Matt D

I'm going to bullet point this. -I'm amazed this wasn't the main event of the show. I remembered it that way. I'm not watching the Rock/Angle thing this ends with, so no one even suggest that. -Austin was exceptionally good at wrestling into his character. I know that's a weird thing to even mention for a guy who is the biggest star of the last twenty years or whatever, but it's really true. You wouldn't say it about Dusty Rhodes no matter how true it was, but now that I've heard him on the podcasts so much and knowing that just a few years before he was Stunning Steve, it is something to point out. -He's super intense here and the first fall is worked a lot like a vulnerable heel champion match. Hunter tries to mount offense desperately, not chickenshit, but still desperate, and he can't get anything going. I do like how he continuously targets the previously broken neck. -They have some stuff that really doesn't look great. The first thesz press attempt which is shrugged off is rough. I didn't love the mini transition with Austin going for the prone double axehandle and eating the foot. I like that spot more when the heel does it. I guess he was going for his second rope forearm, but he obviously wasn't. Then the actual finish of the first fall is a bit of a mess with the kick being all over the place. Not a huge thing but weird with such seasoned wrestlers. -On the other hand I really liked the single arm ddt counter to the early pedigree attempt. Hunter's selling is pretty great throughout. Surprisingly good. Worth noting good. It's probably the highlight of the match, that and Austin's intensity. We see less of Austin's leg selling but it does peak with the figure four, which is a spot that really does feel like it means something here. They kept it on for just the right amount of time and the legbrace made for a great visual with it. -VERY weird to me that Austin goes back to the Thesz press/stumbling forward elbow drop twice. In one fall. I couldn't imagine Cena doing the floppidy belly to back drop/five knuckle shuffle twice in a two out of three falls match at all let alone twice in the first fall. It was fine that he hit it all so early since he was going for the kill and it led right into the stunner reversal/pedigree reversal, but then he went back to it and that actually took me out a bit. It should be noted that he doesn't go back to the Thesz press again in the second or third fall. -It's a shame that the arm/leg selling didn't lead to at least the first fall. It's something that you can transition into other stuff, sure, but I would have liked given the structure of the match that it did lead to something, especially since Hunter was doing such a great job selling. In general it was a pretty good fall and i like that the weapons/wwe main event bs/etc was all set to happen in the following to. It feels fresh to see a fall that lacked all that. Second fall. -The character work continues. Austin causes chaos. Triple H shows his true colors and tries to rabbit. I love how upset the Spanish Announce Team seem when Austin is tearing apart their table. -Attitude Era fans are the worst. -Austin really decimates Hunter with the chair. Then, it's kind of funny to me that the bell seems like such an escalation when he tosses it into the ring, which ends up ironically as Austin gets him in the bell area and slams him into it, but the bell isn't there anymore. At least it pays off later with the late fall transition. -On the other hand, the barbed wire baseball 2x4 is SO over the top I can't really take it seriously, which is bad since it's the huge transition spot. I'm just going to look at it as symbolic. Falling between the two announce tables is a GREAT way to hide your blading though. Another great visual is the blood on the white part of the announce table. -I would have been perfectly okay with Hunter hitting the Pedgiree on the table for the second fall. A lot of that is to do with Austin's big selling of what was going on. The bump Hunter takes where he basically misses the spanish announce table is pretty nuts. -Austin's rapid fire punches really do look great, as did the can shot. -A third great visual is the barbed wire 2x4 in the foreground with the two guys reeling and bloody past it as they get to their feet. -I would have been okay with the neckbreaker on the chair ending the fall. Doing something like that wouldn't hurt Austin or the match and would make it so people could buy something with just a mild escalation like that as a finish. Instead, Austin comes back way too soon and definitively even if it is cut off. I would have preferred if there wasn't a hope spot there and they just let Hunter beat on him til the pedigree reversal to the outside. -Austin selling clumsily around the outside is grade A stuff. Hunter joins in too. By the third attempt at a reversal on the stairs this is getting a bit long in the teeth for the second fall though. -The sledgehammer gets introduced and they take their time getting to the spot. It's weird for Austin to do the kick and then go for a few punches instead of the stunner, especially when he repeats the kick a moment later. The finish is fine but I could have used it five minutes earlier. -Also Austin's boot being untied is really weird. You never see that. Third fall -The lack of physicality as the cage is coming down is interesting. You think Hunter would capitalize. It looks like he tried to kick the 2x4 out but wasn't quick enough. They sure got that thing down quickly. -Because Hunter didn't capitalize, Austin's right back in his face only to be cut off by the cage immediately. Very smart to bring the cage in almost at the first chance to differentiate from the violence of the street fight. -The violence escalation continues with the bat. They REALLY milk that, but I think when you're going to do something like that, the payoff has to be more visually striking. After fifteen-twenty seconds of getting his head cut open with it, he's not bleeding much worse. I'd rather them have not used it at all. There were other things they could have done. -That said, the desperation chair shot was well done and there was definite anticipation for Austin getting revenge with the 2x4 which pays off well. -It's interesting. The cage is there and used in key moments, but it feels much more like a way to keep the violence focused, both in one place, and through a lens, as it's intensified since they have literally no way out. -The violence is actually striking for a WWF cage match. There's a good, solid weight to what they're doing through the selling and the visceral hate. -The abrupt slam into the cage before the pedigree (after the stunner block) by austin was very well done and led into a great near fall, though maybe not a believable one. -Why didn't Austin come back up with the 2x4 when it was in his hand as he was getting up? Anyway, HHH stumbling about after the catapult wasn't the best idea ever. Frankly all the self-conscious epic or whatever bs wwe main event style stuff that was so refreshingly absent from fall #1 is in full effect here. -This time Austin DOES come up with the 2x4 but Trips comes up with the Sledgehammer. Let me put it this way, if they had done that the last time, before the catapult, the finish would have been better. The only difference is that Hunter wouldn't have been able to kick out of the Stunner, basically. In total, I think this match actually gave them an opportunity to spread the bs out and while they did in the first fall, they didn't in the other two, which made it feel even more bloated. It was a lost opportunity, but at the same time full of good character work, great intensity, and tremendous violence. I would have liked to see the limbwork pay off a bit more and for them to tighten it by about 20% in general, but the latter is true of almost every big Triple H match.

I love Warrior, after WM 8, telling all the reporters that his name is Jim and Warrior is just a character he plays.

JR knows where all the bodies are buried.

Matt, do you anticipate the weekly TV to be more important now? With the PPVs on the network, it makes them more like an extension of weekly TV than ever before. RAW, SD, PPV (with a NXT, ME, and SS on the side) are kind of all the same thing now. There's not even a brand split, as I understand it, except WWE and NXT. It's tricky because once they get the new TV contracts, they're sort of bulletproof.

Yeah the company does that...I was coming from the fan perspective. Perfect example is the Sheamus/Christian feud which I had 4 people at work on Tuesday whine about they are tired of seeing since they have wrestled so much on TV. WWE has a bad habit of running the same match every week sometimes twice a week instead of back in the old days when you would run the series of matches over a span of months. There are definitely ways to keep a feud going which don't involve two mid-card guys wrestling twice a week for three weeks. Some of this talk is almost moot since we don't know how the PPVs being on the network will change the tenor of weekly TV this year.

Another huge thing here, as with Survivor Series, is that in any given year we see almost every wrestler interact with every other wrestler due to the nature of the weekly TV. With the old Rumbles and Survivor Series, it was usually the one time a year where certain guys would come anywhere near each other. WWE was so regimented and planned out back then (look at the house show results relative to JCP) that it was great to see something so outside the usual formula and made it seem like we were looking at one coherent world instead of what we usually had.

I think Dave still left it up in the air. He mentioned TBS/TNT amongst others too.

That makes you Julianne Moore The real reason that I want the like button inactive.

We, collectively, can't even figure out what the main event of Beach Blast 92 was.

Johnny just wants to be happy, man. He's our version of "The Dude." You can be John Goodman.

Oh yeah, absolutely no reason not to work within the system.

Isn't this more due to the shift towards 4+ hours of primetime TV a week against actual competition instead of wrestling companies buying time in syndication? You have to do big stuff every week and it's harder to plan ahead.

Kevin Sullivan.

A lot of the time I freeze if people are watching on demand while I try to watch the network but this wasn't that. I was just checking it out on the laptop and it'd freeze after less than a minute of watching the livestream. i still need to follow up with them about my tablet since the fact it crashes the tablet completely within 5 minutes no matter what I'm watching is kind of ridiculous.

I don't know about you guys but Main Event is freezing up pretty consistently for me tonight. I can't say that bodes well.

Dave thinks that Hall's still on the table.

Toby Keith Promotions.

So if he shows up to TNA, he will or won't have to be called MC Phil?

Can we have Flair manage Batista for 3 weeks? It'd be even better if he turned on Miz to get there.

All I'm going to say is that he better damn well invite Jake to the bachelor party before the HOF.

The only way I can possibly see them swerving is if Punk comes back to spoil it all for Bryan setting up a multi month feud between the two of them.

It's weird to me that they sort of end up appealing to the hardcores every ten years. Bret at X. Eddy/Benoit at XX. Bryan at XXX.

Saturday Morning Slam was pretty great.

I'm sure we'll get Cena vs Harper before Mania. We've still got a few weeks.

Do you think some of this is because a kid watching wrestling might see it as real while a kid watching The Walking Dead would know it was a show? Or at least the likely false notion of that?