WRESTLING REVIEW: NXT STAND AND DELIVER III

At the Crypto Arena on the Venetian Day of Fool’s, NXT’s Women’s Divsion made it a point to shine bigger than the Lake Show in my home city of Los Angeles, California for the third annual “Stand & Deliver”. With the Women’s title on the line, a six pack ladder match commenced featuring fan favorite Indi Hartwell to go toe to toe against other former champions Zoey Stark, Roxanne Perez, and Gigi Dolin along with Lyra Valkyrie and Tiffany Stratton fresh and ready for a taste of gold.

Hartwell and Valkyrie started things off outside the ring, quickly putting the ladders into play coming to blows with them, before finally deciding to put their tools to the side and lay each other out with a clothesline. Inside the ring, the current champion Roxanne Perez was laying the remainder of the competitors out punctuating this spot with a dive through the ropes to clear out the ring.
Hartwell took this opportunity to capitalize and attempt to put a ladder into the ring, but she didn’t get far as the ladder got kicked into her face by Lyra, who still remained on the second rope, taunting the fan favorite.

Hartwell wasn’t going to take that insult lying down and there was an exchange between the two, until Stark (who just hit a neckbreaker on Stratton) inadvertently broke things up between Hartwell and Lyra, since Stratton spilling out of the ring caught Hartwell full body, laying out both competitors for a few moments. The ladders finally got set up into the ring, with Lyra and Stratton first up and Stark kicking them off. The two climbed back up swiftly, only for Hartwell to knock them down again. Around this time, GiGi Dolin did something truly amazing and started helicoptering the ladder around her neck !

She got kicked in the face with the ladder still fixed on her, got up, and continued to helicopter the tool, risking neck injury, until she eventually took it off and slithered back to obscurity. Zoey Stark hit an impressive crossbody onto Lyra as she was in the tree of woe position on one of the ladders rungs, inadvertently taking them both out and allowing both Perez and Stratton the time to climb up the ladder and be the first two to touch the gold for the night. An exchange of blows from the top rung though, made it to where a touch was all those two were going to get then as they both fell off the climbing fixture.

Though Perez was able to roll out and regain her stamina, Stratton’s troubles were far from over as Hartwell rose up to powerslam Stratton into one of the ladders! Stark hit a superkick on Hartwell and picked her target as she started ramming one of the ladders into Hartwell’s abdominal as she was pinned up on a ladder she just climbed down from. After narrowly sidestepping one of these shots, Hartwell looked as if she was going to cough up a lung, but the night of pain was far from over for the fan favorite as she looked to gain an advantage from the top rope, only to take a spill from there that left her holding her nose in a fashion that looked like the fan favorite had spilled her own blood.

While this was happening, the current champion was reversing sit out slams on Stark. Sneaking from behind, Stratton attempted to powerslam a distracted Perez only to take a tumble out the ropes, while Dolin picked up the dazed Stark, hung her off her shoulders and just started ragdolling her into the ladders still standing in the ring. Stark was left on one of the ladders, and before she could climb up it to swiftly Lyra kicked her outside of the ring, again inadvertently hitting a recovering Hartwell into a ladder outside on the floor. Dolin used this time to climb up and put her fingers on the gold, but her former tag partner Jacy Jayne came down the ramp just to tear Dolin off the ladder top. Stratton set up the ladder just to take a dive off and lay out Perez and Lyra, leaving Hartwell to climb off the floor and heave up the ladder.

Still suffering from the abdominal shots earlier in the match from Stark, Hartwell struggled to even climb up the bottom rungs with her upper body strength tapped out. But from the bottom of the ring, Dexter Lumis appeared and like James Ellsworth for Carmella years before Corey Graves at “MITB” assisted Hartwell up the ladder crowning the fan favorite into a two times NXT champion and starting her first singles title reign in WWE. A rarity in WWE, Creative made the right call by having Hartwell win in a competition stacked with other former champions and upstarts. A mixed bag, especially with the returning Perez recovering from being carted out of an arena in an ambulance on a previous episode of NXT, Hartwell selling the abdominal injury that she got in this match up from Stark wielding the ladder’s nullified any sympathy viewers could have had for Perez.

The coup de grace was playing off of the nostalgia factor with Dexter Lumis, Hartwell’s former on-screen NXT love interest, returning back from RAW to assist on her win, since consumer’s just love nostalgia. Hartwell’s singles reign should be as lengthy as her tag reign, and having proven herself over the past couple of years in singles competition, Hartwell is guaranteed to continue the workhorse traits that have made her one of Pro-Wrestling’s most sought after rookies in recent years. She wasn’t Most Wanted on 2K for nothing.

New life may have been breathed into the Women’s Title with a tried and true champion, but the same could not be said with Kiana James and Fallon Henley as they swaggered into L.A. to defend the tag titles they won from the more capable K.C.’s (Kayden Carter & Kacy Chance). They might as well have tripped up the arena, but former NXT UK Champion, Alba Fyre, fixed that by wiping out the champions with a top rope dive before they could even step a foot onto the mat. Some pedestrian exchanges occurred, with NXT UK export, Isla Dawn, controlling the action against Henley. Getting Henley to the ground, Dawn performed a taunting spot while Fyre pulled Henley out onto the floor from the bottom rope, selling the creepy factor this European tag team has been using to full effect. Once Dawn tagged in Fyre, the red-hair began performing a clinic on Henley, most notably with a strong spear that practically went through Henley. James exploded onto the scene, but botched a flip to the outside but still taking out the challengers. A powerbomb into a pin attempt on Fyre afterwards could still not cover how green the current champions are.

The challengers took the time to inflict further damage on Henley while the ref was distracted because James was arguing the called down the line two count. While Henley got tagged in just to perform a dive for a pin attempt, Fyre and Dawn worked together and combined a backwards crucifix with a chokeslam for two. Not to be outdone, the champs performed their own little “fusion dance” coupling a halfway complete powerbomb from James and another dive from Henley that served to lay out all the opponents. With the champions stirring, the challengers successfully rebuffed their pin attempts. At around this mark, Henley’s entourage unwittingly distracted James with some ringside shenanigan’s involving her purse, allowing Fyre to sneak up with a backstabber to James for the tag titles. This was another good call at “Stand & Deliver”, since James and Henley are frankly a pair of amateurs from when I saw James last year perform live in St.Petersburg to this point in their career on NXT’s biggest PLE. The future looks bright for James, as there isn’t too many big women in WWE, but I can’t help but confuse Henley with the much more interesting Thea Hall. Henley is bound to be lost in the shuffle and putting the belts on her and James in the first place was a mistake that has finally been rectified.

I can only imagine how my city’s audience would have responded to Carter and Chance at the Crypto Arena. Down the line, a match up between those two and the current UK export champs will make for an entertaining event, since Dawn and Fyre have more than proved their value in the WWE Women’s locker room and their cohesion is seamless within the ring. Fyre has a record with the defunct NXT UK title that has left her in the memory of many supporters of pro-wrestling. With that level of prestige, it’s going to be a fun challenge to see if Fyre can do another marathon run with a tag championship and just who can strip the title away from a wrestler this reputable. At least, Fyre has no chance of being lost in the shuffle with other ginger haired women in the locker room. Henley might want to consider a different hair color or something, anything, so she could stand out the next time she has the opportunity to Stand & Deliver.

6 Pack Ladder Match for the NXT Women’s Championship
(Score: 5/5)
Standard Tag Team Championship Match
(Score: 2/5)

Date: April 1, 2023

City: Los Angeles, California

Venue: Crypto.com Arena

Attendance: 7,584