Joseph Conners returned to NGW on the latest episode of British Wrestling Weekly – all to claim a title shot that didn’t quite go to plan.
We open with a recap from last season where a rather youthful Joseph Conners “gained the soul” of Liam Slater, albeit reluctantly… followed by how Matt Myers won the NGW title… and I guess you can see where this heads.
We’re straight to the action in Hull, for another one-match show… with an inset promo as the champion heads to the ring. They’re doing a really good job of establishing the story inside the vacuum of a single episode, which is useful given how these shows can sometimes air erratically in re-runs…
NGW Heavyweight Championship: Matt Myers (c) vs. Joseph Conners
Conners was out with his Righteous Army – Dara Diablo, Screwface and Cyanide – along with the reluctant Liam Slater.
We finally get going just before the eleven minute mark in the show, with Conners taking Myers into the corner with a tie-up. A spinning heel kick forces Conners to duck, as a tiltawhirl into an armdrag sends us into a necessary evil of broadcast TV – a commercial break! Annoyingly, we return into a promo from Kid Fite. Stop making disjointed matches even more disjointed! Fite talks about the Destiny Rumble, which is in a fortnight.
Back to the match, we see action that was clipped out “during commercial”, which was the bulk of Conners’ heat as he had Myers thrown into the ringpost before he dished out a backbreaker. We return just in time for the Myers comeback as the downtime from a missile dropkick gives them a chance to stuff even more into the show as next week we have Alex Gracie & Cayden Lay vs. Team Sports (Ace Matthews & David Graves, who I guarantee will be nowhere near as colourful as they are in 3CW)… and news on the Davey Boy Smith Memorial Cup Tournament.
On his feet, Myers gets sent into the corner as Conners unloads on him with some right hands, but he rebounds with some clotheslines and a back elbow as the crowd strangely doesn’t make any extra noise for all that. They do break out into a brief chant as Myers hits a springboard moonsault for a near-fall, before the pair swapped near-falls.
A Falcon arrow nearly crowns a new champion, as does a push-down stomp out of the corner, but just like that, Myers fights out of the Don’t Look Down DDT and hits a Flatliner instead for another two-count. We get a ref bump as Conners “accidentally” charges into the ref, which means that there’s nobody to count the pin after a Myers Stunner. Yay for dumb babyfaces who don’t notice things like that!
There’s a low blow just as the referee stirs, and that’s the cue for Conners to order his lackey Slater to get a chair. Out comes the NGW-green chair, but Slater ends up stopping Conners from using it! Cue a shoving match, and an eventual chairshot to the back of Conners from Slater, who “finally” snaps out after less than a season… the referee recovers just in time to see Myers hit another Stunner, and that’s the pin. Well, this was alright, but it felt like they cut out a LOT of the match, which just seemed to exist to hurry through the next milestone in the Liam Slater story. **¾
“Liam Slater finally left the trance of Joseph Conners”? He’s only just been put under his spell last season… Yeah… this was a case of NGW having way too much content to fit into one show, with the big title match and the Destiny Rumble to juggle. It just brought everything down a level, which probably isn’t what you’re aiming for for your new champion’s first defence!