Horatio

So Tom Lawlor fought Jon Moxley in April 2022 and it didn't get release'd for free until recently.

I just said Lawlor's indie-rific tendencies brought down his match with cruiserweight sensation TJP (they did), but check it out, in this match, they cover for Moxley's major-league shortcomings. This was MOTY quality, I don't care who yuh are, this was hard to watch. It's a 20-minute indie match between two guys who look like eachother, and have similar but different tough-guy reputations, and they're differences were on full-display. It was hard to watch because I just want'd it to end; I just want'd to know who and how and holy cow, it was worth sitting through.

Lawlor is not a superheavyweight, or a cruiserweight, but he can basically do everything else. So Moxley is basically cover'd; there's no offset differences to make this a styles clash, but check it out when Moxley starts to bleed and it's not a lot of blood, but it's a good cut, so Lawlor hops in his lap for a guillotine choke and we see the blood start to drip (also look how weird it is when Moxley breaks the guillotine but he's still got Lawlor on his lap fighting like a freak'n spider-monkey - the sort of weirdness you can only expect from a Lawlor match, or at least, it only seems weird when Lawlor does it because he is such an oddity in-ring/personality-wise). But then, Lawlor gets cut and it's even more blood. And Lawlor, who basically has no moveset but is capable of both the ordinary and the extradinary, so he has somewhat predictable Moxley whoop'd for most of the match. BUT, Moxley has a few reversals that Lawlor should have seen coming, but he was obviously busy thinking about his own crotch and his daisy-dukes when he should have been studying Moxley at his best. Just an awesome story, bloody as hell, not violent as can be, but the sort of unique "bar-fight" you expect from two seriously tough as nails bad-asses. The way their personalities clash just has to be seen, not to mention the psychology of Lawlor finally getting a former WWE champion fed to him on the indies - it's deep and apparent when you watch, too deep for me to recall it all in-detail hours after seeing the match just once.

My 2022 MOTY: Tom Lawlor vs Jon Moxley from Defy. And that said, that's probably my MOTY from 2019-2022 my last stretch of wrestling-watching before I had to do other things.