Will Ospreay Responds to Criticisms of His Controversial Match With Ricochet

– The Wrestling Compadres podcast recently interviewed Will Ospreay, who addressed recent criticism of his matches and in-ring style. Below are some highlights (transcript via WrestlingInc.com) from the interview.

Ospreay on the controversy of his match with Ricochet: “I generally had no idea it was going to happen because we’d done, I’m not going to say a similar style match, but we’d done some of the stuff we did over in Evolve. And it was just one of those matches where, like, once again, me and Ricochet have been working each other, like, five times now. We know each other’s style.” Ospreay added, “we know each other’s s–t, so yeah, we just went out there, and as soon as we had done the double handspring backflip, man, we just [knew] the crowd came on fire. It was like, ‘alright, we’ve got something here’. But for some strange reason, the internet [has] just gone nuts over this one particular match.”

Ospreay on Vader being critical of the match without watching it: “He hasn’t watched the match. I asked him straight out. I was like, ‘have you seen the match?’ He was like, ‘no.’ Rest holds are the way forward, guys. Sorry.”

Ospreay on the match featuring counters: “Yeah, yeah, it was very controversial because, once again, those people are saying, ‘they’re not trying to beat each other up’. It’s like, well, if you look at it in depth, we were doing counters to counters, and everyone knows we do that handspring, like, Superman pose. That’s our thing that we do. Like, everything we had done had meaning [behind] it. Everything had a story behind it.”

Ospreay on perceptions of wrestling: “It’s just some people had different perceptions about what [professional] wrestling is. The only [thing] I can relate it to is like I’m a Christian. I believe that there is a God. I believe there is a heaven and hell. And you guys are Buddhist, and you believe in your God. Just because I believe in my thing and you believe in your thing, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong and I’m right. It’s like different styles of music. It’s different styles of wrestling.”