Rambles about the wonderful world of wrestling.
Before I get into this, it’s confession time. Wrestle Kingdom 10 was my first experience of New Japan. I’ve seen matches here and there and I’m obviously aware of Nakamura, Okada, and Tanahashi while you’d have to be living under a WWE-sized rock to have missed Bullet Club (although even that seems to be changing). But until now, I have never sat down and watched a full New Japan show. So here’s my thoughts.
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A week and a half removed from Bound for Glory and TNA seem to have used the show to hit the reset button. It doesn’t hide the fact however that the show, showed up everything that was wrong with TNA. From the opening Ultimate X match, which featured someone making their debut, to the closing of the World Title main event, it appeared like TNA had booked this on the fly and in many ways that seemed fitting for a company that seems to have been doing that for a long time.
NXT Takeover: Respect felt like a strange show going into it. It was lacking the hype of previous NXT shows. Despite on paper, looking like it could be fantastic. It featured two women main eventing an NXT Special for the first time and the conclusion of the Dusty Roads Classic. Throw in the debuting Asuka and this show should have felt huge. Thankfully what it lacked in hype, it more than made up for on the day.
This weekend WWE will bring us their second Live Network Special, this time airing from Madison Square Gardens. It’s a packed card of wrestling matches which looks like it will deliver in the ring, but the event as a whole just feels a bit… random. The last few weeks have been spent building up to it and yet does anyone truly believe that something monumental will happen here? Surely not even WWE thinks the fans believe that Big Show has a chance of pinning Brock Lesnar?
Sting, despite a WWE record of 0-1, is going into Night of Champions against Seth Rollins for the WWE Title. He’s also seemingly slipping back into his Joker character, which made an appearance in TNA. The question is, is this the right way to use Sting? And is there any world in which him becoming WWE Champion is a good idea?
On Monday night the Raw crowd at the Brooklyn Center turned on the WWE Diva’s segment. They begun to perform the usual antics of a bored crowd, Mexican waves and unrelated chants. Yet, only 48 hours beforehand a similar crowd had come unhinged when Bayley pinned Sasha Banks to win the NXT Women’s Title. So did the crowd change in that 48 hours? Or does it point to all the ways that the WWE is failing the Diva’s Revolution? It’s hardly a spoiler to claim it’s the latter.
In the build up to the biggest show in their history, Fear and Loathing VIII at the SECC on the 15th of November, ICW made their way to Edinburgh for a run of shows at City Nightclub. I was lucky enough to have a season ticket for the event. Having previously been a bit of a part-time ICW fan, it’s fair to say that this particular run has seen me fall in love with this Scottish wrestling company.
For the first time in a long time, WWE seem to have decided to make Summerslam a big deal. Always seen by the fans as one of the bigger events. Recent years have failed to live up to those expectations. There have been some big moments, Lesnar demolishing Cena for example, but the event has always felt a few notches below Wrestlemania. This year it feels different. Not only has the show been expanded to four hours, but we have a huge main event and the kind of celebrity participation that is usually reserved for the biggest show of the year. Summerslam feels like a big deal and what goes down this Sunday, could well shape the WWE all the way up to Wrestlemania.
If John McClane had been fighting against a faceless bad guy in Die Hard it’s a safe bet that it, like hundreds of other action films, would have been forgotten instantly. Hans Gruber made him, because a good guy needs a bad guy. Roddy Piper was that bad guy. He was the ying to Hulk Hogan’s yang and it’s a pretty safe bet that without the Hot Rod, Hulk Hogan would never have reached the height of celebrity that he did. On the week that it came out that Hulk wasn’t the squeaky clean American hero that he wanted us all to believe, Roddy had to upstage him once again. Sadly, this time he did it by leaving this Earth behind.
Battleground is very much a B + PPV. Coming just ahead of Summerslam, it is one of those classic middle of the road WWE shows, which is more likely to set up Summerslam than do anything spectacular itself. However, with rumours swirling last week about who might show their face. Battleground suddenly became a lot more interesting to a lot more people. So let’s have a look and see exactly what went down. Unsurprisingly, this will contain spoilers.
Ramblings About Wrestling 