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NBIceman posted...

Iceman's Match of the Week

Ayako Hamada & Ayumi Kurihara vs Madison Eagles and Sara Del Rey
SHIMMER Volume 43 - October 2nd, 2011
Match Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eClN6zJQ0gs

Fun fact: Roughly a decade before Stephanie McMahon invented women's wrestling, a little indie promotion sprung up in Chicago for the express purpose of putting a spotlight on something that very closely resembled it.

Sarcasm aside, SHIMMER is a pretty cool part of modern American wrestling history. A good portion of the most popular women wrestlers in the world today spent at least some time there at one point, including Becky Lynch and Bayley. We kinda take it as a given these days that there's just a lot of good women's wrestling out there, but in the early days of the promotion, it was a pretty big deal to have a company whose selling point was, "Hey, we've got a bunch of ladies who just have really good matches."

And this is one of those really good matches. Most of the names in this match are probably at least somewhat recognizable to the folks in our little community: Hamada from her TNA days, Del Rey for being a big-time coach in NXT now and arguably the single biggest reason that women's wrestling in WWE has become what it is, and Eagles from my occasional rants in the Discord about how great she is. Kurihara may be an unknown, though - she's actually married to one YOSHI-HASHI, and make no mistake about it, she's easily the better worker in that relationship. She plays her part very well in this bout, as do the others.

There's nothing particularly revolutionary about this match, but it's such an easy watch. A hot start leads into some very solid heel work from the challengers, and then once they hit the halfway point, they're off and running, with basically no downtime until the end. It's a shining example of why indie wrestling was so popular among the portion of the fanbase that it was during this period; in a time where WWE was still calling their women "Divas" and running their top programs with such luminaries as Eve Torres, Maryse, Melina, Jillian, and the Bella Twins (long before people started pretending they were Kobashi and Misawa reincarnated, even), Dave Prazak and Allison Danger just put four of the world's best female workers in the ring and told them to go kill it.

So, I've got a confession to make - I'm not really a big fan of most women's wrestling. Ironically, it's for some of the same reasons Iceman has given for not being into lucha (awkward spots, bad match flow, questionable striking and so on). This match definitely had some of those things in it but I still really enjoyed the work of the women in this. It's a shame that Kurihara isn't active today because she would be a big star somewhere and, like most tag matches I've seen with her in them, I think she was my favorite worker in the match. Kind of like how it is with the men, there's a polish with women who endure the dojo system in Japan that women coming up through other systems tend to lack. For more information on what that is like, check out the somewhat infamous GAEA Girls documentary from years ago (it's on YouTube). Del Ray was also really impressive and WWE should be thankful to have gotten her as a trainer because their women's division would be so much worse without her training.

Honestly, my biggest problem with the match was Bryce Remsburg. God, he annoys me so much as a ref. He's not technically inept like a Todd Sinclair but he is incapable of blending into the background like how I believe a good ref should. He wants attention and he wants to be a part of the story of any match he's in, even when it's uncalled for like this one. All the stuff involving him keeping Hamada in the corner for the first half of the match was obnoxious, especially since it kept him from paying attention to things like the tags between Eagles and Del Ray that he misses (and never addresses) or the times Kurihara is in a submission hold or being pinned (I think Eagles had to call him over on a couple of these). Take all of that and his exaggerated gestures or wacky facial expressions while looking right at the camera, he's a constant distraction and I can't believe he's been around for so long without someone telling him to knock it off.

Remsburg gripes aside, the match was good but I think it falls short of great. It's right on the edge but all the minor issues couple with one major annoyance take it to about ***3/4 for me. Good recommendation and I'm happy that we're getting such a good mix of matches on these open-ended weeks.