anarchistxx

The Chris Benoit RR match was probably the best as an actual match, believable in that it went on for several minuts after the last entrant and built up some proper tension. The ending was extremely euphoric and cathartic at the time also - people are spoiled these days in terms of undersized internet/critical/workrate favorites getting WWE pushes. Just a shame how it all turned out. Not sure if it was the best as a show as I can't remember what was on the undercard. It wasn't the Rumble where Bob Holly got a title shot was it?

Kurt Angle vs Steve Austin at Summerslam 2001 always used to be my pick, although it has been some time since I watched it last. As close to a perfect match as they have run. Austin as the nasty, unhinged heel and Angle playing the fiery underdog, in trouble from the start but always roaring back, covered in blood and showing incredible guts only to have the belt ripped away from him by a desperate Austin attacking all the referees. One of the only times a non finish has felt appropriate and useful, building up more heat for the eventual payoff a month later. Those punches to Angle as he is bleeding and prone against the apron are some of the best and most realistic in WWF history, he must have been potatoing him.

The difference was, they had the carrot of The Rock to stop the fans shitting on it. The match was simply a vehicle for setting up the main event the next year. Pretty amazing that the main event of Wrestlemania can be reduced to setting up a later match, but the numbers and interest for Rock/Cena justified it.

WWE already have someone like that in Dolph Ziggler and have zero idea how to push him. He is a jobber one week, a plucky underdog the next, a crazy show stealer the next. The match with John Cena at TLC was superb, the best clusterfuck overbooked main event garbage match they have ran in years.

Don't see this at all - he seems slimy and loathsome to me. He isn't putting in amazing performances, but that is due to the dreadful, regurgative storylines he gets put in and turgid scripts he has to recite. Whoever is responsible for writing the promos for The Shield has done an utterly terrible job. Dean Ambrose and Roman Reigns in particular become more cringeworthy with every monologue. Let them be natural instead if the dreadful attempts at writing humor and exaggerated demeanors they have to put on. There is an argument that neither neither should be talking that much anyway. The longwinded promos that open Raw every week are among the most repetetive, tedious segments in wrestling history. The same lines and phrases and bullet points getting repeated ad infinitum both week on week and in the same promo. Surely they can try opening the show with a match or a backstage segment or anything that feels propellant and gives the show some forward motion. They want to make unpredictable, must see television and they open every week with virtually the same promo that goes on for what feels like forever.

Taylor was a [formerly] major celebrity and had novelty value. That show was moreorless built around him. It is different from running a match you have already done as a throwaway on Raw/Smackdown, a match where the crowd don't passionately care about either of the participants and where one of the workers in untested in a long main event match in the biggest slot of the year. Especially when you have Brock Lesnar, Sting, Daniel Bryan, John Cena and potentially The Undertaker working the undercard on a long show. Still, The Miz has headlined Wrestlemania so anything is possible.

No way can they run Reigns/Rollins for the belt at Wrestlemania, or at least it can't go on last. Would be dangerously underwhelming and the fans would turn on it. Of course, it would be a convenient excuse to have HHH vs Sting end the show so from their point of view it might work. Imagine if they made it an Authority vs Career match and HHH retired Sting, it would be worth it for the hilarity of the internet reaction.

Time to pay the billlllllssssss DANGEROUSSSSSSSSSS!!!!! I have a soft spot for old ROH commentary. Prazak used to post on Smarkschoice quite a lot.

Anyone think they might run something like HHH/Kane/Rollins vs Sting/Orton/Ziggler at Wrestlemania? Might make sense if they don't think Trips and Sting can have a decent match one on one.

Have to give it to Steph and Hunter, they are way better heels than they ever used to be. Far more self aware and brilliant at playing up to the stereotypes about them rather than inadvertently reinforcing them. The constant canoodling, Stephanie dancing to the awful cheesy music...the confetti coming down was a brilliant touch as well. Other than that Raw seemed the usual litany of meaningless repeat matches and boring filler to make up time, fast forwarded through 90% of it, everything feels so stale. Hopefully they pull it back coming into WM season. They have backed themselves into a corner with the firings, presumably it all gets blown off again in the next few weeks because no way they keep Ziggler off television for that long unless he is injured, he is pretty much their workhorse and really over. The triple threat at the Royal Rumble just screamed to me that someone is unwilling to job. Either Cena didn't want to lose to Brock again with him on the way out, or they want to get the title off Lesnar while keeping his strong going into Wrestlemania against Reigns or Daniel Bryan. Surely they haven't added the stipulation so they can run Cena vs Lesnar at Wrestlemania in a singles match?

This isn't a problem unique to wrestling though. Soccer matches at tiny lower league grounds in the UK have a rabid, raucous, loud atmosphere, whereas when you watch Arsenal play in front of 60,000 people it is often quiet. Agree that heat is important though - what would a match like Canadian Stampede be without the crazy crowd? Or Joe vs Kobashi? The reason the heat has gone out of mainstream US wrestling is because the characters are less distinct, they all wrestle and act in a homogeneous, clearly forced way that makes it hard for the crowd to connect with them. Feuds are built worse. Angles with hatred and blood are less common. Haven't seen enough NJPW recently to comment. These days my taste in matches has changed radically. I need to connect with the wrestlers, be interested in the writing and the feud and the match itself has to be worked in a way that doesn't just retread tired old tropes.

Ignoring how reductionist and ridiculous this statement is, pretty much all publications are still owned by white people with money who control their content. Nothing has changed in that regard. Websites are exactly the same. Modern journalistic outlets haven't become some egalitarian utopia, it is almost the exact same strata of people controlling them. And of course, good journalism shouldn't really be about the 'thoughts' of the writer, and that is another problem today. Many articles and think pieces are just a writer talking about their opinion. In older publications you rarely even knew who the writer was. If anything a paper like The Guardian makes a concerted effort to concentrate on minority issues, or at least to appear so. About half their content contains reference to sexism, racism, homophobia, feminist theory etc, and not a huge percentage of their writers could be classified as 'white people with money'. Doesn't make them a good content, because the quality of writing and the meaningfulness of the pieces is so shoddy. The pressure to monetize the website in the face of falling print sales mean the production of clickbait churnalism with very little attention given to investigative, longform, beautifully written writing. Wrestling is the same. They don't have the patience or ability to properly build a feud towards a match that will seem unique and memorable, because they have to produce a ridiculous amount of content.

No. But you might in say The Guardian, whereas now the majority of content in that paper is click-bait nonsense.

I read work that fits this description almost daily. You're talking about an idealized past that never existed. I'm not. Don't be patronizing. Go and read journals and broadsheets from 1830 - 1960. The standard of writing in my experience is much higher. There are good pieces today and there were bad pieces then. You still get good writers like Barney Ronay who would have been right at home in that era. I'm talking in general. Much more content is produced today and a good proportion of it is vacuous, uninformative, shoddily produced click bait. They are catering to an audience with lower attention span and who expects a lot of content to be produced daily if not hourly. Not an audience with fewer distractions who are buying a publication weekly and devote time and attention to reading it. As such, the overall quality has dipped. People used to cut clippings out of music publications and save them because they enjoyed reading them so much. When was the last time Rolling Stone or NME or Pitchfork produced a great piece of journalism?

I feel like I'm the journalism scold here, but this is dead wrong. The standard is actually higher now, largely because the web has made research so much easier. If I'm writing about an unfamiliar subject today, I can learn the basic history in a few hours. Don't agree with this at all. The fact that journalists think they can learn about complex topics in a couple of hours a research contributes to slipshod work with very little understanding that goes beyond surface level. In the past a journalist might spend a week or a month or even more researching his piece in detail. And even if we accept that general factuality is higher in modern day journalism due to enhanced, convenient source materials...my point was more referring to the standard of writing. Older pieces are often a joy to read, with skilled writers producing fluid, insightful and beautiful prose and delivering longform pieces that inform and engross. Today there is such a pressure to produce a high volume of content that even respectable publications fill their pages with clickbait lists, reductionist 'think pieces' that generalize and badly researched, shoddily written articles.

On the HHH debate, the best matches he has are ones where circumstances reign him in. The Shawn Michaels match where HBK had injured his leg beforehand was their most smartly worked and interesting contest. Similarly, with the Daniel Bryan one he was under pressure to work a fast paced, sharp, straight, clean, high quality opener to the show and wasn't given the opportunity of forty minutes, blood, rubber hammers and wheezing on his knees out of exaggerated exhaustion.

Doing your homework can be overrated because actually you tend to lose context rather than gain it. Going through a 'Best Albums Of All Time' list or a 'Best Films Of All Time' list can be counterproductive to me. Much better is that your tastes evolve organically, with one thing leading naturally to another i.e. you get into The Clash which subsequently leads you to Joy Division and then Wire and then Sonic Youth and then My Bloody Valentine and then Slowdive and then Cocteau Twins and then Beach House and then The Weeknd etc. Going throughn 'Best Of' lists becomes boring and unnatural, and you don't even like the albums as much as you hoped because you go in with such high expectations. It is very hard to be blown away when you are told before you even start that this film or record or match is one of the greatest of all time. The first time I watched 6/3/94 was a major disappointment. I watched it again a couple of years later going through AJPW in order and it made much more sense and was incredible, having the combined advantage of lowered expectations and a natural lead in to the match. Rather than putting the DVD in expecting to watch the best match of all time.

That isn't true at all. If I am evaluating a house song I expect it to have a nice groove. If I am evaluating a choral song I can exclude the 'nice groove' factor when rating it. If I am evaluating a piece of ambient instrumental techno I can't complain that it doesn't have a killer chorus or catchy verses like I would with a pop song. Certain factors can certainly be consciously excluded because you want different things from different people. There isn't this set of factors which every match or piece of art has to adhere to. A match has to work well and blow you away in the context it is worked. Look at Undertaker vs Mankind - judge that match of more conventional factors and it doesn't hold up at all. But it is still an incredible spectacle and a far better match than some random Sheamus bout on Raw that has more traditional qualities like good pacing, selling, proper structure, decent build to a back and forth finish with lots of exciting near falls.

Don't see why this disqualifies it. There are a lot of elements that go into making something a MOTYC, not just that the match is competitive and back and forth.

The uniqueness is a big factor in its favour, in an environment where you have people like Kane and Dolph Ziggler basically working the same match week after week for years on end. The style has got linear to the point where even good matches fail to stand out because of how predictably they were worked. The Summerslam match subverted all the usual tropes for a main event title match, and was like nothing they had done before. To make it all the more shocking, it was the most protected main eventer since Hulk Hogan who was getting decimated. People were marking out and just to get the frenzied reaction it did makes it worthy of end of year discussions, even if in retrospect it doesn't hold up.

The biggest negative about those two Cena/Lesnar matches was that they completely negated each other. The first established Brock as this monster, unbeatable freak, cementing the Undertaker victory and making it mean something. The Night of Champions match reaffirmed Brock as just another guy who Cena can hang with, and even have beat until he is saved by interference. It isn't even as if they tried to emphasize that Cena had a new strategy that enabled him to go toe to toe. They just worked it like a regular match.

Why? Pitchfork was very late to the party on them, publications like Fact and GvsB were supporting their music months before.We live in a fantastic era for new music, and thinking that doesn't just make you some transient fan riding the hipster train. With something like PC Music it will almost inevitably age badly as well, so you are missing out by not listening to it when it is part of the cultural zeitgeist. PC Music is like the Attitude Era. Terrible a decade later but a lot of fun if you were involved in it.

Is CageSideSeats a respected site? Just got linked to an article on there that claims Rollins vs Bryan in an Ironman Match should be the main event of Wrestlemania, not to mention this classic gem: "If Sting is going to have any shot of having anything resembling a classic in his one and only WWE match, Triple H is probably the safest bet to give it to him."

They should probably make Lesnar vs DB the title match and Reigns vs Cena as the regular match, rather than the other way round. You still get the huge Reigns vs Cena match to pop the buyrate while not pissing off all the fans who want to see Daniel Bryan with the strap. Booking wise you have a simple story of John Cena winning, and then Roman Reigns coming back older and wiser a year later to take the title off him at Wrestlemania 32.

Just seen that they tossed off Bray Wyatt vs Erick Rowan on a short, eventless midcard match on Smackdown with a clean finish. With no build, no storyline, no nothing. They really are fucking clueless. And then they go and run the same matches on PPV for three or four months straight. Edit: They ran Rusev vs Roman Reigns as well. Jesus christ.