Kyle O'Reilly Vs Finn Balor (NXT New Years Evil 06/01/2021.)

This was a rematch from their main event at Takeover 31, which was a match I enjoyed fine enough but never fell in love with it with as many did. It was still very good, which earlier in the year lead me to break my rule of not watching NXT TV (nothing to do with AEW bias, just self-care) so I could catch the rematch.

It starts well, Kyle is great on the mat. Finn isn’t exactly the best mat worker in the world but he’s agile enough to not slow O'Reilly down. This opening exchange sets up the core of this match. Balors arm is injured, which Kyle would target throughout the match. To get out of a Balor hold Kyle bites the ropes, which forces a rope break but Finn wastes no time in stomping Kyles’s head whilst still biting, injuring his jaw.

This is a good call back to their Takeover match, where Balors jaw was legitimately injured leading him to miss months of action. It’s a natural incorporation of a callback, that’s followed up on through the match. I loved this, as one of my pet peeves in wrestling is when wrestlers use a call back for an easy pop. “He did the thing I remember” is such a cheap way to get the crowd on board. It’s not bad in isolation, but fan service only goes so far. But as I mentioned this was more than just fan service, The jaw was used on several occasions to even up the match. It just had the added secondary benefit of being a call back to previous matches in the feud.

Finn’s arm work was fine, nothing exceptional but he never felt like he was neglecting the arm. Some of Kyle’s targeting of it was good, like tugging on it instead of striking during an exchange with Balor.

There are issues here, within the match mostly with Balor. His move set naturally has a lot of head moves so he did target the draw, but I never felt like it was targeted at the jaw over the general head area if that makes sense. O’Reilly sells it well enough to the point where it wasn’t noticeable on my first viewing, but I couldn’t help but notice that here. Finn also applied a crossface so weak even John Cena would tell him to tighten it up.

There’s also the issue of commentary. It’s not the matches fault but NXT commentary is so bad and obnoxiously

delivered that I found it hard to tune out during the match. It doesn’t make the match worse of course but it is worth mentioning as it did affect my viewing.

Overall this fell down slightly upon rewatch, but I would recommend you watch it if you missed it the first time around.