Magnum Pro
Firefighter’s Union Hall (Omaha, Nebraska)
AJ Styles’ return to the Indies is just underway. In fact, this might be the first of his post-TNA matches that were available to those outside of live audiences. One of the main storylines of early 2014 on the indie circuit is how good Hero and Styles look in their returns. We’ve seen Hero already, now we get our first looks at Styles.
The short answer is that Styles looked good in this match. The longer answer is that he looked good, but Strife did not, and the match was just “fine” as a result. Strife – who already looses points before the bell rings for the insufferable way he spells his first name – did not bring much to the table. He appeared lost at times and other times he was a step or two off. Strife’s offense was not terrible, but also not memorable. He really did very little to standout or add to the match.
But nobody is watching A.J. Styles vs. Jaysin Strife to see Jaysin Strife. I admittedly have not seen a lot of recent Styles in TNA so I cannot fairly compare how he looked here compared to how he looked at the end of his TNA run but I thought he looked good. With Styles you know everything is going to be smooth and crisp. The worry was that a return to the Indies would bring out some of his worse tendencies, specially the tendency to go overkill on big moves. By and large, he worked a moderate match (at least by US Indies standards) in terms of what he did which was nice to see.
Unless you want to see Styles against all-comers, there is little reason to check out this match. However, it does have me wanting to see how Styles looks against higher quality opponents, which we should be getting a glimpse of in very short order.
Nondescript Singles | Skippable | Individual Performance (Styles)
