NXT UK recap, Nov. 7: Faction Action!

Your recap of all the action from this week’s NXT UK, featuring some good old fashioned faction warfare, and Grizzled Young Veterans taking on Mark Andrews and Flash Morgan Webster.

With a belly full of candy — eaten not because of Halloween but just because candy tastes good  — NXT UK continues on. While not reaching the heights of its slightly older American sibling, WWE’s black-and-gold-and-British brand continues to get more and more intriguing. Episodes have had a more serialized feel of late, more cohesive and consistent week-to-week.

This week, multiple storylines converged as bubbling tensions finally reached a boiling point, and the first shots of faction warfare in NXT UK were fired. Seems like all of WWE is catching faction fever, eh? But who was doing the firing and what does it mean going forward? Let’s tackle it all by jumping into the Nov. 7 episode of NXT UK: Faction Action!

Third best in the game

Before faction warfare officially spread to NXT UK, there was a whole really good main event featuring wrestle-battles of a traditional nature. That is, a one-fall standard tag team match with nothing tangible on the line.

Former champs Mark Andrews and Flash Morgan Webster took on former-former champs Grizzled Young Veterans to ostensibly determine who is the number three team in the NXT UK tag division. But really, they just took each other on because they hate each other’s guts.

Much like the triple threat at TakeOver: Cardiff and the subsequent two-on-two rematch, this match was also really good. It portrays Andrews/Webster and GYV as two literally evenly-matched teams. They’ve wrestled each other enough times recently that they know and can withstand all the tricks.

Mark Andrews does his usual crafty move of sliding on his knees under an attack, only to get kicked right in the face mid-slide by James Drake. Ticket To Mayhem, normally a match-sealer for GYV,  gets reversed and swings momentum in the favor of Andrews and Webster. In general, Flash Morgan Webster just takes a lot of punishment and keeps on kicking out (what feels like a third of this match is solely dedicated to Drake and Gibson kicking Flash’s ass). It’s underdog scrappiness and self-righteous indignation fully cancelling each other out, resulting in some fun tag team action.

And then there’s the effective end of the match, which is just a series of devastating haymakers that leaves all four competitors lying in the ring. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a real resolution here.

Mark Coffey and Wolfgang come out to watch the match from the ramp — which in this particular venue is no more than 10 feet from the ring — later to be joined by Marcel Barthel and Fabian Aichner.

As the four of them stand there doing nothing in particular, the tensions become too much to handle. Gallus rush the ring and throw GYV out of it, while Imperium occupy themselves by taking out the already taken out Andrews and Webster. Alexander Wolfe joins his team’s side, while Joe Coffey emerges from the crowd to support his brother and wily uncle-type. That’s when things get interesting, but onto the next page to find out why!