anarchistxx

They ran Batista vs Reigns last week. Both matches should have been saved, or at least given some major build. This is debatable - he could pull off a well laid out, well rehearsed match, as long as it played to his strengths. He is already on the same level as a Kevin Nash, who worked a ton of main events, and at least a few of them were decent enough. And not being ready for a main event singles match really isn't an excuse for wasting money matches down the road. It has been a well booked feud thus far, and you don't have to physically keep them apart. Just don't run a load of meaningless singles matches, it really doesn't help the feud. Reigns/Batista should have been an epic, beautifully teased clash of the monsters, and instead they are working a second hour match with no build.

Because Batista vs Roman Reigns could have been a well built feud, with teases and promos and finally a good match at the end of it all that I was looking forward to. It ended up being meaningless and dour. I was using it as an example of bad booking. On a personal level, I'm a sucker for the 'big match feel' and fresh, interesting pairings. The pairing is no longer fresh and will no longer have a bg match feel if they eventually headline a PPV in the future. My attitude will be 'meh' rather than anticipative. It dimished my future enjoyment. We often complain about repetitive main events and constant rematches at the top of the card, so it is right to complain when potentially new combinations are wasted in the middle of the weekly show with no buildup. The Rock vs Brock Lesnar match at SS02 would have been far less enjoyable had they run it as a midcard match on free television a few months earlier. Kurt Angle vs Shawn Michaels means very little if they work each other on Smackdown every other week. Do we enjoy Hulk Hogan vs Ultimate Warrior to the same degree if we saw them work a ten minute no contest on SNME the year before? Obviously, part of my crticism was also from a business point of view, because it makes no sense whatsoever to run that match. I don't think it is wrong that I express my bemusement and criticise them for doing it, criticism shouldn't be be restricted to the actual content, especially on a board like this where the finances and mechanics of WWE as a public company are debated, often in great depth. I like to analyse both the business and the product; as my interest in actual wrestling has declined, my interest in the wrestling industry has heightened. I Sky +'d it and got through the show in forty five minutes - it still sucked. Watching live is something I rarely do anymore unless I have it on in the background whilst doing something else - too many commercials, too much time filling rubbish. But over the last few weeks I've been stopping the FF button less and less. Even Cesaro who I was loving a few months back gets span on a bit, every show it is just a good midcard match that really progresses nothing. JBL is truly awful on commentary at the minute as well, they need to look to replace him.

Think I’m done with regularly watching for a while as well. The whole show has gone from fresh and exciting to stale and predictable, week after week. Endless lame, lengthy promos by Bray Wyatt, and his never ending feud with Cena that doesn’t even progress into anything. Characters like Kane, Rusev and Wyatt that are cheesy, unbelievable and feel like someone trying too hard and playing a role without any subtelty. The bad writing doesn’t help. Matches occurring for no particular reason – wasting future money matches like Roman Reigns vs Batista as a throwaway free television bout, or just having tag teams wrestle each other in rotation with no rhyme or rhythm or consistent plan. No real build to anything or sense of suspense. Hot characters stagnating. Wins and losses being meaningless because they are traded that often, usually making little sense at all other than who the writers decided to job out that show. The lack of any focus on midcard or lower card feuds. How a feud starts these days by having a match – which leads to more and more versions of the same match. Surely the aim is to start the feud and build up excitement for the eventual match? Most of all the shows are just too long and too boring, just churning out the same lazy promos and feuds and matches that we’ve been seeing for year upon year. A real letdown, considering how stoked I was in the couple of weeks after Wrestlemania. Never takes them long to stagnate and disappoint.

Are you crazy?! Put the belt on Seth Rollins?! The crowd react with bemusement, and outside an initial pop would shit on it. It would also seriously devalue the moment in the future when/if Rollins does win the strap. If anything you want to belt on a steady hand who can quickly job back to DB or Brock Lesnar if they go that way. Rollins is nowhere near ready to be in the position of champion. If you want to hotshot it onto an over face for a brief period go with Dolph Ziggler, he has been at the top of the card already and gets major pops. Giving it to Batista wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Otherwuse you can go back to Cena, the rematch with Bryan is on the cards at some point anyway. RVD and Jericho could be leftfield candidates, if they can get the latter to come back for a short run. The crowd would accept either of those taking Bryan's place, whereas someone like Cena would get resented for it badly. Just please not Del Rio.

Not sure this is possible, unless they get really cerebral and push boundaries with the writing, which won't happen because they have to push it to kids. Soaps don't appeal to these people either, and if they did they'd have to change the style so much they would no longer be soaps. A more 'pure sports' atmosphere might help, pushing the athletic side, and having major storylines with a lot more depth and complexity and better writing, with a bogger proportion of the show dedicated to storyline progression, with less matches and the matches they do have meaning more. If they run Batista vs Roman Reigns on SD it means a lot less as a PPV main event down the line. Shorten the show, wealthy people are busy and don't have the time to sit through three hours. This as well. Nobody in the world does comedy worse than WWE. Agree on the cheesy characters and storylines as well, the likes of Bray Wyatt and the recent Kane stuff are pretty embarassing to grown adults who aren't stuck in the wrestling bubble.

Haven't knowingly sought out a HHH match in years. Purely from memory the match with Shawn Michaels at Taboo Tuesday stands out. HBK had legitimately injured his leg and they were forced to work around it, which led them to have a much smarter match than usual, ramped up the tension, and reigned in their tendency to overbook things and go too long. Michaels sold the leg perfectly, always felt in critical danger and Trips was decent as the sadistic bastard going after it. Other than that, the match with Chris Benoit at No Mercy 2000 was very good. I loved the 2/3 falls with Austin years ago, though can't imagine it will have aged well going back to it now after being put through years of long, sluvenly, repetitive HHH main events. Watching Wrestlemania live I thought the Bryan Daniel match was as good as anything he had done, although it was a match I was invested in a personal level which helped it. The Batista Hell In The Cell was about as good as it could have been, and a decent example of a fun hardcore match with a load of props and plenty of violence. Has he ever gone one on one with Rey Mysterio? Seems amazing if not, considering they've been on the same roster for over a decade. Maybe the office wants to protect Rey and his merchandise sales and subconsciusly knows what Trips is regard to having people come out of feuds better than they came in.

Agree that Daniel Bryan should give up the diving headbutt. Never understood why people do that spot, especially after Harley Race has talked about the damage it did to him. It doesn't even look especially cool, and way safer moves like a splash, elbow drop and senton get a better reaction. Something like the diving leg drop looks ten times better and must be much better for you. The neck injury might be a blessing in disguise if it saves him from a dreary buried alive match with Kane that would hurt his popularity even further. His interviews aren't really helping him, that gawky laugh he did after the "Now I know how it feels to be John Cena" line made me cringe, especially since the line was greeted with tumbleweed in the audience. And he is also being featured as the second feud on the show, maybe even the third with Wyatt/Cena still going on. The parrallels with Benoit are amazing - wins the strap after beating HHH clean, proceeds to have a heatless feud with Kane whilst HHH and his buddies still take up the top of the card. Not complaining so much in this sense, because Evolution vs Shield is a genuinely hot feud stacked with talent, but there is no denying they could have handled the early stages of his title run better, even if it was just him running through Kane and mid level heels like Ryback, beating them clean and convincingly before the bigger fueds. 'The Demon Kane' is so laughably bad that even the live audiences don't tend to take it seriously. Agree that it could benefit Bryan to be off television in the short term.

Sloppy matches can be great, especially chaotic brawls. Better than some Christopher Daniels match where everything looks perfectly executed and choreographed and thus fake and rehearsed, like ballet without the emotion or investment.

Amazed Christopher Daniels is still around.

Yes. But the number of wrestling fans with an internet connection and access to wrestling news sites is much higher. The number of people discussing and reading about wrestling on the internet is much higher. The number of people with the opportunity to download wrestling matches from other cultures or watch them on YouTube in the attitude era was virtually zero. Out of 10 million people who watch Raw in 1999, how many go on the internet afterwards and talk about it? A few thousand probably. Out of the 5 million people who watch Raw in 2014, how many go on the internet and talk about it? Close to a million probably. So my point stands. As a percentage, more smart fans were aware of Puroresu in 1999. As a plain number, a lot more wrestling fans have exposure to it now. So the easy availability of Tanahashi matches works against him when it comes to a live pop - he was no aura and mystique. Whereas Liger comes from an era that has been romanticized by smart fans for years, where you would watch his matches in blurry quality on a six hour VHS comp, where even reading about him was an effort let alone getting hold of the matches. He was a more valuable commodity to super fans and that was probably part of the reason behind his reaction compared to current NJ stars. They can find their own way, we are in an information age. CM Punk and Bryan Daniel and the rest of the pushed indy stars have opened up ROH and indy wrestling to wrestling fans who only follow WWE - a quick glance at their Wikipedia page will tell them about their legendary matches and careers before the WWE. Maybe they check out some ROH on YouTube with a single click. Then ROH leads you to Dragon Gate USA and then to NOAH or NJPW. It is easy to research anything now, and get match suggestions or video suggestions. Just researching the G2S could lead you to KENTA which could open up your interest. Compare that to 1997. You see Yugi Nagata on Nitro, it piques your interest in Japanese wrestling. Where do you go from there? You might not have an internet connection. You might not have access to magazines, or be clued up on the smart fan community. It is far easier now for a wrestling fan to stumble accross Puroresu than it was in 1997, where only the really hardcore fans knew about it. Even if you got to know about it, getting hold of the footage was a real effort. You'd find a seller online or through trading communities; who knew if you could trust him? You had to pay him without the convenience of Paypal or an internet banking. You had to wait a while for the footage to show up. The quality might be iffy. The price would be high, especially if you wanted a custom comp. It was time consuming for the seller to make the tape. Compare that to now, when a few clicks of a button can lead you to virtually any match that has happened anywhere in the world, and it is hard to argue that the accesibility ot Japanese wrestling is lower now. So I'd argue that a lot more US wrestling fans actively watch Japanese wrestling now than in 1999. The difference is they aren't as invested in it. It doesn't mean as much to them. They can just watch five minutes here or five minutes there. Which is half the point. If you can click a button to get Okada and Tanahashi with no effort or cost, are they really stars to you? Compared to Liger, who seems more exclusive, with a greater aura, from a legendary era.

Is that true? The number of clued up 'smart fans' following Puroresu in 1994 might have been higher as a proportion, but I would wager in terms of actual number way more people outside Japan are watching modern NJPW these days. There are way more smart fans, way more internet fans, way more people aware of wrestling in Japan. Dragon Gate can draw really good numbers in the UK - would Michinoku Pro have been getting similar crowds in 1996 if they came over? Dave's point has some merit even if it is flawed. You see a similar thing in music - there are fewer superstar bands with a mystique and an aura in 2014 than in 1974, partly because of the easy availability of music. It is easy to acquire an album, easy to interact with the artist through social media - so seeing someone like Bob Dylan or The Rolling Stones feels way more special than seeing someone like Mumford & Sons or Coldplay who have a far bigger reach in the current market. So even if Tanahashi is bigger than Liger right now, Liger still retains a mystique and generates an excitement because he is from a bygone era when things were less obtainable.

I fast forward tons of stuff. Life is too short to sit through another Alberto del Rio match or some Santino comedy segment. Music is worse for me, I feel obligated to check out pretty much every acclaimed record of a particular year, and then with already checking out new stuff any of my favorites put out I have a constant backlog of stuff to hear. It diminishes the enjoyment as well, because you rarely give a new album the time it deserves to grow on you. Time was you bought a CD and played it dozens of times, but when you are downloading album after album online there is always something new that needs your attention.

I actually think the WWE style has diversified rapidly in recent years, although a lot of the matches still follow the same basic pattern and mechanics. A few years ago main events tended to be indistinguishable from show to show, whereas now there is a definite difference between a Cesaro match and a Bray Wyatt match and a Seth Rollins match. They are hurt by an inability to do the hardcore blood feud stuff, and don't have the talent to have pure technical matches on a regular basis, but in the constraints of their style things are way more creative in ring than they used to be. Or maybe it's because I don't watch much indy wrestling anymore so don't realise when spots are being copied and dripping through the the big leagues. Either way the overriding point about increased variety still stands.

The ending of the streak is looking more and more like a shotgun decision as time rolls on and they don't follow up in any meaningful way.

Wrestling does have a tendency to attract weirdos, though CM Punk is a strange one to have stalkers day and night. Perhaps it's because his gimmick is that of the everyday wrestling fan who happened to make it, people think he is just another guy who wants to hang out with them.

Only just realised that the start of The Shield's theme music spells out their name in the phonetic alphabet. Amazed at my idiocy to not notice this in over a year, always wondered what the 'sierra, hotel, india' thing was about.

No. He is clearly a draw or they wouldn't offer him such money - if he makes them a lot of money he deserves to be paid a lot of money. Also, to use him as more than a special attraction devalues him as an asset, so the argument that he should be working week in and week out to deserve it doesn't wash with me. One look at Batista shows you how quickly the shine wears off when you are working every week and subject to the ineptitude of creative. I used to work in theatre and there would be similar rumblings from the regular troupe of actors when a less talented, less dedicated 'big name' celebrity would come in on a lot more money for a six week run of seasonal shows. And by a 'lot more money' I mean that the regular actors would get maybe £3,000 for the six weeks (three weeks rehearsal, three week run), and the celebrity would be looking at £25-30k. The 'star' would usually be someone from reality television or a famous model, with little acting experience. However, the shows would attract more people, the star would stay a sell/sign merchandise at the end and the theatre would get a cut etc. It was a no brainer for the theatre. Of course, there were occasions where the big name would come in and get paid a lot and the show would bomb - in which case the resentment of others grew and was more justified. This sort of thing just happens in the arts, the same way Robert de Niro can get a million dollars for a cameo on a film when an unknown actor with a big part maybe makes a tenth of that or less.

3MB as McIntyre/Slater would work really well as a sort of proto Edge & Christian duo. Mahal doesn't fit their vibe at all. They are over even after losing every week, maybe even because of losing every week. A push as an underdog tag team would work really well, either as faces beating the odds or as cowardly heels sneakingly pulling out unlikely wins.

Kawada vs Foley wasn't exactly a 'dream match' for many people in the traditional sense, but it could have been way more fun than it winded up being.

Kane is capable of the occasional solid to good match, the problem is the umpteen hours of garbage he has also subjected to, both in the horrible angles and also the tedious matches. He hasn't changed his style or offence in two decades. Add that to the fact he has been on television pretty much continuously since 1997 and the hate is unsurprising. He is usually mediocre rather than purely incompetent. His reputation would surely be higher if he had taken a couple of years off here and there to stay fresh. He is a strange case in that he had better matches with Test and Gene Snitsky than he did with Chris Benoit or Rey Mysterio.

Seth Rollins will be on top for a lot longer than Roman Reigns IMO.

Have to agree with El-P on this one. Can you imagine Steve Austin, The Rock, Hulk Hogan or John Cena running away from Kane?

Good/fair response. Not sure if there is much mileage to be had in arguing the issue any longer, as the major difference is that you are fundamentally engaged by the character whereas I'm not - a matter of taste as much as a matter of argument. I do think Wyatt has potential though, and will be towards the top of the card for a few years at least, barring some truly terrible booking.

The site should reflect the forums in my opinion e.g. with a lot of analysis and debating of minutae and treating wrestling in a more academic, intelligent way. That has been the joy of reading the board, the sheer amount of knowledge and the amount of effort that has gone into a lot of posts. It should function more as an academic journal than as just another wrestling site offering news and opinions. It should have a timeless quality to it rather than week by week scrutiny of booking decisions. That is what I'd like to see anyway on a personal level, I'm sure people have their own better ideas, especially if the idea is to expand the community. Not sure expansion is always a good thing, though. My contributions aren't especially insightful or intellectual, so not really the best person to make the point that having a higher profile and a greater number of posters can dilute the quality of discussion. But that has to be a worry. This place has often been a sanctuary from the stupidity that is endemic on a lot of remaining boards and websites. Even relatively smart sites like DVDVR weren't particularly great when the traffic was highest, and it led to an ultimate decline. Anyway, just my two cents from someone who has been here for almost ten years on and off.

I don't know that he does, really. Since when do 'computer nerds' wear hawaii shirts and straw hats? In my experience they usually stay at home in plain, ill fitting clothes and do code and programming or play video games. Wyatt has nothing in common with shy, bullied kids except for his rants about how society has rejected him. Why doesn't he say so, then? He claims wants to bring out the 'monster' in Cena, not the jock bully you talk about. You are reading between the lines too much and putting your own slant on it - none of this has been made explicit or even implicit, except in the last couple of weeks when there is the occasional reference to Wyatt representing those who have been rejected by society. Not sure how using a nondescript, past his prime commercial rapper really enhances this. Eminem is pretty clean cut and establishment - this isn't 1999, he isn't the voice of white trash kids any longer. Why not use an alternative artist? My biggest gripe is that the promos are boring. You can't have a supposedly magnetic, charismatic character and then have him cut boring, repetitive promos.