Timbo Slice

Dunn can't stop hitting buttons.

Think he got over a bit too much as a face when he beat Miz, wanted a definitive heel for Drew to face, but yeah, they absolutely didn't do him a service.

Got #1 yesterday. Arm is killing me but other than that, feel fine, thankfully. This has been fine, but there really hasn't been a lot here to make this feel "WrestleMania Special."

All I can think of is Drew not getting this moment last year when it would have made him even more.

The AR skeleton isn't gonna stop the rain.

What...in the absolute fuck, was that?

To be fair, WWE isn’t the only brand playing the philanthropy card, but they’re definitely the most egregious about representing causes where their company values and many of their employees values are in direct contrast.

That’s my conclusion. If that was the case, the explosion would have been a single puff of smoke and shown Omega laughing his ass off or something.

I'll take that as a reason behind it, but (and this is gonna sound weird) the match they had last night had a lot of ways to make it come off as something more dangerous than it actually is! And they didn't choose that route for some reason!

It came off looking like a botch either way, and I think my point is that, for something of that magnitude to work the way it needs to, there needed to a be lot more work put in to make sure it came off well.

Everything about the main event came off half-assed, like they didn't want to go full-force into what a match of that style truly requires. They had some neat moments throughout, but the drama that usually builds up in a match like that seemed like it just wasn't there, and when that becomes the basis for the big kaboom, well, you better do a big fucking kaboom. The problem is that because it's half-assed, they can't full-ass their way out of it either way. It's gonna come off as half-assed. For a company built upon the premise of taking a big risk, they seem to be awfully fine with not taking as many risks in recent months given their standing during the pandemic. From both a presentation and a booking standpoint.

Personally, I recently got off Twitter just because I was tired of what it was doing to my anxiety, and am okay slowing down on my favorite old wrestling message board at my older age. Wrestling, like basically all entertainment, has become more compartmentalized and niche over the past couple decades, and their struggles to stay relevant are definitely part of their own doing, but also because they have become another entertainment type that's in a long list of easily accessible entertainment types. An odd dichotomy given WWE was one of the first entities to embrace streaming as a major business decision (and were widely praised for it, even!), but the market share and ability for wrestling to catch on writ large just isn't there anymore. The more it gets exposure, the less impact it has on pop culture, simply because people get to easily pick their pop culture aspects nowadays.

He's been given some of the book on SmackDown so I don't think he's going anywhere for the time being.

Kay Lee Ray defends the WWE NXT UK Women's Title A match and a result too cute by half, to the point where you wonder what Meiko is doing there in the first place when it's all over. The WWE viewpoint is that they didn't just want Meiko to become another Asuka, an unbeatable Japanese Ace that can't possibly be on the same level as anyone else on the brand. The problem is that is EXACTLY who Meiko is, who she was billed as, and who she was promoted as when she came in, to the point where her moniker is literally "The Best In The World" in her ring introductions. And in 20 minutes, all of it basically vanishes? Ray still isn't great with transitions, and there are plenty of Meiko matches at this point where she has been asked to put over a young ace in the fledgling joshi promotions all over Japan, but at least in those situations, Meiko is given an opportunity to go a bit back and forth before finally putting over the ace to make it seemed earned. That's the template for this match, something Meiko can do in her sleep, but usually it's reserved for the final meeting in a short feud. The presentation is supposed to be Ray overcoming just an overwhelming force, but the match layout was extremely even-keeled, even by the 50/50 standards WWE has lived by for the better part of a decade, and that makes the end result, where Ray pins Meiko clean, even more confounding, unless the end result is that the main roster women have convinced the higher ups to not let Meiko flounder on the UK brand, and get a quick run out of her with the Horsewomen and Asuka matches while she's still relatively fresh. Considering how WWE has treated the UK brand so far, there seems to be this pretty substantial struggle to determine if the top folks on the brand have the ability to crossover into WWE's mainstream, and with both Drew and Becky's success outside of that, someone like Ray seems like a good fit given her limited exposure already, but the hierarchy as it stands leads to weird ways certain wrestlers are booked, and if that leads to someone like Meiko getting lost in the shuffle, it's hard to see much value in her presence on the brand.

There are petty fines across all professional sports behind the scenes (baseball alone is enough to make folks cringe) so I come from a different viewpoint on it, but WWE hasn't exactly done a lot to teach it out of these folks who learned it on the indies coming up.

If you look at a match, like say, Roddy vs. Finn from this week, when Roddy does his running forearms, the camera shots show how obvious it is with him slapping the thigh to the point of outright laughter. Also, this is what you get when you fire Hero, who's the greatest audible strike wrestler maybe ever and knew how to hide it well.

It's incredible to see this match only a year after the absolutely insane tag match he had with Iizuka against the invading UFO guys in Ogawa and Murakami. Always liked how these guys matched up.

Really can't get over how good this was considering the circumstances. Thatcher is an absolute badass.

Fucking banger of a match here. Casas looks like he can go until he's 85, let alone the fact that he's 58 right now and flew through this like it was 1989 or something. No let up at all. Just incredible.

I definitely do not want it to fail. I am also definitely wary of the byproduct of this.

The longer we get away from this year's Dome show, the more I feel Naito should have been put over. NJPW direction outside Golden Lovers has been subpar.

I do feel that the criticism of the fanbase who eats that stuff up is valid, though. It's insulated to the point where it can be downright cultish when criticism comes around. I don't care who you're a fan of, but if you can't handle the heat, that's on you. There's a big time hive mind vibe to these guys.

Interesting that Ricochet effectively worked a dark match at Center Stage. Guess they wanted his debut for Full Sail. It's gonna be a hell of a few weeks there, it seems.

Ospreay's biggest issue is that his athleticism overshadows any semblance of structure in his matches to a point where it becomes a distraction. The Ricochet stuff still doesn't do anything at all for me. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I get why Dave would say it, but him being talented doesn't necessarily make him a great wrestler.

If that was a work, Matt needs to teach every wrestler in history how to sell.