anarchistxx

Providing the service is quick, easy to use and reliable, this really is a quite incredible deal. I'm amazed they would offer Wrestlemania as part of the package, especially since the entire cost of a six month subscription is equatable to ordering that one show. They should do huge numbers, at least for the first six months. Surely they are going to drip feed the 'On Demand' content to keep people interested for more than the first few months? Although their library is so huge that nobody has time to watch everything in a short time period anyway. Still, every WWE, WCW and ECW PPV EVER on demand is pretty crazy. The Wrestlemania number this year will be very interesting.

Honestly can't believe they are wasting Lesnar on a match with Big Show at the RR. They could have at least done a match with Henry that felt a bit fresher. All the new and intriguing match ups they could do and we get a rehash of something that happened multiple times a decade ago and wasn't especially interesting then, other than to see if Brock could lift Show for his offence.

You have to think this is a false turn. Bryan is way too over for them to have him be a heel for an extended period, unless they are trying to pull the rug from under him which would be plain stupidity. Perhaps it's just for a few months for him to face Taker; he loses at Wrestlemania, the Wyatt Family beat down on Taker and Bryan makes the save for a huge pop and the rub from UT.

2-Cool/Rikishi vs 3MB has to be an early contender for worst worked match of the year. The hot tag was possibly the worst I've ever seen, and the whole thing was really awkward, no flow or rhythm and no heat either which made it worse. Scotty looked genuinely embarrassed to be there, and totally out of place too, they didn't even bother getting him to look like his old self. Brian Christopher was just a bit weird looking old and haggard but still playing Grandmaster Sexay. Rikishi was way out of shape. 3MB didn't look fresh or sharp either. Other than that the show was alright, spun it on less than usual and took me ninety minutes instead of thirty to get through it all. Flair is still one of the best in the world on the mic and the opening segment was surprisingly good. The Rhodes tag was fun although jobbing Real Americans out again on free TV in a non title match seems questionable booking wise. He'll probably get screwed/eliminated by his eventual Wrestlemania opponent. Yep. He is also subscribing to this weird new heel trope where they all have to fake laughter and grin maniacally. Maybe he will grow into the role, the writing needs to get better though as the promos are obviously 100% scripted. Seems a bit forced right now. He was fantastic. As a character he has come on leaps and bounds and is solid in the ring if the matches are kept short and just involve a load of bombs. An extended run with the IC title would really enhance both him and the belt - he'd come out of it in a solid position to head back into the world title picture. The return of the 'Bully' skits would be nice too, genuinely my highlight of WWE last year.

Is it certain he is coming back? Maybe he faces Taker and Cena goes in the title match. Is it at all possible that they might do Orton vs HHH vs Batista with Ric Flair as the special guest referee?

I've not been paying attention, but how does Cena/Punk fit as a team? Surely Punk/Bryan would be more logical?

They have backed themselves into a hole a little bit with having Randy Orton as champion, as he has faced all the major players in the company time and time again. A match with Batista is the only thing that will feel remotely fresh to the casual - they've faced before but never on such a big stage, and they can play up the Triple-H/Evolution history angle, as well as the fact that Batista will get a monster reaction whatever. The only other conceivable route they could take is to give Roman Reigns a premature title push, or have some kind of multi-man match to get the title onto Daniel Bryan, like they did with Benoit and Mysterio when they weren't trusted to carry the main event. Orton/Batista doesn't even have to be the main event. They might run with: Randy Orton vs Batista John Cena vs Undertaker CM Punk vs HHH Daniel Bryan vs Shawn Michaels Roman Reigns vs Dean Ambrose At which point Cena/Taker goes on last.

Even during that period there hadn't been a match that had taken those elements to such lengths. Angle/Benoit from Unforgiven 2002 was worked substantially differently to the Rumble match.

A lot of it depends on your parents. Mine listened to The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Peter Green and The Band, so that was what I listened to as a young kid. The access point is valid too - The Prodigy, The Fugees, Pulp and others were topping the UK charts back then, so a lot of my memory is listening to that stuff on the radio. Just luck that good music was around in both the home and the chart when I was that age. Didn't stop me also listening to Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Peter Andre and the Spice Girls either though. You tend to be into whatever you get exposed to. Not into this concept at all though. Kids should discover things organically, not be led by hand into the art their parents consider to be good taste, made to feel guilty if they watch High School Music.

BT Sport have the Champions League rights now, and their channel is free to the millions of people with their internet access. They are big players. If the UCL can move to BT Sport, it wouldn't be that stupid for the WWE to do so, especially if they were offered silly money, which is possible. When is the Sky deal up?

Ah, wasn't aware Disney owned sport networks. The UK situation is quite interesting actually, I can see BT Sport making a huge play for these rights, they seem determined to blow Sky Sports out of the water with any popular content at the minute. I'm hoping they go the way of Sentanta and ESPN, because Sky are by far the best at producing sports programming. The football coverage on BT is appalling.

Haven't watched Angle/Benoit in years, although at the time I loved it, as did most people. You have to contextualize it though; this was a time when Raw was utterly dreadful, plodding and repetitive, with HHH having an endless string of long, boring matches and promos. Smackdown was the fast paced alternative, booked by internet favorite Heyman and starring all the workrate legends like Benoit and Mysterio. So people were predisposed to like it, especially in the context of the show with that awful Steiner/Trips match. It was an amazing contrast - athletic, spectacular and exciting, as oppose to cumbersome, mundane and predictable. There were also a lot of unique spots in the match at the time, at least in the context of a WWE main event; the DDT on the apron, the endless trading of suplexes, the long sequences of submission reversals. They were overdone in the subsequent years and became cliched tropes, but at the time were at least somewhat fresh. It was also a time when a lot of internet smarks loved moves, reversals, near falls and long, drawn out endings with multiple false finishes. Again, overdone to fuck now, and there is no way to maintain that style as Davey Richards et al have shown - the logical conclusion to this particular trend. At the time, the match appealed to a lot of smark fetishes. A lot of people resented the fact that Chris Benoit appeared to have dumbed down, with a much more limited moveset and very different style to his WCW stuff. This match was almost seen as him cutting loose, finally with a worthy opponent free of the shackles of 'WWE style' wrestling to put on a mat clinic.

The main event was totally unremarkable. Exactly the type of match you'd expect. Not a disappointment as such, just incredibly predictable like most of the product.

Surely they aren't going to end up on Disney? That would stifle them completely in terms of what style of product they can put out, even beyond the limitations they currently set for themselves.

There are far, far better ways for ROH to spend $300k than employing AJ Styles. Production, lighting, marketing, image, presentation, identity, promotion etc. That is how the promotion is going to grow, if indeed they want it to grow. Sinclair might be happy to have it as a niche product, to attract a small but loyal group of people to their channel. AJ Styles barely drew for ROH in his prime (he wasn't one of the huge DVD sellers or attendance attractions to recall) so he isn't going to make much of a difference now. He's in that middle ground of not being enough of a super worker for the hardcores, especially at this point in his career, and not being a big enough star for the casual fan to warrant WWE dropping any money on him.

My instinct is that a WWE online network would fail big time. Having said that, there is proof with the likes of Netflix that this type of presentation can work, especially for people with smart televisions and consoles. Nobody is going to pay big money to watch wrestling all day on their laptop, but if it is all wired up to their television anyway then what is the difference between that and a traditional channel, especially with the uniformly great broadband speeds these days.

Imagine if you had told someone in 1996 that seventeen years later you would have The Giant, Goldust and Rey Mysterio Jr teaming together at the top of the card on the biggest wrestling show in the world. Just as bizarre was Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Mick Foley, Triple-H, Booker-T, Mark Henry, Christian, Big Show, Rey Mysterio and Kane closing the show as the 'WWE Legends'. How would that have sounded in early 1998? Oh, and WWE booking continues to be appalling. They are jobbing out Alberto del Rio to Sin Cara on a weekly basis; Del Rio has spent three or four years going over every top name they have, Sin Cara has spent a couple of years jobbing to a load of no names.

I said last month that they were seemingly heading towards Cena/Orton in a unification match. There was no other real reason for either guy to have the title. Presumably they are going to run it at Wrestlemania in the main event - about six years too late, but there you are. I was always amazed how much they blew their big two matches with the last true stars they created circa 2004/2005. Cena/Batista and Cena/Orton should have been huge Wrestlemania main events when they would have been hot and fresh, and instead both were thrown away on Summerslam and done to death with a million rematches.

This genuinely looks like the worst Survivor Series card of all time. I've not watched any of the buildup but on paper the show looks horrible.

So Kurt Angle and TNA do this thing with ONE DIRECTION, and it apparently just gets slung online with no publicity or promotion whatsoever. I mean, seriously, these guys make terrible music etc but they are up there with the biggest celebrities in the world. They close airports down and have millions of fans willing to follow whatever the group[tells them. They are five times as big as all the no name C-List 'stars' WWE has tried to hype as being associated with their product. The failure to capitalize on something like this is just symptomatic of their utter, unmitigated incompetence. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9_zfeu2KiY...eature=youtu.be

This sentence epitomizes the dearth of creativity in WWE booking. How many feuds start these days because someone beats someone else up for no reason? There are no real storylines anymore, just vague feuds where the participants trade beatdown segments every week before a match at the big show, and then rinse and repeat until they have fought on about three consecutive PPVs. There are way too many rematches these days and way too many heatless, uninteresting feuds without a solid reason behind them. Compare and contrast to a show like Armageddon 2000, where you have The Radicalz feuding with Team Xtreme after Malenko gets a crush on Lita, leading to some fun, unsettling segments leading up to the show and nice payoffs. Val Venis vs Chyna leads to the whole Chyna neck broken storyline, getting Ivory over as a sick, twisted heel and a ton of heat for the RTC while setting up programs well down the line. Chris Jericho and Kane feuded over Kane getting accidentally burned with coffee, with further build up concentrating on the ugly, deformed Kane being jealous of Jericho's looks and personalities. The main event was a good example of a multifaceted build up, with all participants having various feuds and motivations going in, with the sidestory about Vince worried about losing $1 billion dollars worth of talent and Foley desperate to have a clean WWF title finish. Nobody is going to care about lower and mid card workers if you don't give them a reason to care. Feuds about coffee may seem silly but they are at least about something. WWE is meant to be a soap. But Coronation Street would be pretty rubbish if it was just affairs, murders etc happening every day without any reason or motivation. WWE would do far better if they focused on building characters, that is what most people tune in for.

Did Rhodes and Steamboat ever work a match? They were around so often in the same places that it seems certain they did, but I've not seen any evidence of it.

Trish got a lot of goodwill because she was working very hard to improve. Also, the female division had been awful for years, so she actually seemed decent compared to what had come before. For about three years women's matches consisted of nothing more than hair pulling, rudimentary offence, Lawler screaming CAT FIGHT and PUPPIES and then a roll up pin after a couple of minutes.

Don't get this at all. CM Punk and Sheamus have both bad extended runs with the title and pushed very strongly in the main event. Daniel Bryan beat John Cena clean at Summerslam. You can't compare those three to Wade Barrett, Cesaro or the PTP. Cesaro especially seems to be being built very well; a slow move up the card, getting over in the tag division before presumably being tried out higher up. That is how it used to work, how it worked for Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Jeff Hardy. The problem isn't the glass ceiling, it is inconsistent booking. Ziggler, Bryan, Punk and Sheamus have all been booked to defeat top stars, often cleanly. But they have also been booked to job left and right as well, and wasted in pointless feuds and saturated matches that happen over and over again, winning one week, losing the next. Once they decided to push Taker, Bret, Shawn, HHH, Rock etc they were all protected. Now they have serious booking ADD, so they elevate all these people and then don't know what to do with them. They smash them through the glass ceiling and then throw them back down again after a couple of months.

I don't see the point in releasing Kane, unless he is on obscene money. He is so established right now, and people will be more excited to see him on a house show than the likes of Jack Swagger or R-Truth. He sucks, but you have to have well regarded veterans like him to put over the new talent. His schtick is pretty embarrassing, though. It is something that would really turn off a new fan, or an old fan trying to get back into the show. Surely there are better ways to do a comedy character than that? I've watched a fair amount of the product this year. Why is my opinion worth less than yours just because I dislike the product and you like it? The whole point of a cull would be to freshen the product up for those like myself dissatisfied with the company and who have been drifting away for years, so in that respect my opinion is important as someone who wants to see a change to get invested in the product again. Not true; the undercard in 1988 or 1998 or 2004 was far more interesting and compelling than the undercard today. Most of the people I would cull are completely, irretrievably bland, void of any charisma, obviously playing a role. The prototypical WWE produced wrestler of today. The slots should be filled by people with originality. Why do they need job guys? The last industry boom coincided with the lack of squash matches on television. Slater is serviceable from what I've seen, but he would surely benefit from going on the road, getting experience, freshening up, coming up with a new angle for himself? What is he achieving at the minute? A fun act who has lost every single match they have been in. I had decent hopes when they were introduced, it seemed a fun, entertaining midcard gimmick. It ceased to be so when they became jobbers. Why invest in them? 2 Cool worked because they actually won matches. 3MB is effectively dead as a gimmick with the way it has been handled, they might as well be off the roster. 'Tons of Funk' are just a rehash, yet another attempt to capture the 2 Cool/Rikishi dancing/comedy thing. And again, they job every single week, barely getting any offence in. Someone new could do just as well in that spot, or even better they could try a fresh gimmick. Brodus Clay and Tensai are prime examples of people ruined by the ridiculous booking tropes; both brought in as monsters, defeating everyone in their paths, not getting over and now jobbing out to everyone. Where is the consistency? They are irredeemable deadwood. Hornswoggle is prime example of someone who turns a lot of people away from the product. You can run that kind of character when you are hot for a short while, but when it extends to years and years when the company isn't exactly firing on all cyclinders, it ends up taking away from the overall product and making it seem like its embarrassing junk for kids. There are ways to have kids characters without endangering the adult audience. Khali once again is someone ruined by booking, and the fact he can't work for shit. Typical WWE not knowing what to do with a guy, so they have them dance or read poetry or other comedy crap. WWE is useless at comedy. Only a WWE mark could love these characters, surely? What would be lost by The Great Khali leaving? A victory over him means shit, his matches are rubbish, he isn't particularly over. If he makes money in India, fair enough, but we are talking about increasing the quality of the product rather than increasing international revenue. I'd certainly repackage him. His gimmick is stale, old fashioned, restrictive and he isn't even over. He's too similar in style to so many people they have. It's an act that isn't going anywhere, isn't especially funny or entertaining, isn't believable. Why keep him on? He was stale from the moment he debuted. Bad, inconsistent booking, a cavalier attitude to wins and losses - a familiar story. All these gimmicks as 'dancers', 'blue bloods', 'rugby players', 'Japanese princes' etc they are so outdated. When has that type of thing ever been especially entertaining ir drawn any money? Agree with this. As a casual fan I can't differentiate between any of the Divas except for AJ Lee. To homogenous. They need to get distinctive looks and personalities. Chyna. Lita, Ivory, Jacqueline, Trish Stratus - they might not all have been great workers or characters but you could tell between them. Again, it is all homogenous - they all look similar and work exactly the same style. They would also benefit from bringing two or three people back who are over and will help elevate new stars. Jeff Hardy is perfect to bring some life to the main event but he is probably too messed up and I haven't seen him for years, has he gone to pot? If they could get Batista back it would be a great move. They should keep RVD on, but if they do he needs some wins to keep him strong or it means nothing beating him. Rey Mysterio coming back would help. Kurt Angle working part time. The problem with all this television is that everyone faces each other so you can't build a fresh match. Outside guys coming in helps with this.