NotJayTabb

I don't think it's a coincidence how many guys have had their best WWE matches with Roman in the last couple of years - Lesnar, Big Show, AJ, Balor, maybe Jericho.

The biggest fall has been on the women's side as it was arguably the show's biggest strength for some time. Losing Charlotte, Becky and Sasha at once created a huge void that simply hasn't been filled. Asuka is more than competent, but has also never been established as a firm babyface or heel which prevented her matches with Bayley & Nia Jax from approaching the level we'd seen previously. Jax got moved up far too quickly and they simply haven't brought in anyone who can really push Asuka. I hoped Nikki Cross would get that chance but its not in the cards as of yet, and Ember Moon hasn't made any real impression thus far. Certainly potential to revamp the division with arrivals from Japan & Europe post Mania, but we'll see how strongly any newcomers are featured. I really think Ruby Riot could be absolute money for them with a bit more polish. Historically, WWE have always done well with female wrestlers who've been a bit edgier, a bit "outsider" - think how popular Lita, AJ Lee and Paige have been with female fans. Riot is arguably already a better wrestler than all three of them and hopefully will get better in NXT. Obviously a lot depends on how well she's booked, but I can see her getting more over than the likes of Ember, Liv or Aliyah very quickly

Would it be an answer to make Mauro head commentator on NXT, and leave Tom Phillips on Smackdown? NXT would see Mauro free of the triple threat of JBL/live TV/screaming headset Vince, which feel like they would all be contributing factors to having a relapse. Plus if that did happen, the NXT taping schedule means he'd be unlikely to miss anything.

He had a good match with Sean Waltman on an early 3PW show (A Night For The Flyboy) as a cocky heel. After that, I'm struggling

Going contemporary with Enzo and Cass. Absolutely wretched pairing. Enzo still wrestles like he's horribly untrained, Cass is a terrible hybrid of Test and Edge at their worst and they're the most irritating on-screen presence every week on Raw. Their music is awful, they look ridiculous, their overrated promo schtick involves Enzo machine-gunning out a load of nonsense and Cass awkwardly getting round to the catchphrase. I realised Corey Graves was my spirit animal when he exclaimed with utter glee as Enzo entered the Rumble to die at the hands of Brock. The only time I ever enjoyed them was as NXT jobbers dying at the hands of Mason Ryan for a few weeks.

Big Grizzly is a great hoss here in the UK, surprisingly agile for a big guy, but he only uses it in a way that hurls his massive frame crashing into people. He's only young too, gets better every time I've seen him.

I think it was hindered partly by being in a cage which would make things harder for the audience to see, and that the La Luchadora costume also made it harder to tell who it was. From a distance, it's just a woman with brown hair, and the camera focused on Becky's reaction first, then on Mickie. Slightly concerned that the Nikki/Natalya feud means there's no obvious contender to take the title off Alexa (assuming Becky feuds with Mickie), as Bliss is still not up to much in the ring. I left the Rollins remark in agreement

Every time I think of Norton, I think of that Cat angle. I remember loving the time that the NWO B-team decided to tell Norton that Miller was calling him out, when he was actually doing no such thing, just because they enjoyed watching him beat Cat up. Then the Cat knocked him out with loaded slippers. Such a fun angle

Obviously take my national bias into account, but it does feel like the Brits are owning it on 205 Live. Gallagher feels like the guy most fans are getting behind and is managing to make potential disasters like last nights duel into something fun. He's also got just enough to stop him being a comedy act thanks to those bullet head butts. Neville as the brute heel of the division is great, cutting his best main roster promos and looking like a beast in ring. Even Dar is making his new heel gimmick work, and his match with Alexander the other week was really great.

I got into lucha the same way I got into puro - by finding one guy I really like and letting things branch off from there. With puro it was Liger, with lucha it was El Hijo De Santo. By watching Santo matches, I discovered Casas, who in turn led me to modern CMLL and the web increased from there. As with all wrestling, it just became a case of knowing which names I like and which names make me less likely to watch a match.

Dar's shit-eating grin at Cedric behind Alicia's back was just terrific

Got to love Becky's character commitment to wrestling like a totally different wrestler until the match winning Disarmher

Some interesting names in the tournament, some guys who aren't even big names on the UK scene, so this can only help their bookings. Guys like Chris Tyler and HC Dyer I'm familiar with because they mainly work East Midlands indies, but others will be as unaware of them as I am some of the Irish lads who've been announced, and I think that exposure can only help the UK scene. On a personal level, having first seen Tyler Bate and Pete Dunne working in the upstairs room of a Coventry WMC, either of them would be my sentimental pick to win. I think Jack Starz could be the sleeper star of the tournament. He's a Brookside trainee, so he had the connections, and he's just a really solid wrestler, good on the mat and a good storyteller. Hope he gets past the first round.

I think the women's division is on the verge of getting really great. Even aside from the Lovelace/Kimber Lee/rumoured Evie & Nixon Newall signings, you've already got a really solid spine. Asuka/Nikki Cross/Ember Moon are already better than any of the Horsewomen were when NXT started, they just need a hook to get the crowd interested in them. You've got Peyton Royce and Billie Kay as decent midcard hands and the more unknown names like Mandy Rose, Aaliyah and Daria look more promising than early doors Alexa or Nia Jax. There's a basis there to suggest this division will be only getting better in the next 12 months, just need to get these guys connecting with the crowd

Ha, I've started to make a run through the ECW myself. 4 episodes in, and still not a hint of a decent match, but it's still curiously entertaining

Going to C+P what I wrote about this show at DVDVR So, I went to the WCPW #Delete iPPV last night and it was...good. Ish. I've been to plenty of shows with green or below-average talent, where good booking and good match layout have meant it ended up being a good show. In this case, you had a load of really good workers covering up the fact that the booking was lousy. Highlights (both positive and negative) included: - Doug Williams being consigned to a pre-show dark match, against HT Drake doing a comedy Mexican gimmick. Even though Drake is a heel, he's booked as a comedy face. It's not like they're disguising who it is, as he's wearing tights with "Drake" written on the side -Booking a load of matches that are heel vs heel or face vs face. Both the tag title and tag #1 contender had this issue, as did the El Ligero/Cody Rhodes bout. Worst of all, Matt Hardy vs Bully Ray had a clear face/heel divide, before they turned Bully face with a pre-match promo, then turned him heel again in the post-match. Literally, he was only an face when he was facing another face wrestler. -Pete Dunne & Travis Banks had a good match with two local wrestlers, Alex Gracie (who I think is pretty good) and Lucas Archer (who is ok). -Putting one of your titles on an import (Cody) absolutely stinks of 1PW "We're in awe of the ex-WWE" guy booking. They already blew the outcome by having Rhodes put his GFW belt on the line, as you knew they weren't putting it on Ligero, then had Ligs kill off three of his finishers by hitting them back-to-back for Cody to kick out of. The audience admittedly loved Cody, chanting "You deserve it" when he won the title. Not sure how being a career midcarder and the third best member of Legacy translates to deserving an indy secondary belt, but there you go. -Moustache Mountain and Nixon Newell were both really great and really over, so of course they jobbed to the questionable Swords of Essex -Johnny Mundo was due to face Alberto Del Rio, but Alberto was stuck at his airport. As a replacement, they booked Mundo vs Gabriel Kidd, which worked surprisingly well. Kidd is a local wrestler, a trainee from the local Stixx-run House of Pain wrestling school, and despite being only 19 has been wrestling for 6 years. He's mainly wrestled on HOP academy shows, so I had no idea how he would do against a big name like Mundo, but he put on a really good performance. Mundo was really generous in making Kidd look competitive against him, to the point I nearly believed in an upset. This worked. -Rampage vs Primate had great moments, but fell to terrible booking. It was a lumberjack match, but they could only muster 6 lumberjacks, all the lads from the two pre-show matches. Rampage and Primate threw big bombs at each other, before Rampage looked to have the bout won. But no, Primate's stablemates Gracie and Archer, who were lumberjacks, came in to attack Rampage. This was right in front of the ref, but rather than draw a DQ, the match continued and allowed Primate to choke Rampage out for the win. The question is: why didn't Primate's team just attack Rampage at the bell if there was seemingly no DQ? -Hardy vs Bully was a reasonable no DQ match, which still saw a ref bump and one of the What Culture "personalities" run in to low blow Matt, leading to the Bully win. This, on top of a table spot being teased but not delivered, seemed to piss off a lot of the crowd, and there was a mass exodus before the next match started... -...which is a shame because Johnny Moss/Liam Slater vs the Coffey Brother was the match of the night to this point. The highlight was any time Moss and Joe Coffey squared off, two big tanks exchanging big bombs and massive suplexes. Loved this -Martin Kirby vs Will Ospreay in a 2/3 falls match was even better. Heel Ospreay is exactly the route he needs to take, as he was excellent as a smarmy dickhead. It'd also be better for his long-term wellbeing as, aside from a few big bumps, he didn't need to give his body anywhere near as much abuse. After both won falls with roll-ups (Ospreay's with his feet on the ropes), Ospreay won the final fall with a weapon's shot and a springboard cutter. The post match saw the Matt Hardy table spot finally paid off, as he rescued Kirby from a beatdown from Ospreay's goon squad, and set Ospreay up for Kirby to hit a top rope powerbomb through a table -Finally, the main event. This was a triple threat steel cage match for Joseph Conners' WCPW title. The opponents were Joe Hendry (who I quite like, but looked bushleague as fuck with his gold ring jacket and big grey granny-pants trunks) and Drew Galloway, who was fucking massive compared to his opponents. This was all really good, as all three guys can go, and the cage setting meant no "wrestler lies on the floor for ages whilst the other two fight". But then, the ending. No idea what that was all about. Hendry was up-and-over on the cage, when Conners called out to him, with Galloway set in position for his finisher, the Righteous Kill. No-one could hear what he was saying, but it lured Hendry to climb back into the ring. As this was happening, Galloway broke free and hit the Futureshock DDT on Conners. Rather than break the pin, Hendry decided to try to escape the cage again, which of course gave Galloway time to pin Conners and win the title. Not sure if the idea was that Hendry thought Conners could hits his finisher on Galloway and pin him before Hendry could escape, but it seemed unlikely, given that Hendry was 3 rungs from the win. Just an odd ending, and more proof that the booking in WCPW leaves a lot to be desired.

Yeah, I agree that Becky is one of the best two women workers on the roster, probably just pipping Charlotte to top. I think she's been given less great big match opportunities than the other 3 horsewomen, but she's excelled each time she's been given the chance (vs Charlotte at RR, vs Banks at an early NXT Takeover). I also think her overall all round ability is why she's been put on Smackdown where the heel side of the roster are either still green (Carmella, Alexa) or tired acts (Natalya). She's a much better face than Charlotte and feels more likely to get a good match out of these girls than Sasha or Bayley.

Always been a Goldberg fan, so this was great to watch. What I loved is the timing of the spears. No Lesnar having to wait around for a few seconds, watching Goldberg spear him like a chump - the second he was in place, he was getting speared again. That little bit of execution made the whole deal work so well

Very sad news, such a horrible disease. RIP

Yeah, Enzo's biggest problem is that, once the bell rings, he's nowhere near as over as when he's talking, which wouldn't be as big an issue for Dillinger. Be another big loss for NXT though, I've read in the past that Tye works as a player/coach, working with the younger talent in the Performance Centre.

End up being a really fun show. Obviously, Douglas isn't in his prime, but they gave him the right opponent in Malen, an experienced head who will work in a load of schtick and playing to the crowd so that Douglas doesn't have to work hard to keep up. Douglas seemed genuinely pleased to be there, which always helps. Jester/McLuskey was a really good main event, felt like both guys complemented the other well, and the undercard was decent. Good6-man tag featuring Martin Kirby, El Ligero, two heels and two referees and a fun Barricade squash match.

This Friday, I'll be going to HOPE Wrestling in Mansfield headlined by Shane Douglas vs Paul Malen and Jack Jester vs Jake McLuskey. I've also got tickets for WCPW in Nottingham with Matt Hardy and Alberto Del Rio

The good thing about this match is you assume it won't be the kind of dreadful "Suplex City" match we've been subjected to for the past 2 years. Goldberg isn't taking 16 German suplexes

I think I'm higher on the Hart Foundation than a lot of people. Then again, I voted Bret as #1 on GWE, so I'm generally higher on Bret than most people anyway.

I'd go Funk, Savage and, to throw two new candidates into the mix, Bret and Regal. Regal, to me, is an absolute all rounder. Bumbling heel dressed like a pirate wench for laughs? Yep. Vicious heel cruelly stretching guys? Yep. Fired-up babyface promising a violent revenge on HHH for assaulting Eugene? Yep. Can work convincing vicious brawls with Finlay as convincingly as working guys over on the mat or doing some comedy schtick dressed as Goldust. Bret is a guy I always found believable in every role he played. Whether working as an underdog against Yok or Diesel, slugging it out with Austin or domineering face ace vs 1-2-3 Kid, Bret never felt unconvincing in those roles. He was a great, virtuous face and made the switch to being a heel without it ever seeming forced or like a massive switch in his personality. Whichever role he had to fill, he was always right for the role and always still felt like the same character.