It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

Yes, it’s Voices of Wrestling Secret Santa time again, everyone. The brainchild of JR Goldberg (@wrestlingbubble), VOW Secret Santa sees all participating website contributors give their fellow contributors, the greatest gift of all: wrestling matches!

VOW Secret Santa Archives: voicesofwrestling.com/category/vow-latest/columns/vow-secret-santa/

Juice Robinson vs. nZo
July 9, 2021
NEW

Reviewed by Lee Malone (@Malone_713)

Gifted by Super Joel Cast (@thesuperjcast)

It’s funny up until this week I thought I was a well-liked member of the VOW family. I don’t cause any major disruptions in the VOW slack, I wish everyone a happy birthday and yet now I discover that someone has left a massive piece of coal in my Secret Santa stocking. 

Let me be blunt, this match stunk!

I hated it and I never want to have to see or think about it ever again. I’ll begin with Juice, this fucking guy seems to have given up on whatever wrestling-based aspirations he had. In 2019 it felt like he could go on to be one of the biggest gaijin stars in New Japan and yet now he’s wrestling nZo in a quarter full hockey rink. Let’s get it over with and get this guy on Smackdown hanging around with Nakamura and Rick Boogs.

nZo, here is a guy that watched Tiger King and thought “man I wanna look just like Joe Exotic”. Between the red boxing robe, purple shorts and compression pants, blonde beard and overgrown hair, nZo looks like the human form of the emoji on the ass of his shorts. Adding to all of this is the fact that nZo appears to be blown up within 3 mins of some very light grappling. 

The match is worked at what I would generously call half pace. The commentary doesn’t help as they sound especially bored by all of this. The big finish of the match is nZo applying the worst Sharpshooter ever seen after 45 seconds of working over Juices knee. Time expires as we get a 15-minute draw that sadly couldn’t quite reach the heights of Omega vs Danielson or Page vs Danielson. For two supposedly charismatic guys, they do some trainee wrestler level appealing to the fans asking do they want 5 more minutes but sadly before overtime can begin two nobodies jump in the ring and attack both nZo and Juice. So this match was in actual fact a plot to build to a “big time” tag match on the next NEW show. 

This sucked but I guess not everything in Secret Santa can be a winner. Hopefully, I get a better gift next year. As for my gifter, I will take a stab and say Griffin Peltier gave me this lump of coal.Â