Botched!: Rey vs Andrade Finish, Kota Ibushi’s Header, More

Hi, hello & welcome to Botched! I hope you all are having a great 2020 so far. We’ve covered the entire world to bring you some of the most unintentionally hilarious moments of the last couple of weeks. We’ve even gone to the Land of the Rising Sun, where we found out that New Japan has botches too. Who knew, right? We also get to talk some Cincinnati Reds baseball announcing!

1. THOMMY!

One of my favorite things about networks carrying wrestling shows is networks forcing their sports announcers to read ads for wrestling shows. There isn’t much middle ground when it comes to wrestling. You either really like it or really hate it. Combine that with the fact that many sports announcers see themselves as being above reading most of the ads the network makes them read, and you get some really enthusiastic ad reads for WWE SmackDown during NFL games.

I’m very excited about this, as it’s the first time I’ve got to mention Thom Brennaman in one of these columns. The longtime Reds play by play broadcaster also does NFL games for Fox, and his attempt at asking us if we knew who Sasha Banks was revealed that he had no idea who Sasha Banks was.

Thom Brennaman completely botched @SashaBanksWWE name for the Smackdown ad read. pic.twitter.com/KnyzOpDLco

— Austin (@rondarouseyszn) December 29, 2019

An interesting part of this: his father, legendary Reds radio announcer Marty, was quite the wrestling fan back in the day. He even invited Randy Savage into the announce booth one time. Having listened to both Marty & Thom talk about baseball forever, the most likely scenario is that the Brennamans used to watch pro wrestling, but gave it up when these pesky young kids & their new-fangled moves made the show unwatchable in their eyes. That would certainly replicate their opinion towards baseball.

2. Swing & a Miss

People have lots of opinions about Will Ospreay. I like the guy. Sure, he does a bunch of crazy stuff that doesn’t make very much sense, but he does it very well. Usually. When he misses something, it really stands out, like it did here at New Japan’s Wrestle Kingdom 14:

https://twitter.com/JESnowden/status/1213414144369672197

True, Takahashi is coming off of a very serious injury and you don’t want to stiff the guy, but you gotta make it look better than that.

3. Even ****** Tokyo Dome main events have botches

To the surprise of nobody, Kazuchika Okada & Kota Ibushi had a tremendous match at the end of Wrestle Kingdom Night 1. Also, to the surprise of nobody, Ibushi almost broke himself at least once.

sure #njwk14 pic.twitter.com/6ZZZtBsxkX

— Pool (@ZePoolio) January 4, 2020

This happens pretty often with him, so we probably shouldn’t worry too much.

4. Weird stuff going on here

Rey Mysterio came up a little short against Andrade on Monday night. The finish to the match was strange, to say the least. Mysterio inadvertently took out Zelina Vega on the outside, then got rammed headfirst into the steel steps by Andrade. Andrade set up the hammerlock DDT, but then the referee broke it up and told Rey to go outside.

https://twitter.com/ryansatin/status/1214362674085031936

Andrade ended up getting that win anyway, but it made for a headscratching moment. It also resulted in Jerry Lawler calling Zelina “Melina”, which is a little problematic.

5. JR Uncut!

Jim Ross’s crankiness gets on my nerves sometimes, but I’m ok with him dropping more F bombs by the week.

https://twitter.com/bradwrestletech/status/1212572792756899840

Thanks for reading! If you see (or hear) anything wrong in the world of wrestling, let me know via Twitter or e-mail at [email protected]. See you next time!