MLW Fusion Results, Highlights, and Grades: War Games
Credit: MLW Instagram
The Match Beyond
Abyss makes his way to the ring with a familiar bag in his hands. If you’ve seen any hardcore/extreme rules Abyss match, you know exactly what’s coming at some point with the tiny, tiny treasures in his velvet pouch. At this point, with every man (aside from Strickland) having entered the match, all bets are off and a winner can be crowned! The only way to end the match is via submission or surrender and with nine bodies in the ring, it’s still anyone’s game.
“The Monster” immediately made an impact as he laid out every single member of Team Strickland. Dreamer came closest to solving the puzzle of Abyss but found himself on the receiving end of a Black Hole Slam for his troubles. As Abyss and Hughes grabbed each other for dual chokeslams, the members of the opposing teams attacked each man to break the stalemate.
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As eight of the men converged in a sprawling mass of humanity in the center of the ring, Brazil scaled the cage and took them all down with a corkscrew plancha reminiscent of the late Hector Garza. At some point in all of this, Fulton received a nasty cut under his eye – I won’t link to a picture of it here because it’s pretty gruesome, but if you want to challenge yourself feel free to seek out Fulton’s Twitter account for a nasty post-match picture of the injury.
The rest of the period is the chaotic mishmash one comes to expect from War Games as everybody paired off to incapacitate members from the opposing team. With nearly everybody flat on their backs across the two rings, Havoc and Callihan called for Abyss to empty his pouch in the ring much to the delight of the bloodthirsty crowd. Abyss dumped the tacks in the center of the ring but was unable to send Kotto Brazil into them – instead, Brazil countered Abyss’ efforts and sent the monster falling into his own tacks!
As Callihan and Havoc attempted to take out Dreamer in the opposite ring, “The Innovator of Violence” was able to throw a wrench in their plans by throwing Callihan in the way of Havoc’s Acid Rainmaker clothesline before dropping Havoc with a cutter.
Finishing things out, Kotto and Dreamer wrapped Hughes in a string of barbed wire leading to him flattening Fulton with a splash across the back. Hughes and Brazil wrapped the remaining barbed wire around the head of Fulton and pulled back with a crossface forcing Fulton to tap out to give the win to Team Strickland despite being a man down and without their leader!
Grade: Good. It was messy at times, but that’s to be expected in a match like this – especially with a ring full of weapons to accompany nine bodies flying in every direction. If you’re a fan of War Games (or violence in general) don’t sleep on this match. I probably would have rated this higher, but Strickland never making it into the match was a huge disappointment for me.