Rambles about the wonderful world of wrestling.
Hell in a Cell. Once upon a time those four words meant something. A match retained for only the biggest of moments. The debut of Kane, the fall of Mick Foley and just a few years ago the end of an era when Undertaker and Triple H took to one at Wrestlemania. However, recent times has seen the cell devalued. Matches often flattering to deceive and a yearly PPV, stacked with feuds we don’t really care about.
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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.
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?
Night of Champions is a strange PPV this year. On one hand it feels like a big deal. Seth Rollins will compete twice and Sting is fighting for the WWE Title, something we never thought we’d see. However, the rest of the card is same old, same old. Rusev and Dolph Ziggler are still plodding away in their never-ending feud and Neville will probably beat Stardust again. As usual, WWE are approaching the end of the year stuck in a bit of a rut. Which is probably not the way to entice you into reading this preview.
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.
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.
Footage has just been released of WWE 2K16, showing that… well it’s pretty much the same as all the other ones. WWE games have been running off the same tired engine for years now and even with a change in developer, it doesn’t look likely to stop anytime soon. Sadly, that engine just doesn’t work and creates an experience that has more in common with a fighting game than a wrestling game.
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.
TNA is a mess at the moment. Over the last couple of weeks we have seen some of their biggest stars decide to leave the company and they seem to bounce from disaster to disaster. Sunday night’s Slammiversary, seemed to sum up all of those problems at once.
Ramblings About Wrestling 