I watched NXT Rival last night, and it was another amazing show. While Hideo Itama VS Tyler Breeze was a really good opener, most of the show's first half was rather unremarkable. But it was in the last 3 matches that the show hit the stratosphere. It's hard to describe, but these NXT shows seem to capture the feeling of watching the amazing ROH shows from their heyday with their back-to-back showstopper matches, only on a WWE product.
Finn Balor VS Adrian Neville was fantastic. I could instantly see Balor had star quality when I saw him wrestle live in Glasgow, but he's built and built on it. His entrance is electric, and he carries the persona established in that entrance into his ring work through the match. I loved how the match just built and built, with Neville trying to ground the pace, but Balor just being relentless and steadily chipping away at Neville until the tide turned.
The women's four-way was another stunner from this division, which has been a revelation for me since starting to watch the product. This was like the female equivalent of Joe/Styles/Daniels from TNA Unbreakable. Maybe not quite on that level, but very much in that vein as every entrant in the match had a story and an approach to the others they were selling against the backdrop of a relentless pace that never let up. It's so impressive that all four of these women are not only impressive in the ring, but have clearly-defined characters. Fantastic match.
The drama between Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens was off the charts. The pre-match video sold it beautifully, as did the entrances and the intense pre-match staredown. The match itself may not have quite matched Balor/Neville or the women's match for pace, but it didn't need to, as this was all about enhancing the narrative. Kevin Owens just dominated here, for pretty much the whole match, making it one of the more one-sided world title matches I've seen. This seemed to be an exercise in crushing the spirit of the audience, as it's rare a crowd will get LESS vocal as a match progresses. But that happened here, with Owens quashing every attempted comeback and every attempt to get the crowd back in the match and behind Zayn. The story here was that Owens had got in Zayn's head and pushed him into a match he wasn't ready for, and that Owens had studied Zayn to the point where he knew him inside out, and Zayn just couldn't get truly into the match. Nguyen, of course, Owens destroyed him.
I could write a whole post about this, and likely will, but I could see Zayn/Owens becoming the Raven VS Tommy Dreamer of our time. I hope this feud continues into WWE one day.
