The first round of this season of Who’s Next wrapped up with perhaps the most experienced contestant yet on the show!
We find out that 92% of the audience voted for lizard-man Maverick. Landslide.
This week’s judges are Jody Fleisch, Ahmed Chaer and Angelico, and we open up with Onur Daglar of Turkey coming out. How do I know he’s Turkish? He’s got a Turkish flag with him, and the star and crescent on his singlet… that’s one part of the characters within GWF I’m not too struck on – at least in Who’s Next, a lot of characters seem to be based on “I’m from (country), here’s my flag.” Daglar’s 20 years old, had about five years of training, but only four matches? He’s here to take what’s “rightfully mine” in a promo that slips between three languages, which is a good skill to have.
His opponent is Andy Steel, who seems to have a stripper gimmick going by his tights, bow tie and suspenders gimmick. Think of it as the Dicks from SmackDown, but not as oversized. He’s Irish, and thank God he’s not carrying the flag, as the 25 year old’s been training for seven years and has had over 300 matches thus far, including a stint at the New Japan dojo. Steel is sick of wrestling in Ireland, and he sees this as his chance to break out. Wait a minute… 300 matches?!
His promo is a little hammy to begin with, but he gets some reaction from the crowd when he said he did the New Japan dojo before coming here.
Onur Daglar vs. Andy Steel
The match gets going with Andy playing to the crowd, as Daglar successfully scored a waistlock takedown as he’s keeping things on the mat.
Steel escaped and rolled into a hammerlock, before working back to the feet so he could try for a German suplex… but Daglar’s in the ropes and sneaks in a poke to the eye as he clotheslined Steel for a near-fall. Cheap tactics. Daglar chokes Steel in the ropes before he used his own wrist tape to choke Steel with… after showing it to the ref beforehand!
Suplexes keep Steel down for a near-fall, before the Irishman’s whipped from corner to corner by the Turk, who eventually runs into an elbow, then a boot. Andy ducks a clothesline to throw some more elbows to the head, as he boots away a back body drop and hits a spinning heel kick, eventually heading up top for a missile dropkick that almost ended things. Daglar’s back in with a suplex that turned into an awkward brainbuster for a near-fall, but he’s quickly met with a forearm to the back before a legdrop-assisted reverse DDT puts him away. Let’s just say… you can really tell who was the more experienced of the two here!
Angelico praises Daglar for wrestling in line with the “amateur wrestler gimmick”, while nitpicking Andy for having stripper-ish gear but not following through with the character. Jody echoes those comments, while Ahmed Chaer wondered out loud if there was anything about these guys that made him want to see them again, pointing to the finish looking a little sloppy as being his final memory.
So, a decent match as we’ve gone through the first round without any “so bad they’re good” matches… and that’s it for Who’s Next for now! The show returns later in 2018 once all eight qualifiers have been revealed – so we’ll have to wait and see what happens next on Who’s Next!