Westside Xtreme Wrestling
Turbinenhalle (Oberhausen, Germany)
This would be Chris Hero’s triumphant return to Germany where he won the wXw Heavyweight Championship at this very same event (“Back to the Roots”) eleven years ago. John Klinger’s claim to fame is winning the online TNA Gut Check fan vote and the promotion largely just ignoring it. TNA is using him during their impending tour of Europe for a couple of shows, so there’s that.
In the write ups for Hero’s recent matches against Kevin Steen and Ricochet, I praised him for reeling those two in and providing both matches with a semblance of structure. This is the first 2014 Hero I have watched where he fell into the “going to long” problem.
The match fell apart for me a little more than halfway in when both wrestlers ended up on the outside. Up until that point the match there were slowly building with a lot of holds/counter holds and basic early-match ring work that you get in any Chris Hero match. They ended up on the outside and had a strike exchange which was out of the place given the flow up until that point. Then Hero laid out on one of the bars while Klinger took a powder outside the ring as well. It might seem nit-picky to write that a break in the action completely threw off the match, but it did here.
Once the action headed back to the ring, it was for a seven minute end stretch involving a lot of repeated moves from earlier (Hero hit at least a half dozen running kicks throughout the match) and a few too many near falls. I am being a bit harsh – this is still certainly watchable – but nothing altogether memorable.
Nondescript Singles | Watchable | Individual Performance (Hero)
