday’s edition of Rewind-A-Raw.
**Next Friday’s bonus Patreon show will be our first “Roundtable Show” consisting of Wai Ting, Brian Mann, Martin Bushby and myself discussing all the major news topics of the week and going through the Royal Rumble card. This show will be available to all members of the POST Wrestling Café.
**Jason Agnew will be presenting “Rumble Strikes” on Friday January 26th at Comedy Bar in Toronto. It is an Improv comedy show completely aimed at professional wrestling fans and is always a great show. The show takes place at 11pm and tickets are $15 in advance. Among those that will be playing, include Ontario-based wrestler RJ City, Marty Adams, Stacey McGunnigle, Scott “Not Colt” Goldman, Ned Petrie, Gary Rideout, Jr. and Michael Kellett.
**Finally, in the “words, I never imagined I would type” department, Dan “The Mouth” Lovranski is now on both Instagram and on Twitter. His new YouTube series “Slipped Through the Cracks” has received a lot of positive reviews and his most recent review is on former Motorhead guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke, who just passed away.
WRESTLING NEWS
**The WWE Network schedule is listing the “Mixed Match Challenge” premiere date for Thursday at 10 pm Eastern and this will allow those without Facebook Watch to be able to watch the series.
**Chris Adonis (Chris Mordetsky) has announced that he is leaving Impact Wrestling. Adonis joined the company as a member of the GFW roster and was later paired with Eli Drake and the two worked off of each other very effectively. Adonis did not explain why he was leaving but thanked Scott D’Amore, Sonjay Dutt, and Ed Nordholm.
**Impact Wrestling had an audience drop of 10.6% this past Thursday on POP TV. Following a four-month high of 309,000 viewers the prior week, this week’s episode was down to 276,000 viewers for the taped episode from the Ottawa tapings back in November. They are promoting a “Barbed Wire Match” between oVe and LAX for next week’s episode, although Konnan posted that the match is going to air on Twitch with the storyline reason that the match is “too extreme” for television.
**EVOLVE will host their first card of 2018 tonight from Queens, New York with a live internet pay-per-view at 6 pm Eastern. The new model going forward is that all live events will be available for purchase a la carte with tonight’s show going for $9.99 if you watch it live and $14.99 on demand. The live events do not come with your Club WWN subscription (which is their new streaming service) but rather new shows will be added approximately two weeks after they take place. In total, WWN will present three shows this weekend with EVOLVE on Saturday and Sunday night and a Style Battle event will take place Sunday afternoon with all the shows available through WWN Live. Below is the card for EVOLVE 98 from Queens tonight:
*Zack Sabre, Jr. vs. Darby Allin for the EVOLVE title
*Keith Lee vs. Jaka in a non-title match
*Austin Theory vs. Fred Yehi for the Full Impact Pro heavyweight title
*Tracy Williams and Dominic Garrini vs. Timothy Thatcher and WALTER
*Matt Riddle vs. AR Fox
**The MLW “Zero Hour” event this past Thursday night drew 316 people to the GILT Nightclub and would be the highest total the promotion has reached since their return. A lot of people were raving about the match between Penta El Zero M (Pentagon, Jr./Dark) and Rey Fenix as well as the brawl between Low Ki and MVP. It appears that MVP, Jimmy Havoc, and Low Ki are helping with the layout of matches and working with the other talent as agents. Talent from Impact Wrestling and NXT also made their way to the show on Thursday and were backstage. The promotion plans to have the show up on their MLW.tv service by Sunday.
**MLW returns to Orlando on Thursday, February 8th for their “Road to the World Championship” card at the GILT Nightclub.
**The WWE has announced the signing of former baseball player Rinku Singh. Singh won a reality show out of India called “Million Dollar Arm” and the exposure from that series led to a tryout with numerous teams in Major League Baseball with Singh eventually being signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates, although spent most of his tenure in their minor league system. Singh will report to the WWE Performance Center with the new class this Tuesday.
**The Raw crew has a live event in Wichita Falls, Texas on Saturday night. Samoa Joe is off the house shows stemming from his foot injury this past Monday. The SmackDown crew is in Hidalgo, Texas and then will return to the same venue on Sunday for back-to-back shows in the city. Randy Orton is on the road this weekend with the SmackDown crew.
**New Japan and CMLL’s Fantastica Mania tour continues Sunday with a show in Kyoto. The card will be headlined by a six-man tag with Kazuchika Okada, Ultimo Guerrero and Gran Guerrero vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi, Mistico and Niebla Roja.
**GHC heavyweight champion Kenoh will be defending his title against Yuko Miyamoto at NOAH’s next Korakuen Hall event on February 2nd. The same card will feature Muhammad Yone and Quiet Storm defending the GHC tag titles against Mitsuya Nagai and Maybach Taniguchi.
**The WWE stock closed at $32.18 on Friday.
**Matt Hardy has posted a video teasing the return of “Vanguard 1”:
TELEVISION REVIEWS
WWE NXT (Jan. 10th)
-The show built up to the announcement that Adam Cole and Aleister Black will have an Extreme Rules Match at Takeover in Philadelphia. The Undisputed Era took out Sanity prior to their tag title rematch and led to an impromptu tag with Kyle O’Reilly and Bobby Fish defeating Aleister Black and Roderick Strong in a very good main event. The show concluded with William Regal’s announcement of the match stipulation for Takeover.
-When you talk about the best non-wrestling performers currently in the industry, Zelina Vega needs to be near the top of the list. She is tremendous in her role as Andrade Cien Almas’ advocate and commands a lot of presence, is a great speaker, lots of confidence and has played a major role in the Almas character turning around as he was on a path of becoming a washout after his initial introduction. Vega was featured in the weekly spot of various “reporters” asking questions and these are usually bad. Vega carried her segment and was one of the best elements to this week’s show.
-Shayna Baszler was featured prominently in a match with Dakota Kai. The end of the match came by referee’s stoppage after Baszler stomped the elbow of Kai and they played up that Kai may have broken her arm with Baszler displaying no remorse. It was also noteworthy that Baszler’s theme song kicks off with the sound of a horse for a potential alliance down the road.
-Velveteen Dream returned on this episode and was his first appearance since Takeover back in November, which was a star-making performance and then disappeared afterward. He confronted Johnny Gargano and mocked Gargano for the length of time it took him to beat Kassius Ohno and alluding to the fact that Gargano is only receiving a title shot because Dream wasn’t around.
Impact Wrestling (Jan. 11th)
-This felt like a strange show as so much was made about Austin Aries winning the title (by Impact themselves) and then on this episode, you’re watching a show taped months ago and it felt somewhat of a lame duck show that is attached to the prior regime. The counter-argument is that not everyone is following taping results and would be aware of Aries, but I would assume a greater percentage of Impact viewers are given the smaller audience size.
-They are adjusting the character of Allie to display more of an edge in retaliation to the attack by Laurel Van Ness the prior week. Allie cut a serious promo and conveyed more anger than she has shown in the role.
-Matt Sydal interrupted a match between Ethan Carter III and Petey Williams and led to Sydal issuing another challenger to EC 3 for a 60-minute time limit match for the Grand championship with no judges or rounds. The whole concept of the Grand championship with the judges and rounds is being thrown out as it never got over with the audience to begin with and is the right move to make.
-KM officially joined American Top Team and teamed with Lashley in the main event to defeated Eddie Edwards and Moose with KM pinning Edwards.
MMA NEWS
**The middleweight fight that was scheduled between Vitor Belfort and Uriah Hall for Sunday night in St. Louis is off. Hall failed to weigh-in on Saturday morning and UFC officials later confirmed that the fight was off. Paige VanZant later tweeted and asked people to pray for Hall and called it “the scariest thing I have ever seen.” As a result, the lightweight between Michael Johnson and Darren Elkins has been moved up to the main card portion of Sunday’s Fight Night card.
**The UFC has lost a big fight for the UFC 221 pay-per-view that is scheduled for February 11th in Perth, Australia. Brett Okamoto of ESPN reported that middleweight champion Robert Whittaker will be unable to defend his title against Luke Rockhold due to an undisclosed injury. The title was set to headline the event and in place will be an interim title fight with Rockhold set to fight Yoel Romero. In order to ensure the main event for this show, they had to remove Romero from his previously scheduled fight against David Branch that was set for February 28th in Orlando. The installation of the interim middleweight title brings the total number of interim titles to two within the UFC. In this case, the interim title was likely unavoidable given that a non-title fight would not be very appealing to Rockhold, who had signed on for a championship fight and been very adamant about fighting for a title in his next bout.
**Invicta FC is holding a card from Kansas City, Missouri at 8 pm Eastern on Fight Pass. Below is the lineup for the show:
*Sarah Kaufman vs. Pannie Kianzad
*Vanessa Porto vs. Mariana Morais
*Sharon Jacobson vs. Ashley Nichols
*Ashley Cummins vs. Stephanie Alba
*Brogan Walker-Sanchez vs. Cheri Muraski
*Felicia Spencer vs. Akeela Al-Hameed
*Tiffany Masters vs. Mallory Martin
*Loma Lookboonmee vs. Melissa Wang
*Helen Peralta vs. Jade Ripley
*****
REWIND-A-WAI – Night After ‘Mania Raw 2013
(John Pollock and Wai Ting review Raw from the night after WrestleMania 29 featuring Dolph Ziggler’s cash in, birth of “Fandango-ing”, revolt during Orton vs. Sheamus and we welcome Espresso Executive Producer John Taylor at the end of the show)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/rewind-wai-2-raw-16353951
*****
REWIND-A-SMACKDOWN 1/9/18 – John Pollock & Wai Ting review SmackDown Live, Wai catches us up on this season of Total Divas, Pollock chats Brian Pillman book and we take your feedback
https://postwrestling.podbean.com/mf/web/u3tyfs/180109_RASD.mp3
*****
REWIND-A-RAW 1/8/18 – Balor Club vs The Shield, Strowman Attempts Murder, Woken Mat In-Ring Debut
https://postwrestling.podbean.com/mf/download/ma33g4/180108_RAR.mp3
*****
POST WRESTLING’S “WORST OF 2017 SHOW” with John Pollock, Wai Ting, Jason Agnew and Dan “The Mouth” Lovranski
https://postwrestling.podbean.com/mf/download/t9yvzr/POST-WRESTLING-The-Worst-of-2017.mp3
*****
WRESTLE KINGDOM 12 REVIEW (Patron-only show)
https://www.postwrestling.com/2018/01/05/njpw-wrestle-kingdom-12-review-patreon-exclusive/
*****
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