Sporadic Movement

RWL Sporadic Movement

9 July 2007 - St. Wilfrid’s High School Sports Hall

After years of wrestling on grass, cardboard, sand and blue tarpaulin, RWL finally discovered something revolutionary:

Gym mats.

Sporadic Movement took place almost six weeks after RWL:ACW Hardcore Debut and represented another small but important step in RWL’s evolution.

This time, the inspiration came from outside RWL.

Learning From NAW

By the summer of 2007, Valo and Jayyy had become increasingly involved with National Alliance Wrestling, travelling around the country and gaining experience outside their own promotion.

NAW promoter Steve Farrell regularly ran events at Houghton Regis Leisure Centre, using hired sports facilities and thick gymnasium mats to create a wrestling area.

It gave RWL an idea.

Many of the RWL group were current or former students of St. Wilfrid’s High School, and they discovered that the school’s sports facilities could be hired relatively cheaply through a council sports scheme.

The scheme was presumably intended for things like football, basketball and table tennis.

RWL had other ideas.

They also knew how to get hold of the school’s thick blue PE mats.

For the first time, rather than finding somewhere outside and building a wrestling area from whatever happened to be lying around, RWL deliberately hired an indoor sports facility and constructed its setup using proper gym equipment.

There was even a vaulting box, positioned at the edge of the mats and used as a makeshift top rope, another idea borrowed from what they had seen at NAW.

After cardboard, shopping trolleys, rocks and a blue tarpaulin that regularly attempted to escape in the wind, RWL suddenly had crash mats and a roof.

For RWL in 2007, this was practically luxury.

A Very Busy Weekend

There had also been a significant development outside RWL.

On 7 July 2007, just two days before Sporadic Movement, Valo competed for NAW at Britfest 2007 at The Rivera in Aylesbury.

In blazing summer heat, Valo became the first ever NAW Cruiserweight Champion.

It was also the first time somebody from RWL had gone elsewhere and won championship gold.

The following day, Valo wrestled again at NAW Collision at the same venue, defending the championship against UKBYW veteran Richard Carey.

Then, still carrying a fairly brutal sunburn from the weekend, Valo headed back to Blackburn for Sporadic Movement.

Footage of Valo’s championship victory at Britfest survives in the RWL archive, preserving another part of the wider story taking place around the promotion during 2007.

Bringing Gold Home

Sporadic Movement opened with Valo addressing the crowd, receiving cheers for representing RWL and becoming the first of its wrestlers to capture a championship elsewhere.

There was one fairly obvious difference from the last RWL show.

Valo was a good guy again.

At Hardcore Debut, Valo had been bragging that wrestling for NAW made him better than everybody in RWL.

There wasn’t an elaborate redemption story behind the sudden change.

RWL needed a top babyface.

Chris Goodwin was coming into the show as an outsider and a heel, and with no obvious top face available to oppose him, Valo’s recently established heel turn was quietly put to one side.

Sometimes wrestling storylines develop through months of carefully planned storytelling.

Sometimes somebody looks at who is actually available that day and thinks:

“Well, I guess I’m the good guy again.”

Valo told the crowd that he’d won the NAW Cruiserweight Championship for RWL and had brought it home with him.

He also recounted his defence against Richard Carey the previous day, claiming he’d German suplexed Carey fifteen feet down a hill to make damn sure the championship came back to RWL.

More importantly, Valo announced that he was willing to defend the NAW Cruiserweight Championship in RWL whenever he could.

He didn’t have to wait long for somebody to take him up on the offer.

The Chris System

Suddenly, “Call on Me” by Eric Prydz started playing through the CD player.

Out came Chris Goodwin.

Goodwin was already familiar to RWL through HGWA and the earlier interfed shows, while by this point he had also become a regular part of NAW.

He had also developed his own fitness programme.

The Chris System.

Playing an obsessive fitness instructor, Goodwin arrived at St. Wilfrid’s ready to educate Blackburn on the benefits of his workout system.

Unfortunately for the people of Blackburn, the first stage of the Chris System appeared to involve Chris Goodwin telling them how fat they were.

Goodwin ripped into the crowd before turning his attention towards Valo and the championship he’d brought back from Aylesbury.

He wanted a shot at the NAW Cruiserweight Championship.

Valo accepted.

Watson vs Lyger

The first match of Sporadic Movement saw Adam Watson once again face Kazuki “Lightning” Lyger, less than two months after their previous meeting at Remedy III.

The improvement from that match was noticeable.

Their second encounter was considerably better than the first, with both looking more comfortable and the new surroundings providing a much better surface to work on than many of RWL’s previous makeshift setups.

There was still a good amount of the comedy that had become part of Lyger’s matches, although less than during their particularly comedy-heavy encounter with Flaming Chaos at RWL:ACW Hardcore Debut.

More than anything, Watson and Lyger provided another small indication that the RWL roster was gradually getting better.

Another Cruiserweight Title Defence

Next up, Flaming Chaos challenged Valo for the NAW Cruiserweight Championship.

As a complete match, Valo vs Flaming Chaos was nothing particularly remarkable.

But that wasn’t necessarily what it had been designed to be.

RWL was still primarily presenting its shows online through music-video edits, and the match contained plenty of individual moves and moments that could be cut together into that format.

In 2007, that was often the priority.

Get the moves.

Get the footage.

Make the music video.

Viewed as an uninterrupted match years later, the spaces between those moments become considerably more apparent. Viewed through the format it was actually being produced for at the time, it makes much more sense.

One Challenger Becomes Two

The challenge made at the beginning of the show eventually came around as Chris Goodwin received his shot at Valo’s newly won NAW Cruiserweight Championship.

Except it wasn’t quite the match that had been agreed upon.

Somewhere along the way, Kazuki “Lightning” Lyger had been added.

Why?

Apparently nobody felt the need to explain that.

So instead, the championship was contested between Valo, Chris Goodwin and Kazuki Lyger.

Whatever the reasoning behind Lyger’s sudden inclusion, the resulting three-way was actually pretty good for RWL at the time.

There were little signs throughout of the experience the three were beginning to accumulate. Valo and Lyger both had some professional training behind them, while Valo and Goodwin were regularly wrestling with NAW.

It didn’t suddenly transform RWL into polished professional wrestling, but that little sprinkle of outside experience helped.

The new surroundings also provided RWL with entirely new objects to misuse.

At one point, Lyger powerbombed Goodwin onto the wood-and-metal trolley used to transport the gym mats.

RWL had finally escaped the dangerous objects lying around outside.

Fortunately, the sports hall had supplied some new ones.

Twice in One Night

By the end of Sporadic Movement, the NAW Cruiserweight Championship had been defended twice on its very first night in RWL.

The championship had only been created two days earlier.

Valo had won it on Saturday, defended it against Richard Carey on Sunday, returned to Blackburn on Monday and put it on the line another two times.

It had been a busy few days.

Sporadic Movement

Taken as a whole, Sporadic Movement wasn’t an extraordinary RWL show.

There wasn’t a huge storyline development, an infamous disaster or a match that suddenly changed everything.

It was simply a fairly inoffensive show.

And in the music-video format RWL was producing at the time, it came across considerably better.

But underneath that was something more important.

RWL was learning.

The experience Valo and Jayyy had gained travelling with NAW was beginning to influence how RWL itself operated. Instead of simply influencing moves or characters, ideas from outside were now affecting where shows were held and how the wrestling area was constructed.

Valo and Lyger’s professional training added a little more polish to the wrestling. Goodwin and Valo brought some of their growing NAW experience with them. Watson and Lyger looked noticeably better than they had less than two months earlier.

And for the first time, an outside championship had been brought into RWL and defended on an RWL show.

None of these things individually transformed the promotion.

Together, though, they showed progress.

After wrestling on playgrounds, fields, cardboard, sand and blue tarpaulin, RWL had found its way into a sports hall.

It had proper mats.

It had a vaulting box.

It even had a trolley to powerbomb Chris Goodwin onto.

It wasn’t a revolution. But RWL was learning.

RWL had spent much of its first year figuring things out for itself. By the summer of 2007, it was beginning to learn from the wrestling world around it.