IWA Mid-South is a professional wrestling promotion that started off as purely a hardcore world, but much the same as ECW before it it would feature some top quality professional wrestling along the way. After their initial beginnings, the company moved to Indiana in 2000. Shows were run fairly frequently, and it is fascinating to look back at the various cards and see the talent on display. One such example comes from 2004 and the 'An IWA Homecoming' show. The event was headlined by Petey Williams and B-Boy, but a look at the undercard shows some interesting names. The third match of the night saw CM Punk defeat some dude called Claudio Castagnoli (or Cesaro, to most), Alex Shelley and Roderick Strong defeated Chris Hero and Nigel McGuinness and Eddie Kingston and Matt Sydal took on each other in tag team competition. The semi-main event of the evening saw Bryan Danielson take on AJ Styles, in an absolute barn burner of a technical classic. Danielson, or Daniel Bryan as he came to be known, has been on top of his game for seemingly forever, and the match with Styles is every bit as delightful as one would expect. Danielson came out on top, but both would continue to hurtle towards the stratosphere of modern professional wrestling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D02lTFtR0Ck
Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.
