Trapped in the Cagematch: Robbie Eagles vs. The Tuckman (August 1, 2025)

With Trapped in the Cagematch, Kim Wong combs through the highest-rated matches according to Cagematch’s voters in preparation for the annual FSM 50 and the year-end Match of the Year extravaganza.

Robbie Eagles vs. The Tuckman
PWA Black Label The Climb
August 1, 2025
Cagematch ranking as of 12/02/25: 61

According to the Internet (and specifically, this profile of Tyran “The Tuckman” Tuckey by Sheridan Munro writing for The Owl, the University of Canberra’s student newspaper), “The Tuckman” is “one of Australia’s most exciting up-and-coming professional wrestlers,” “refers to himself as ‘Australia’s Mullet,’” and is “just a young Aussie having a go, trying to work his hardest and doing it with a smile on his face.” For The Tuckman, “WWE is the big goal,” and he hopes to use Pro Wrestling Australia, his home promotion, as his launching pad to join the likes of Rhea Ripley, Grayson Waller, Bronson Reed, and Zaria. He’s certainly tried to engage the press to reach his goal; he’s also been profiled by the Western Advocate, Bathurst publication that’s existed since 1848, and Pario Magazine, an Australian bimonthly print publication. He and his partner in the Dropouts, Scott Green, were also profiled by Australian Rural & Regional News. And he has a robust social media presence, including engaging in stunts like taking part in a burpee challenge and working with PWA to create a mini-doc in advance of this match against Robbie Eagles. He is eager to show that he’s charismatic and well-spoken, the main qualities that WWE seeks in their independent contractors to fulfill their vision of sports entertainment. 

Robbie Eagles was one of the key wrestlers in the most recent boom periods in Australian wrestling, when the scene seemed poised to break out as the next hotbed after the British scene had been co-opted and snuffed out by WWE. (This is probably where I will get told by certain British wrestlers that this criticism of how WWE leveraged NXT: UK and how certain British wrestlers prioritized their interests to aid WWE’s penetration of the scene is “not the way.”) Eagles, Adam Brooks, and Jonah Rock (now known as Bronson Reed) wrestled in Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s Battle of Los Angeles 2018, the surest stamp of acknowledgement (other than being predated by WWE’s expansion) in the wrestling industry at the time. Of that group of key wrestlers, Eagles arguably reached the highest height, winning New Japan Pro Wrestling’s IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship and Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship. (The other options are former NXT Tag Team Champion Duke Hanson, Mark Davis, Reed, and Pro Wrestling ZERO1 mainstay Chris Vice. Brooks, unfortunately, never quite made it out of the Australian wrestling scene.) 

The story goes that The Tuckman held the Soul of PWA Championship for 181 days between 2023 and 2024 when Eagles beat him for the title at PWA Black Label Ringmasters. The match ended by referee stoppage because Eagles knocked The Tuckman out with an enzuigiri in their match. Eagles, the veteran, wanted the title to go along with his multiple PWA Heavyweight Championships and the PWA Tag Team Championship and destroyed The Tuckman to get it. As the longest reigning Soul of PWA Champion (469 days, blowing past Mick Moretti’s 294 days and The Tuckman’s 181 days), Eagles also defended the title abroad, facing Jackson Drake in North Carolina at DPW Carolina Classic 2024 and Koda Hernandez at Black Label Pro Crowning Glory. He also defended the title against myriad opponents in Australia: Lena Kross, Jack J. Bonza, Paris De Silva, Billy Preston, Mitch Ryder, Zeke Andino, Jude London, Jimmy Townsend, Michael Spencer, and Shay Kassidy. In this reign, Eagles became the gold standard for the title and PWA itself. In the process, he raised the title’s prestige, setting up the opponent who dethrones him to reap the benefits from his hard work. In theory, whoever defeats Eagles could then help raise PWA to new financial and reputational heights.

There are worse candidates than The Tuckman to be the vessel of PWA’s hopes and dreams. He’s young (though I can’t find his exact age, he said in the Munro interview that he dropped out of university in 2021), new (he made his debut in 2022), and charismatic. He hustles to get press, and he has a theme song that the crowd can sing along to, a key driver to popularity in modern wrestling. 

To work through the logic of sifting through the viable candidates to dethrone Eagles:

• Selecting someone from Eagles’s generation (Brooks, Damian Slater, Marcus Pitt, Slex, Mick Moretti, Matt Diamond, Jack Bonza, Krackerjack, Erika Reid, and Rocky Menero) wouldn’t accomplish the brief of setting PWA for the future.
• Selecting someone from the current generation (Jessica Troy, Caveman Ugg, Tommy Knight, Eugenie, Hendricks, Jude London, Paris De Silva, and Lena Kross) would try to balance the present and the future, but it wouldn’t maximize the return on the investment that PWA made in Eagles’s reign.
• Selecting someone from the coming generation (The Tuckman, Jarvis, Robbie Thorpe, Shay Kassidy, Eli Theseus, Gabriel Aeros, Ryan Rapid, and Tyson Reid) would gamble on maximizing the return on the Eagles investment, assuming that the wrestler then doesn’t get snatched up by a larger company from abroad. 

Once PWA had selected The Tuckman to be the beneficiary, it then directed its focus behind him. PWA continued to feature him in his tag team, The Dropouts, formerly known as the Beer Bong Bros, while they kept him away from Eagles. They wove the Dropouts into one of the other major stories in PWA, Jessica Troy’s feud with Charli Evans for the PWA Heavyweight Championship, by pairing the Dropouts against Troy and Evans and then teaming the Dropouts with Troy against Evans and North Shore Wrestling. They made him the first entrant in the King of the Metro Rumble and had him outlast the other competitors, even arranging for his partner in the Dropouts, Scott Green, to help him win the Metro Rumble. And they created videos to reiterate the narrative of The Tuckman’s fall and revival ahead of the rematch with Eagles.

PWA also smartly used Eagles’s reign to test some of the aforementioned wrestlers of the current and coming generations as a contingency plan in case The Tuckman didn’t work out as their next focus. Eagles only wrestled two people from his generation (Bonza and Spencer) during that reign. Instead, his matches were spent on the current generation (Kross, De Silva, and London) and the coming generation (Kassidy, Townsend, Ryder, Andino, and Preston). Also, PWA made its shows and matches easily accessible on YouTube, labeling the videos clearly so they are optimized for search engine discovery. (Click on any of these hyperlinks to the matches on PWA’s YouTube page to see for yourself.) 

All this is to say that PWA used Robbie Eagles’s time and built to this moment of redemption for The Tuckman as well as they could have. It showed the same level of concentration and clarity of focus that I admired in how Stardom directed the company to follow Saya Kamitani’s lead or, on a smaller scale, how Pro Wrestling ZERO1 is using the new Hayabusa to grow its business. 

So, how has it worked out for PWA? As someone who is parachuting into the Australian scene for his column, I can’t speak for the Australian fans’ mood around the ascension of The Tuckman. (And we should also acknowledge that Australia’s wrestling scene is still very territorial. The Melbourne scene is different from the Perth scene, which is different from the Brisbane scene, which is different from the Sydney scene.) Cagematch doesn’t have attendance for PWA’s shows, so we won’t be able to use that as the metric. We’re left with using the views of the shows on YouTube to gauge. 

*This is the views count for just the King of the Metro Rumble match; I can’t find the full show on PWA’s YouTube. Also, this match was uploaded 5 months ago as of this writing.

**Both nights of Colosseum 2024 were streamed, but I can’t find Colosseum 2024 Night 2 on PWA’s YouTube page. The reason for this abnormally high view count seems to be Grayson Waller, who wrestled Jimmy Townsend on Colosseum 2024 Night 1.

It’s hard to conclude that the focus on The Tuckman led to growth in the number of views. If we assume that Ringmasters might have gotten to its high number of views based on interest on Eagles vs. The Tuckman I, then wouldn’t the fact that The Climb, where Eagles vs. The Tuckman II took place, has a lower view count be worrying, even accounting for the headstart Ringmasters has in accruing its view count? On the other hand, the view count shows an upward trajectory from CHEVS V TROY to King of Metro 2025 to The Climb, which would match The Tuckman’s storyline. 

This leaves us with the question of the artistic quality of the match itself. As the climactic moment in the Eagles vs. The Tuckman story, it must have been at least good for reviewers to have rated it so highly. It’s certainly the highest rated match in Australian wrestling in 2025, which is how it caught my attention. That attention comes with certain expectations about the match, which clash with my first impressions of The Tuckman. Robbie Eagles is a known quantity, and I know to expect high calibre work from him. The Tuckman, at first blush, reminded me of Broseph Joe Brody from Hoodslam, the American independent wrestler Matt Brannigan, and former WWE superstar Mojo Rawley. That first impression set my expectations for The Tuckman somewhere between the lower mantle and the outer core of the planet’s crust. 

Focusing this feud around a title called the Soul of PWA felt a bit on the nose. To me, Eagles represents one vision of professional wrestling, and The Tuckman represents another. I don’t intend to dismiss The Tuckman; similar to how I approached learning about Saya Kamitani despite the fact that she was another in the long lineage of black clothes wearing, rules flouting villains in professional wrestling, I am open for The Tuckman to impress me even though the fact that I have to type “The Tuckman” every time I mention him in this column biases me to root against him. 

Also, I get why an independent Australian wrestler would use a song from a Sydney band with a chorus that is easy for a crowd to sing along to and that laments the plight of the little people in an unfair world as his entrance music. Nonetheless, it feels a bit rich for The Tuckman to use Moving Pictures’ power ballad “What About Me,” which has lyrics that implore the listener to “Take a step back and see the little people/They might be young/But they’re the ones that make the big people big” when he tells the world every chance that he gets how he’d like to leave his home country to join the industry-leading sports entertainment company that has worsened and cheapened professional wrestling for the better part of the past four decades and loves to cozy up to murderous dictatorships and wannabe dictators. 

I don’t begrudge The Tuckman’s for his dreams of fame and fortune. I don’t even begrudge him for using “WWE” as shorthand for “becoming famous and rich through professional wrestling.” I do begrudge him for defining success as “making it to WWE,” as if that were the only option for a professional wrestler in 2025 and as if sports entertainment is the same as professional wrestling. If he had said, “I want to be known around the world as the best professional wrestler in my generation” or even “I want to be in the main event of a show seen by millions around the world,” it wouldn’t rankle me so badly.

Before the bell even rings, I can already predict that the match is going to position The Tuckman as the sympathetic underdog against Eagles, the vicious and domineering veteran. Starting from that supposition, I am prepared to be annoyed. The Tuckman can reassure me that he has all of the necessary koalifications (because he’s Australian, you see) to be the person I should root for in this match, but I am skeptical. He’ll have to work hard to earn my sympathy. The commentary team doesn’t help The Tuckman’s cause when it starts on about what a great moment The Tuckman’s singalong entrance for this match was.

Once the match starts, it’s slightly easier to swallow the idea that The Tuckman feels aggrieved and embarrassed by how he lost the first match and how outclassed he was by Robbie Eagles. Eagles and The Tuckman started by imitating the iconic (or does it need to be spelled “iiconic” to honor the Australians Peyton Royce and Billie Kay?) Don Frye and Yoshihiro Takayama punch exchange, but Eagles and The Tuckman didn’t commit to that for long; it becomes just a footnoted reference in the match. The Tuckman chased Eagles out of the ring and paid for it as Eagles battered The Tuckman around the ring and even came out on top when The Tuckman caught Eagles climbing the lighting rig.

Though The Tuckman has a height advantage, Eagles used his lower center of gravity to rip off three consecutive side suplexes. 

Then, Eagles antagonized the crowd while they chanted “Dubbo,” The Tuckman’s hometown, so they would focus their energy toward cheering the underdog.

Eagles worked hard in this match to direct the viewers’ sympathies to The Tuckman. When The Tuckman ambushed Eagles on the top turnbuckle with a superplex, Eagles bounced back up like a slasher monster and pulverized The Tuckman’s back with a running kick. I was heartened to hear someone in the crowd shout, “Do it again!”

Elsewhere in the match, Eagles would take time to taunt the crowd after he laid The Tuckman low with a kick or had him trapped in a hold. I greatly appreciated Eagles’s acting, athleticism, precision, and intensity during even little moments like when he cranked The Tuckman’s knee in a hold in this match. Eagles truly earned the “Robbie is a wanker” chant from the crowd; I hope they also appreciated his effort to feed The Tuckman their sympathy.

I wish I could give the same appreciation for PWA’s production. The difference in color balancing between the two handheld cameras was very distracting.

And then there’s the video corruption later in the match when Eagles hit The Tuckman with a backpack exploder from the apron to the floor where the video’s frame rate sank to single digits. I had to check the video on two other devices to confirm that it wasn’t an issue on my end.

The match was structured to let Eagles have control throughout the match and to give The Tuckman short bursts of offense to keep his hope alive. For example, The Tuckman was able to flip Eagles over for a loose Texas Cloverleaf hold, which caused Eagles to show vulnerability for the first time in the match. Eagles then sent The Tuckman scurrying out of the ring with a kick, and Eagles chased him with a snappy tope con hilo.

Eagles then took a moment to goad one specific ringside fan and then wound up the entire crowd to despise him so that they would be primed to cheer when The Tuckman would start his next brief comeback. 

And then there was the little wave to the crowd as he sprinted from one turnbuckle to another to hit The Tuckman with a running knee strike. It was the cherry on top of the asshole cake that Eagles constructed in this match. It’s no surprise then that when the crowd started a second “Robbie is a wanker” chant, there was a counter-chant that replied, “No, he’s not.” Eagles played the heel so well that one couldn’t help but appreciate his work.

As the match wore on, the offensive balance would shift a kick and a chop at a time from Eagles to The Tuckman. In hindsight, the match’s rhythm and pace are emblematic of The Tuckman’s story. He took a whooping early, and he persevered through that pain and struggled to achieve victory over his past, embodied in this case by Eagles, PWA’s elder statesman. No trope, not even the cliched check on The Tuckman’s consciousness by lifting his hand three times, was left untouched in this effort to channel the crowd’s energy to The Tuckman to fuel his (and PWA’s) rise. So, by the time that The Tuckman can trade blows with Eagles in the middle of the ring, the match should be bubbling fiercely. By the time that The Tuckman beats Eagles, the crowd should be at a fever pitch. 

With all these factors in The Tuckman’s favor, it was crucial that he impressed with this opportunity. He doesn’t seem particularly athletically gifted; it’s unclear, for example, what the intended move from the top turnbuckle was here.

Later in the match, The Tuckman was on his back on the mat while Eagles tried to position him for his Ron Miller Special submission hold. It almost looked as though Eagles had to position The Tuckman’s foot so that they could execute the next transition, where The Tuckman would kick Eagles’s neck and face so that Eagles would release the hold. 

On the flipside, we have Robbie Eagles pleasing the part of me that remained in the late 2000s and 2010s and just loved flipz in wrestling.

Did Eagles need to flip to make the leg lock work? No, he could have found other ways to cause The Tuckman to fall so he could continue attacking the leg that he’s targeted all match. Did it feel cooler that Eagles flipped to make the transition to the mat work? “Absolutely, yes,” said the part of me that thought Jack Evans was the coolest wrestler in the world in May 2004.

To The Tuckman’s credit, I thought the way he let his leg buckle while he lifted Eagles for a powerbomb was a great touch and incorporation of the damage that Eagles had inflicted on his leg throughout the match.

(I’m sorry about the artifacting in the gif. The app just wouldn’t cooperate with the flashing green background.)

The match reached an awkward speed bump when The Tuckman landed a 450 splash on Eagles. That exhausted him, so he was unable to pin Eagles, which allowed Eagles to survive and remind us that he exuded cool, like he did in this trip for a pin attempt.

Or how quickly he transitioned from that pin attempt to lock up The Tuckman’s legs so he could kick The Tuckman in the face.

The tide finally turned against Eagles for good when Eagles demanded to be awarded the knockout victory after he landed the same Hyperion running kick that knocked The Tuckman out in their last match. The referee, who also refereed their last match, refused to call the match for Eagles this time, so The Tuckman launched his comeback with a lariat, a slam, and a piledriver. Was it cheesy and contrived when he slid out of the ring in pain so that he could sit between two front row fans who would then lift him back to the ring apron so he could launch himself from the top rope to drive Eagles face first into the mat with a cutter to win the match? Indubitably, it was on par with the stinkiest cheeses you might find at The Stinking Bishops Boutique Restaurant and Cheese Bar. It certainly worked for the crowd, who roared on their feet when the bell rang for The Tuckman’s victory.

As it was, the match is a great example of a company picking a goal, working with a single-minded focus to craft the conditions to fulfill that goal, and then letting its talented wrestlers reach that goal. I have qualms based on my preferences, but I have to admire the storytelling craft PWA displayed in putting its focus behind The Tuckman.

I wish PWA and The Tuckman the best of luck. They’ve chosen him to be their growth accelerant, and PWA’s done everything it can to position The Tuckman for success. The Tuckman works hard at marketing himself on social media, and he has a fairly solid connection with the crowd. Between using the Lou Thesz press, the Rock Bottom, the rolling Stunner, and a cutter in his offense, there’s a sense of amateurish cosplay to how The Tuckman presented himself during the match itself, which is a bit off-putting when considered in the context of his frequent declarations about his intentions to make it to WWE. Given the choice between watching another Robbie Eagles or another The Tuckman match after this, I’d choose another Eagles match. He was very impressive in the control he had over the crowd, his athleticism, and his intensity. I’d known Robbie Eagles was good; this showed me how good he could be if he’s positioned as the main antagonist. 

The match can be seen on PWA’s YouTube page.

Next time: For most of 2025, Mercedes Mone was more leather and precious metals than bone and flesh as she traveled the world and accumulated championships. And while that’s great for her and the companies that she now represents as their champion, have the matches been good? We’ll check in on Mone with her match against Swedish wrestler Aliss Ink in the Danish company BODYSLAM.