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NXT returned last night (February 10) from Capitol Wrestling Center (CWC) in Orlando, Florida. You can find the results on the live blog here.
The finals are set
The main event this week was a Dusty men’s semi-final between The Grizzled Young Veterans and Tommaso Ciampa & Timothy Thatcher.
The game was a solid main game, which showed how GYV really worked as a real team. While T&T are not on the same page, it was clear that the veterans are extensions of each other. This factored into the finish when Zack Gibson grabbed James Drake, who was prone to Ciampa Willow’s Bell coming in, preventing movement. This allowed the veterans to deliver their double finisher ticket to Mayhem. Gibson covered Tommaso as Drake stopped Thatcher from breaking him.
Grizzled veterans have always been a lock on the final as it looked like they were in line for a significant push before the pandemic hit and they returned to Europe.
On the other side of the medium, MSK beat El Legado del Fantasma to join them in the final.
This match opened the show and was quite a fun time. The two have a very entertaining style and it pairs well for this fight. The deployment of MSK has been as strong as it gets. They were able to show off their personality and use their unique style in the NXT tag format. Advancing to the Dusty Finals immediately establishes them as a legitimate threat in the Division, whether they defeat the Grizzled Young Veterans or not.
This will pit a talented, but bland (by design) team in GYV against the exact opposite in MSK. And while veterans are those heels with no redeeming qualities, they’re still good in the ring. This final should deliver a match worthy of a Dusty Classic final.
The other final
The dusty women’s finals were also held this week.
Shotzi Blackheart and Ember Moon defeated Candice LeRae and Indi Hartwell to move on to TakeOver. It was a really enjoyable fight, but with some of the talent in this game it shouldn’t be surprising. Moon, Blackheart, and LeRae are all great wrestlers. Hartwell is still fairly new to this area, and it’s evident in a lot of his games. But here she was solid, even sticking out an impressive springboard elbow.
My “gripe” about this match was more the positioning of it. Last week Raquel González and Dakota Kai landed their ticket to the final. This means that the outcome of this match was never really in doubt. Heel-to-heel matches are very rare, so the Way had little luck in this match. Face-to-face matches are more common. If Ember & Shotzi won first, it wouldn’t be impossible that Kacy Catanzaro and Kayden Carter could have won their match. This is not a problem at all with this game. It’s more a matter of how they chose to present it.
We learned this week that the Dusty Cup winner will get a chance for the women’s tag team title “eventually”. The winner on Sunday is expected to try to get that game before Nia’s hole is completely healed.
A perfect Jerk
Johnny Gargano continues to find new life as a loose heel.
To avoid confronting Kushida at TakeOver, he told everyone he broke his arm. To bring the point home, he asked Way to take him to the ring in a wheelchair, explaining that he is such a powerful walker that if he can’t swing his arms, he can’t walk. I am going to buy it.
It was the entire heel of classic comedy, something that still amazes me how well Johnny plays him. From the instruction to rotate the wheelchair from the rigid camera face to the video screen face to providing an x-ray with the wrong member identified, it was all hilarious.
William Regal played the party’s pooper, revealing that he knew Gargano was allowed to compete and pointing out all the mistakes in Johnny’s argument. This allowed Kushida to sneak behind the Path, leading to a comedic reveal when the Heels noticed him in their ranks.
Kushy faced Austin Theory later that night, a match that ended in DQ when the North American champion attacked his challenger. After the match, Dexter Lumis prevented this from becoming a two-on-one beat, and their night ended with Lumis and Kushida performing double submissions.
While Lumis has enough reasons to dislike the Way, he does feel a little bit sorrow here. I would call it a fifth wheel, but technically it would be a fourth wheel, which is the perfect amount of wheels.
Pick the wrong fight
The Tian Sha team appear to have their first program.
To begin with, I thought Tian Sha is the stable name. After last week’s original video, it was possible that it was Mei Ying’s name after she sold her soul to a dragon to become immortal. But given that Tian Sha is on the video screen as they all go out, and Wade Barrett called her Mei Ying this week, I use it as a stable name until I see something suggesting the opposite.
Their first quarrel will be against Kacy Catanzaro and Kayden Carter. The KCs were at ringside when Xia Li ran over Cora Jade, trying to get to a woman they thought was her friend. (This is a classic wrestling move, establishing a friendship after the fact despite that friendship never really being shown on TV.)
To make matters worse, Carter entered Ying’s face, predictably upsetting the Dark Queen. Mei even suffocated Boa until Li actually got rid of Kayden and Kacy.
I don’t know how it’s going to be. At present, Tian Sha has an active wrestler in Xia Li. Ying is just watching and Boa has not wrestled. Not that he would fight one of these women, but it’s strange that they didn’t give him some squash as well. Maybe NXT doesn’t feel as ready as Xia.
So for now, a woman is going to fight a tag team. Unless that’s the vehicle to get Mei into the ring. Since she is just observing the fights, it will take a little more work for her to reveal this dragon soul.
Everything else:
– Cameron Grimes came back to Full Sail very rich after investing in GameStop and then in dogecoin. It’s a humorous touch to this character. He’s still an arrogant idiot, but now he’s super rich. It’s a fun ride that will be fun to follow. I also can’t wait to see when he loses everything.
– Both main title matches have received video package processing. Which is good, but both matches lacked real warmth. They could have taken advantage of one more segment to try and add a little more drama to these matches.
– Santos Escobar sent Joaquin Wilde and Raul Mendoza to attack Karrion Kross. Kross of course destroyed them instead. (Only the consequences have been shown.) Escobar will face Kross next week.
It was a solid show. Neither of the main title angles had any new additions, both of which were shown in video form. This meant the Dusty semi-finals had to win.
And in general, those matches were all good. Although I think next time they should space out the men’s and women’s Dusty tournaments. I understand why they want to run them at the same time, but the last few weeks have seemed overdone. The other option is to announce it earlier and stretch the towers over a longer period of time so they don’t have to fill every episode. It wasn’t such a big deal as they progressed deeper into the tournament, but there was some Dusty Classic fatigue even this episode.
Other than establishing what the two Dusty Finals would be, this show did nothing to add to Sunday’s TakeOver. However, Johnny Gargano is still entertaining.
Category B
Ring below.
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