Matt D

Cena's confused look was stretch armstrong levels of grotesque.

This match is like a video game match with the reversals without substance. Also, it feels awfully early for them to be doing some of this stuff.

Poor Tensai.

Heyman's great on the outside. Michaels is more like Kelly Kelly wearing a hat.

It's the Blow Away Diet.

Heyman managing the heels in the #2 and #3 matches is kind of cool. It's like Heenan having Rude and Andre at Wrestlemania V kind of. Best thing about Brock is his awesomely mangled ears.

I'm also generally okay with the lack of arm selling by Taker because it was a containment segment, mainly. This felt a little more like an Edge vs Taker match to me than HHH or HBK vs Taker but when they were doing the forearms on their knees, it felt like Punk did belong in there with him so that was good I guess. The throat-cut was pretty ridiculous though.

The front row fans really made that urn shot near fall. I'm okay with the g2s into tombstone shot since he obviously got him way low. I didn't catch if they made that clear or not.

Heyman's expressions are awesome.

Given the way Dutch wrote about his first Mania, I am so glad he got to have another, and in a featured role too. He was great here, especially that look of horrified frustration when Swagger lost. There was a huge whip on that final Cross Arm Breaker. I wouldn't have minded the abruptness of the finish on another PPV but it was a little weird here.

I bet they could have gotten Confederate Railroad for a lot less money. whatever the fuck that is.

it's fun to see Jericho kicking out the babyface offense. I thought the beginning was real rough. That bugged me more than the finish. They just didn't seem to be syncing early on. They're definitely getting the most out of their match times on this show.

Big E's offense segment on Kane looked great. Loved the crowd post match.

I actually kind of love how bloodless this is, because there's really no reason for it to have blood. The cage is used as a prop and a means to do some more stuff on the top rope.

This may be the single match i saw the most times as a kid. No lie. The only tape I owned was a taped off the TV version of GAB which cut off halfway through Sting vs Nikita.

Agree on this. Biting the cut is more silly and stupid than brutal and cool. I can see a man biting another man's cut in a fight to the death, but not in a wrestling match that is being sold as a competitive sport (at least on some level. What about in a no dq/no holds barred/lights out/cage match etc. There's a reason why the belts are so often not on the line in AWA cage matches.

Oct 22, 1977 Savage/Mayne/Skip Young v Rose/Wiskowski/Sam Bass 2/3 falls Sandy Barr's kid does the ring announcing and couldn't be more nervous. First fall is great with tons of schtick. Rose keeps trying to come in when they have an advantage on Savage, but he slips the lock right after the tag. After Rose accidentily kicks Bass in the corner we get a ton of dissension to the point where Bass goes to a neutral corner. The first fall ends with him taking a tag from Ed and they double team Skip Young to set him up for Wiskowski's diving headbutt. Very amusing stuff like always. Really great character work too. Mayne doesn't even come in. Second fall starts with some babyface domination before the heels take over on Skip Young. Buddy's offense is great. Just nasty little stuff. Fall ends with Buddy dropkicking Bass by accident and Young getting the pin. Buddy and Ed almost immediately take over on an irate Bass in order to save their skins including the diving headbutt and a gusher of a bladejob. It's just a wildly bloody mauling with great flailing selling by Bass. Mayne flips a coin with the others and sits out for the third fall so it's 2 on 2. The heels keep on Young until they make the mistake of slamming his head in the corner which allows the faces to take over. They maul the heals until Buddy and Ed are squirming together in the corner, Dutch shouting for one of them to come out and wrestle. It's a bit back and forth til the end where Young is in control of Rose leading to the time limit draw. Strong stuff again with a great mid match angle/turn.

Honestly, they should have tossed the Nasty Boys at them.

No, we're used to it

The in ring interview with Heyman where News makes him rap and dance is so funny. That should make an errata for the year. I still argue that the fans really wanted to get behind News but he was just atrocious flubbing his simplistic lines left and right.

Shawn says pretty stupid things about the MSG Demos match. Just saying.

It's a tough balance and I absolutely appreciate that and I think that, is in some ways, the main counterpoint to these podcasts. I think Dylan and I especially have raised that point. It's not necessarily that one way is better than another and Will claims the opposite of what you just claimed, Johnny, for the most part. And with him that may be true. I just think that some matches will do better in this setting than others and some matches will do better in the manner you just discussed. And some will do well in both but for completely different reasons. I'll say this. I usually watch most of this stuff while on the exercise bike, so I'm a captive audience and I wouldn't necessarily be using that time to do anything else. I'd be biking anyway and if not watching these I'd be watching something else.

To me, there's no or next to no logical progression on the front end from the first cage match to the second. It's not like they do call back spots. They do the SAME spots. It was them running basically the same match in two different towns like you'd see between Philly and Boston in the WWF at the time. What they did was tweak and tighten the match between the first and the second. There are differences but they're on the back end of the match, fixing the mistakes in the first match, not the front end having one lead storyline-wise to the other. It's the same match, just made a many times better. Edit: I might be wrong but obviously I feel pretty strongly. According to Wiki Doug Somers is 62 years old. If anyone wants to find him and ask him, I'd be open to what he said. Shawn or Marty less so.

I do think his music got a pop and the Crossface teases always got pops. In general, though, I just think Boston in 2003 is a bad example for a crowd that needed that sort of prompting. If he managed that in the middle of Iowa in 2006 I'd be more impressed. I'm not saying there weren't plants. I just think, having been there, that it may have happened anyway. If there were plants, that says more about how the company felt about things than actual reality, but ultimately, it's an important element to all of this.

All I can say is that I was up on my feet before any plant could have possibly been. And I was in the cheap seats. Boston is a smarky smarky town and it was probably a hell of a lot worse then. The guys who paid the money for the best seats were, in part, the smarkiest of the smark. They're the sort that'd be up on their feet before anyone else. I know I was at the time. That doesn't mean there weren't plants in there jumping up too, mind you.