As promised, this week I will be delivering a fairly comprehensive report on the ICW show from Dundee this past weekend. For anyone in the USA, ICW is a generally Scottish wrestling company, who are currently on a tour of the UK, and Dundee is a city in Scotland. Scotland is a country in Europe, which is just to the east of you, although not as far east as Russia or China, or any of the places you do not like.
For anyone at all, comprehensive in this instance means pretty vague, with not much detail, because the venue sold beer, as did all the local drinking establishments nearby.
Right, first off, the venue, Fatties is well known as a music venue, but fitted pretty well for ICW. the crowd were right on top of the action, and the wrestlers used the building pretty well. Drew Galloway and Wolfgang fought all over the building, Galloway ended up jumping off the bar. Jester and Grado did likewise in the main event.
Now on to the actual wrestling… The crowd had a short warm up from Billy Kirkwood before the show, where he suggested that anyone expecting a PG WWE style show should probably leave before it started, and I will come back to this later, but the guys delivered on that promise big time. While some of the earlier bouts struggled a bit to get any real crowd reaction, they DID get some, and the later matches saw the Dundee crowd going a bit radio rental.
Galloway and Wolfgang came on just before the break, and had to delay the start of the match to let the crowd settle down. But that was nothing compared to the reaction Grado got later…
For Wrestling action, in general, the quality of the work was pretty high. Stevie Boy and B.T. Gunn kicked off the night, and from what I can remember, put on a pretty good match. It was slightly clunky in places, the timing was slightly off on a couple of moves, but generally it did the job of introducing ICW to Dundee.
The finish to this match brought on the entrance of the New Age Kliq, and the following two matches resulted from the fallout, with Renfrew and Divers winning against Big Damo and Joe Coffey. for the record, another pretty good quality match with a lot of standard tag team tactics. Both teams worked pretty well together. ‘Big’ does not do Damo justice. That man is very likely related to Everest…
Mark Coffey was next up, putting the NAK on the back foot by defeating Darkside in the match of the night so far. Both guys styles meshed pretty well, and this match was the one that really lit a fire under the show. That fire was fanned with the entrance of Galloway. Now, I may be wrong here, but I think someone may have spiked my coke with something alcoholic, but it seemed like the chants for the chosen one lasted well over 5 minutes before this fight could even get started.
When it did start, it was well worth the wait. Galloway really did show why he was the chosen one, his in ring presence might be enhanced by his visit to America, but this guy really stood out from the crowd. Don’t get me wrong, Wolfgang was no slouch in there either, and both guys put on a real show, going at it in the ring, at ringside, then all over the venue, with Wolfgang eventually being crotched on one of those metal handrails they have on the stairs to stop drunks from falling over.
Now I am no expert on how that feels, and I know that these things are done in a ‘safe’ way, but I was about three feet away from that, and I felt his pain.
Eventually both wrestlers got back in the ring, fought some more before Drew got the victory, followed by possibly another five minutes of fans chanting his name. The other thing that happened, and I cannot be sure of the exact timing, but I think it was while Wolfgang and Galloway were fighting on the bar, is that a special guest arrived…
The special guest never made an appearance in the ring, never came out from behind the curtain, but we all knew he was there, or at least we all knew about twenty minutes later. Joe Hendry was due to face Liam Thomson, but for some reason, which was explained in the ring, I think, Noam Dar joined them to make it a triple threat match. Obviously once this happened, we had suspicions about the special guest…
This match was maybe a bit too cluttered for my liking, we had Noam doing a bit of comedy, Carmel was in the ring a few times, and generally, a bit too much outwith the wrestling going on, again another clue… But it was the finish, Dar had an ankle lock on both Hendry and his manager Kennedy, Thomson then put some kind of bridging headlock on Hendry, who then tapped out, and Dar and Thomson were BOTH declared the winner.
Step forward special guest star Vince Russo…
The Zero G championship match was most noticeable for the champion Kenny Williams getting his bits out in a failed attempt at a tea-bagging. Kid Fite got out of the way, the guys had a good scrap and Williams retained. And now was the moment Dundee had really been waiting for…
Grado.
The crowd in Fatties was possibly around 3 or 400 people, and I would guess every single one of them was singing a Madonna song at the same time. Whatever anyone thinks of Grado as a wrestler, the guy has something about him people love. Dundee was no exception as Grado danced, teased, and generally milked the crowd for everything they had to give.
This was a title match against Jack Jester, and given the great job ICW have done on promoting Jester v Galloway at the start of November, it was pretty much guaranteed that Grado had no chance of winning. But that did not mean he did not try. It is easy to dismiss Grado as a comedy character, but, not for the first time, he showed he can hang with the big boys in the ring.
Granted he was a bit Santino, but that is the character he plays, and none of the comedy stuff took away from what was a fairly impressive showing from both Grado and Jester. The match ended with Jester picking up the win, and was immediately followed by the re-appearance of Galloway, and we were then teased with the title match taking place in Dundee. The bell even rang before the ring was then flooded with wrestlers, and the announcement the match would not take place until November.
And now we come to the only disappointing part of the night. Somewhere in amongst all of that Jackie Polo came out. I am not sure what his segment was all about, but it seemed as if he either misjudged the heat he would get from wearing a Union Jack outfit in the city that was the most pro-Scottish independence in the recent referendum, or the crowd just never got what he was trying to do. Either way, that part of the show was a bit of a let down.
Which brings me nicely to what happened the next night in Liverpool, or at least what some are saying happened. Jackie Polo allegedly did something that crossed the line in terms of offensiveness. I know that because I have read what others have written about it. Most if not all of those people were not there either.
I am not going to say what he allegedly did, because I was not there, but to those who are debating the merits of Jackie Polo based on what he did, I will say this.
If you were there, and felt offended, what did you do about it? If you were not there, how can you be offended by something you never heard? If you read something on twitter, or facebook, or anywhere else for that matter, the person who offended you was not Jackie Polo, it was whoever tweeted or posted.
If I say something about you, and you cannot hear me say it, how can you be offended? You cant. it is as simple as that. If I said it to a mutual friend, you still cannot be offended by me, because you still never heard me say it. If that mutual friend then repeats what I said to you, then the friend is the one who offended you, even if he is repeating what I say.
Nowhere have I read about any riots in Liverpool caused by a wrestling show, no-one was run out of town, and the police were not called, or at least I have read nothing if any of that happened, so I would guess nobody at the show was that offended. But even if they were, at the Dundee show, as I mentioned, ICW warned everyone there this was not family entertainment.
If you go to a show that warns you it might be a bit offensive, and you STILL want to go sit on the offended bus, then the wrestlers have done their job in that department. Nobody goes to see Frankie Boyle and complains any more. You have an idea of what you are getting before you go, and it is the same for ICW.
A lot of those same people complaining are the same ones who also complain about WWE being PG, and how they yearn for the attitude era, an era where WWE were at their most offensive. Even now they have some of the most racist storylines I have ever seen with the real Americans, and the whole Rusev angle, and this is supposedly PG.
Going to ANY wrestling show and being offended is a bit like going to Wimbledon and being offended because they play tennis. Wrestling heels will ALWAYS try to offend, and while there might be a line you do not think should be crossed, that line is different for every single person in the crowd.
So I guess what I am trying to say is if you think a wrestler might say something you find so offensive you cannot bear it, leave, or do not go in the first place. But the reaction to being offended should never be to tweet, or go on facebook to tell the world. The truth of the matter is, as everyone has a different idea on what is or is not offensive, nobody really cares that you are, the phrase ‘that is offensive to me’ means absolutely nothing to anyone else, they have different guidelines, so cannot possibly relate to your ‘anguish’.
Now I have got that off my chest, I would like to say that the ICW show in Dundee was pretty much a fantastic night out. I went with a group of friends, and all of them had a great time. We had a few drinks, a few laughs and cringed, sang and marked out together for a few hours. We also laughed at people wearing merch they had only just purchased.
And now, as is traditional, I would recommend perusing all the other fine articles here on SLTD. The mfx podcast is acting like schoolteachers, and taking ANOTHER break, but they will hopefully return soon, again i would use the time to catch up on previous episodes. they are available on this site I believe.
Next week I plan on returning to my usual type of article where I pretend I paid attention to TNA or Raw, and generally bluff my way through some writing. Apologies for a bit of a rant this week, and to those who doubt my commitment to a cause, FREEDOM!!
Recent Comments