Fight Club: PRO, Return of the Sendai - Part Two, Wolverhampton - review

In front of a raucously partisan crowd, Satomura and her fellow native of Sendai, DASH Chisako, came agonisingly close to defeating Schadenfreude for the Fight Club: PRO Tag Team Titles.

This was an excellent match, with the heavy striking of Satomura and the smooth athleticism of Chisako making for a great contrast with Chris Brookes and Kyle Fletcher.

The end came when the champion hit a spiked sitout piledriver on Chisako for the victory.

Before that, there had been a breathless sequence, where Chisako came agonisingly close to winning with a series of innovative rollups and cradles.

However.the most astonishing moment came when Chisako hit a frog splash off the top of a huge ladder.

After the match, Brookes and Fletcher beat down the Japanese women.

They looked to put Satomura through a table, only for Fight Club: PRO owner Martin Zaki to rush down to ringside.

He chased Schadenfreude away and put their manager, Kid Lykos, through the table. Brookes marshalled his forces in response, with all five present members of Schadenfreude beating Zaki down, before they cut his forehead repeatedly.

With an assist from Dan Moloney, Zaki recovered to issue the challenge for a special Fight Club: PRO vs Schadenfreude match to end the rivalry at the promotion’s Project Mayhem show in September...

It was a wild end to had been a consistently excellent show. The tone was set from the start with Mark Davis defending his Fight Club: PRO title against Shigehiro Irie.

Both men are big heavyweights, and this was a hoss match with both men looking to hit hard strikes and big moves on each other. But what was also striking was their risk taking and athleticism, with Irie for example diving over the top rope to take out Davis on the outside.

The champion then hit a springboard second-rope Spanish Fly. That set up the finish, as he went on to hit a thunderous lariat and a sitdown tombstone piledriver for the victory.

Birmingham’s Dan Moloney won a similarly hard-hitting match in the co-main event, as he overcame WWE UK superstar and OTT Champion Jordan Devlin to continue his good run of form. .

Wolverhampton resident El Phantasmo returned to The Hangar after his first tours of New Japan Pro-Wrestling. Now part of the infamous Bullet Club stable that launched the careers of WWE superstars such as Finn Balor and AJ Styles, the mild-mannered high-flyer has been replaced by someone more boastful and caustic.

Phantasmo put both the city of Wolverhampton and Fight Club: PRO on blast, in a brutal and hilarious promo, with his former trainer Travis Banks particularly bearing the brunt.

Much to his displeasure he enedd up in another multi-person scramble match that was won by Rickey Shane Page.

Fight Club: PRO returns to The Hangar on Friday 23rd August.

By Will Cooling