By Haydn Gleed, ProWrestling.net Staffer (@haydngleed)
-Oh what a week it’s been to be a Bluebird. You can keep your Minnesota Miracles, I’ve been perfectly happy with being a Cardiff City fan this week. A 4-0 hammering of Sunderland last weekend was followed up with a 4-1 win in the FA Cup, and now the worlds richest club Manchester City will be visiting Cardiff City a week Sunday, and of course yours truly will be there. We will, of course, get a total hammering, but I don’t care. Anyways, I’m sure you didn’t click on the link to read about me gushing about my soccer team, so lets take a look at wrestling this week.
-Via WWE Raw, WWE presented what I can only describe as the perfect example of what I call fast food booking on Monday. When you are hungry, McDonalds or Burger King seem like the perfect option. You get a hit of food quickly, but within an hour of eating it you kinda feel hungry again and to some degree your satisfaction levels are quite low. Whereas if you wait and go to a nice restaurant where you have a starter and then have to wait for that perfectly cooked steak to arrive, you come away feeling much better about your days intake. So why am I making you all hungry with this talk about food? Well, watching Raw I could only feel that WWE made Asuka vs. Nia Jax and Seth Rollins vs. Finn Balor feel like a dry reheated burger between a sesame seed bun instead of a steak with a nice peppercorn sauce over the top. The matches were of a good quality, but they should have meant to much more.
If you have been watching wrestling for more than two years then you know about the incident between Seth Rollins and Finn Balor at SummerSlam in 2016. It was purely an accident when Balor was injured and had to forfeit the WWE Universal Title he won that night the very next night on Raw, but it had the ingredients to really become a juicy meal of a feud. WWE could have waited until the opportune moment and used what happened as catalyst for a Finn heel turn. He could have said he’d been waiting for the perfect opportunity to get revenge for Seth taking eight months of his career from him and now he’s taking going to do the same to him. Make the fans hungry for Seth to come back and point out it was an accident and throw some garnish over the feud with Finn continually getting the better of Seth. Eventually you could have had Seth come out on top with a hell of a match that would leave the fans satisfied. Instead, they threw out a reference of the injury from a couple of years ago as flimsy as a greasy onion ring and then burnt through the match. You can’t go back to this now, it feels that whatever positive could have come out of the Finn injury has now been wasted.
Asuka vs. Nia Jax was similar. The first time something happens is always more special than the second, third, etc. To continue with my analogy, you can go for a nice meal after having some fast food, but it’s never as special and you’d end up feeling sick no matter how good the food may be. It’s the same here, you’ll never get the opportunity for these two to have their first proper main roster match together and it was thrown out there as if it was just another segment on any other show. There was a fairly inconclusive finish, but that felt more of a way of getting out of a corner they’d put themselves in creatively by hot-shotting to ensure neither lady lost anything from this match rather than something to build a feud around.
Again, I’m not saying the matches were bad, I really did enjoy them, I just worry about this style of booking in terms of trying to get the best match out there and trading equity and the ability to tell long stories at the expensive of ratings and a quick fix for the fans like a fast food burger for the hunger. Ok, that’s enough food talk as I’m starting to get hungry….
-After I’d filed my blog last week, news came out that Paige’s in-ring career might be over, though neither WWE nor Paige have confirmed the news. At the time of writing my blog, the word was out that she been struggling with an injury. There is a video online of the Sasha Banks throwing what looked like a rather harmless kick to Paige’s back. You could tell that Paige was not expecting it and it therefore caused a whiplash effect of the neck. The footage becomes uncomfortable viewing as you see Paige struggling to get any power in her legs and shaking her arms to try and get feeling back. It was truly a scary moment. Added to this was the image of Bayley comforting Sasha, and you can see that it was a serious moment all round. As bleak as it may appear, I am holding out hope that the old saying of no news is good news and I’m still holding out hope that Paige will be able to continue her in-ring career and her redemption story after a rough couple of years seemingly both professionally and personally.
-WWE Smackdown was another blah show. The horrendous U.S. Title tournament limped to a finish with an unbelievably boring conclusion. Considering this was the main focus of the show, this really brought the level of enjoyment down. Bobby Roode coming out on top of the favorite Jinder Mahal was somewhat of a surprise, but I can’t say it does anything for me, nor did it make me more interested in the wrestler, the title, or the brand at this point.
-Also on Smackdown we had the wrestler try and modernize the classic wrestler A in the Royal Rumble tells the people at home why they are going to win the Rumble, including even the wrestlers you know don’t have a hope in hell of winning. In a spooky moment for me, I was sat watching Raw just before I watched Smackdown and I was thinking to myself about how much I missed the cheesy 30-second promos backstage in the build up to the Rumble that used to be all the rage back in the early to mid-90s. Thus, I was happy on that level when I saw an attempt on Smackdown to bring these back. The modernization of these styles of promos was a good idea on paper, but in execution it didn’t come off particularly well. Jason Powell hit the nail on the head when he said that fans have come to expect a certain production value from WWE that you can’t get from a mobile phone selfie video. I appreciate the effort and more importantly the fact that Smackdown wrestlers are talking about the Rumble at a time when the Raw wrestlers seem to have completely forgotten about it, but I’d give them a C- for the end result.
-Could the fact that the Smackdown wrestlers are talking about winning the Rumble while the Raw wrestlers are not actually a sign that it’s going to be a team blue member winning one or both Rumble matches? Just a thought.
-Raw is plug central for Raw 25. As someone who has been watching for the majority of those years, I am looking forward to the nostalgia feast that will be on display on Monday. I worry about two things though. One, with so many people due to make an appearance, will any one of them get the opportunity to really make it feel special. Two, is this another opportunity for WWE to show that anyone involved in the Attitude Era or even before are far superior to anyone on the current WWE roster? Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the show and it is sure to do a good rating, which can only help WWE with this being the go home show the Royal Rumble.
-With that I’m going to take my leave, mostly because my stomach is now rumbling after talking about burgers and steaks. Have a great and safe week ahead.
As always, agree or disagree with my blog feel free to get in touch either through twitter @haydngleed or via email haydn.gleed@gmail.com
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