It’s time for another project of mine that I will never finish, although with this one it’s more open-ended.
I’ve been a fan of wrestling for almost 25 years now and I believe a key element in never giving up on this childhood hobby is exploring new genres and broadening my horizons. No matter how great one promotion can be, their hot streak will come to an end, the quality of the shows will decrease and it’ll be a boring and frustrating experience to be a fan of the company. If I’d have stuck with only watching WWE growing up, I’d have given up on wrestling by 2003. However if you open your mind and take a chance on a different promotion or a different country or even a different point in time, you might just stumble on a match or worker that reinvigorates your love of pro-wrestling.
It’s something that’s happened consistently for me. In 2002 my eyes were opened to NWA-TNA and wrestlers like AJ Styles and Low Ki who were nothing like what I was used to seeing on Raw or Smackdown. By the early 2010s I was branching into Japanese wrestling, by the mid 2010s I was hooked into the rise and fall of modern Britwres and German wrestling, and in recent years I’ve watched a lot of classic lucha libre. All of these discoveries have given me a necessary break from mainstream western wrestling and kept that flame alive.
Over the last month I’ve had an interest in pursuing some blind spots in my wrestling viewing. I’d say the most surprising one I have left is classic British wrestling because it’s fairly well regarded and had a defined style, it’s free to watch, it presents no language barrier to me and, well, I am British so why not dig into our wrestling history? However in preparation for this project I’ve already had a wandering eye and started watching matches from Germany and France so I don’t think I want to limit myself to only talking about World of Sport matches or only British wrestlers. It’ll only be a matter of time before I want to check out some Danish wrestling after drawing them in the Euros sweepstakes.
Long story short, this is a place for me to talk about any match on European soil that catches my eye. If you have any recommendations or requests for matches to review, please feel free to hit me up.
I have no idea whether this will be enjoyable to read as I assume most of you won’t have seen the matches I’m discussing and that may prove to be counter-productive for a substack article. In the good old forum days this would just be a catch-all thread for myself to document what I’m watching and think out loud like I did when I went through 90s AJPW during the Pandemic. I’ll be including the youtube links of anything I review so they’ll be there for people to follow along with if curious and I’ll be sure to highlight if I think a match is great.
Let’s start
Fit Finlay Vs Johnny Saint - (9/4/88) Link
I thought I’d start out in England with two names I’m familiar with. Johnny Saint you may remember as the doddering old man who Triple H unwisely picked to be the general manager of NXT UK, who then had be bailed out by Sid Scala because it was apparent that Saint didn’t even have the charisma to be a bingo caller. However as a wrestler, Saint is one of the most respected names in British wrestling history. Even Bryan Danielson said there was no-one better at technical wrestling than Johnny Saint - and who knows more about technical wrestling than that guy?
Of course Fit Finlay doesn’t really need any introduction being one of the few names in British wrestling history that broke out and had a career stateside with WCW and WWE. Here he is 30 years old, rocking a black mullet and green and white tights - hey, Misawa stole his look. His manager, Princess Paula, might need more of an introduction; She was Finlay’s first wife and they had a stereotypical heel act going where she’d work interference spots or stall a match for heat. Here in this match she’s wearing an Indian headdress which I’m not sure is her usual look, she may wear something different from the Village People wardrobe every time.
Quickly I’m thrown into the world of rounds matches where this match was contested of 8 three minute rounds where the winner would be the best two out of three falls (pinfall or submissions) or the first man to a knockout. When NXT UK incorporated the rounds system into their product, I found it a bit jarring, a bit of a momentum killer that I didn’t think suited modern day wrestling, but perhaps I’ll gain more of an appreciation for the rounds system seeing it in the context of when the style was the norm.
Round 1 follows the pattern of Finlay attempting some arm work on Saint, only for Saint to hop about or lunge around and find a fancy way out of it. Within a minute I feel like I’ve got a good handle on Saint’s formula of an escapologist that can one-up and frustrate the heels at every turn.
At the start of round 2 there’s some stalling from Finlay and Paula as they moan about Saint’s boots and also Finlay has to have a kiss before he resumes the match for heat - PDA as unpopular as ever in 1988. Saint flips out of a chickenwing after a minute and finally goes on the attack, whipping Finlay into the corner and catching him with a dropkick. Saint then does one of his patented sequences where he goes up the turnbuckle before doing a 180 and crawling under his opponent’s legs - something I know I’ve seen Danielson use before. The bell rings for the end of the round, but Saint like a WWE2k character continues his sequence for 5 more seconds and ends with a double knee strike to Finlay. Bit weird for the babyface to give the heel valet a legitimate reason to moan, and moan Paula does throughout the entire interval.
Round 3 begins with Saint apologising, claiming he didn’t hear the bell. Finlay respond with a punch to the head which brings about the first public warning - apparently 3 of them will result in a disqualification. Finlay pick up the first fall with a fireman’s carry backdrop kind of move that commentary allude to as his finishing move. The fall causes quite a break in play where the announcer has to come back into the ring to announce the result. It appears as though any fall ends the round and you just start at 0:00 of the next round. A quick round 4 sees a trio of dropkicks and a roll up earn the equaliser for Saint.
Round 5 begins and Finlay doesn’t get a kiss this time after the interval - tough love. At the end of the round they keep fighting and a distraction from Paula gives Finlay the chance to dump Saint out the ring - enough to be given a 2nd public warning so he’s on thin ice now. It proves to be a crucial moment as things end anti-climatically for Saint, getting trapped in a chicken wing submission in the first few seconds of round 6 which he quickly submits to. Shame to end there when it felt like Saint and the audience were fired up and the match was evenly poised.
I can’t really recommend the match. There was a clearly defined babyface and heel dynamic which made it very accessible dropping in for this first look at WoS, but the story had some inconsistencies and it ended pretty abruptly. It was however a nice introduction to the rounds system and the public warning rules.
We all are there