El-P

From the very few I've seen, Adam Cole is a whole lot of fun and charismatic as hell. I don't see the Edge comparison yet. To me he's Corino 2.0. That's a compliment. Anyway. Almas vs Black. Holy shit. That match. Almas' performance. Vega being the best valet since Sherri at her peak (with Savage). MOTYC. The finishing stretch was out of this world great. And although I take nothing out of Black's work, Almas looked like the best worker in the world here. Just insane on every level. The only one thing I still don't like is that double stomp set-up, which will never work well. But wow. Wow. WOW. What a difference a year make. Almas has made a Steve Austin level jump in one year. Ringmaster vs Savio to Stone Cold vs Bret level jump. The whole act with Vega is amazingly great.

That's how you do a clusterfuck. Exactly the opposite feeling to the opener, this felt like simply three teams beating the shit out of each other going a hundred mile an hour. And a great turn that I absolutely did not see coming. I have no idea why the heel The Undisputed Era is not universally loved, these guys are terrific. O'Reilly doing the "delayed selling.... no I'm dead" was gold. Adam Cole is charismatic as fuck. Roderick Strong was on fire here. The AOP have progressed so much since they debuted. Super fun match, excellent angle. This was really good.

Can you picture if they ran a gimmick like Raisha Saeed ?... I can only shudder at the PR they're gonna do over there too...

I must admit I'm morbidly interested in that Jedda show.

So, what about Takeover ? A lame-ass neo-metal band. Stuck in the early 00's WWE is. Speaking of which, the opening multi-man clusterfuck is everything I despise about the style. Completely purposeless, carefully pre-planned super dangerous stunts with guys killing themselves without ever establishing any dynamic except for "go up, fall down, break ladder". If you do chaos, do chaos, not a stunt version of artistic skating. Plus it was way too long, with way too much awkward setups. Terrible way to debut Ricochet, now he's Jeff Hardy in 00. Adam Cole is the only guy who displays actual character I thought and he's over as hell. I enjoy his Steve Corino 2.0 approach. The match can go fuck itself, just another one self-conscious multi-man clusterfuck in the vein of all these MITB matches I never cared for either. Where was Shelton Benjamin anyway ? And now I'm grumpy. More terrible live band. Ugh... Well, at least Ember Moon is sporting a great look. And Shayna punching her in the face and grinning washed the sour taste of the 30 minutes of garbage that preceded. Slower build to a hot stretch. Cool neat touches. Tons of character on both parts, Ember being a really good bad-ass babyface. Shayna popping her shoulder back on the post was something else. She's really got a unique charisma to her. Very good match. Thanks ladies, I was getting grumpy, you got me back on track. Although I don't know how I will be able to handle Mauro Ranallo for long. Settle the fuck down. Shut up for a second or two already. He's like the worst of JR on speed... Let Nigel speak.

Garbage. It's ridiculous these kind of stuntfest with no purpose whatsoever and awkward set-ups and overscripted internal sequence still pass for good work in 2018. I enjoy a good garbage clusterfuck if there's a sense of chaos. This had a sense of carefully planned super dangerous spots to pop a crowd of wankers who were chanting "this is awesome" even before the match started. This is an awful way to display Ricochet in his very first match because he's now the guy who gets tossed around on ladders. This was also overlong, overthought, overproduced. One of the worst, most boring, uselessly dangerous match of the entire week-end.

As a fan of both these guys, I'm glad I didn't watch that...

Derailing stuff : I don't dislike you. I don't know you. I dislike the way you interact with us on the board. That's different.

Nak is a banged up guy whose prime is behind him, who seized the opportunity to work a lighter style and get big time money by going to WWE. Good for him. But yeah, his match against Zayn two years ago was awesome. That's the last time we saw that Nakamura. That being said, those more familiar with the guy in NJ will say he was always more or less coasting and showing up only for super big matches. I thought the match against AJ was very good, maybe even excellent, and the idea of him working heel is rather promising. But AJ had a better match in WWE against Seth Rollins. That's the reality of it. Right now, I'm more interested in watching Bryan vs Sami than I am watching another AJ vs Nak.

I said celebrity.

I know you're a Reigns fan, but come on. He's been pushed as the number one guy in the entire business for four years, probably makes an insane amount of money in the process. This is ridiculous.

To be clear : if I were a mod, you'd be gone already. So there. Back to Mania discussion, please. Did I miss anything or there were no celebrity stuff this year ?

The anoa'i family needs to quit bitching. Roman Reigns has main evented four Manias in a row. Not a whole lot of guys can say the same thing. What is it ? The Samoan Mafia ?

Newsflash : no one gives a fuck. This thread is not about you. Get a grip already.

Derailment reply : I don't think I've seen ten matches in my life I would give the infamous 5* ratings. Yeah, what a joke. Just a troll. Don't feed him.

Gawwd, don't tease me with some dream matches that won't happen. Nikki elbowing the shit out of Rousey until she gets her arm broken in half would be such a fun match. Was I in your dream? Ah ah ah. I don't remember the posters involved, but I do remember browsing the thread. Me too. Really, this week-end made me happy to be an old pro-wrestling fan (and I'm watching Takeover tonight…). Pro-wrestling wasn't more fun before. It's great and fun now.

This is actually a pretty great and accurate description of the match and how these two guys worked. I think it speaks volume on how patterned it has become. They can't act & react organically as pro-wrestlers depending on the story they are supposed to tell, they just do token spots over and over again. Picture Rey Mysterio doing the 619 twenty times during a match...

All joking aside, Braun can be special and unique. Not the new Andre. Not the new Taker. Hopefully not the next Big Show. Just the first Braun.

Completely agree.

Yeah, it was a complete mess. I'll say this though, there's something somewhat compelling about blown-up Lesnar sweating like a pig throwing people around and elbowing them in the head to make them bleed. I mean, Lesnar has a presence still that no one really has. Sure, the match was garbage, Roman throwing a hundred superman punches was a compelling as it sounds, as where the dozen finisher kick-outs, but I dunno, I'd rather watch a Lesnar complete car-crash than your run-of-the-mill decent Roman match. Of course I'd rather have anything other than these two propositions, really. But yeah, that match was pretty damn awful and a complete failure in the end, like most Lesnar have ended up being since he got into Suplex City mode as opposed to kick-ass MMA beast.

That gets overlooked here. Cena is a fucking trooper. And as far as presence, aura and star power, he's still above everyone else, as demonstrated by the whole "sit in the crowd/reaction shots/Elias angle" combo and the way he reacted to Taker's entrance. The guy is still at that level.

It's odd because for all the talk of Vince not wanting anyone being bigger than the company anymore, he sure still insists on creating the next Hogan/Austin/Rock/Cena. Since the WWE brand is bigger than anything and that the McMahons are the stars of the show (and really, after yesterday, Stephy really was), why not just run with a bunch of people on top without having to try and create and Ace ? Then if someone gets over to that degree, ride him as long as you can. It's not like a Steve Austin is gonna exist for every generation. You can't create a megastar, especially going against your own audience.

I'm not pretending. He's fully capable of following a good lead and has gotten pretty great at selling/bumping, but his offense is garbage finisher spam, at least for the big matches I've seen over the last 4 years. Agreed. The superman punch spamming is just dreadful to me, not to mention the spot itself is pretty goofy anyway as a one shot. I'm not making any narrative nor do I search excuses when I say I don't see shit in Roman Reigns as a top level guy. He's overrated as all hell now because of the pendulum effect, he gets way too much credit when he has a really good match considering who he's been working with. He's not bad, he's not great either. He's an ok guy put into position to work WWEtm epics.

You're just trying to get attention on yourself, as showed by the way you like to point at your "odd views" all the times. You're not exchanging, you're just trying to get yourself over and you are derailing threads with stupid shit about "white power prevailing" and comapring the Usos to the Crush Gals or ROH with LLPW and other nonsensical stuff. This is what a troll does, derailing threads to get attention on himself.

Come on, her brother used to go toe to toe on the mat with Olympic Gold medal Kurt Angle. This is a family of fighter. But yeah, that was the only moment where I though "Oh, shit, seriously ?". The whole match was still glorious though, the finish being an all-time classic with Stephy actually showing how good she can be when she wants to (too bad it's 5% of the time).