Stiva

Ha, that stare down as the other guys brawl was a clever way to get some spotlight on the tag teams for a bit

Wait, they actually called the German guy LUDWIG KAISER?! That’s an incredible bit of 1970s regional wrestling heeldom brought into 2022

Nah, I’m here, my brother. No way I’m missing Sheamus/WALTER.

As someone who hasn’t watched WWE in a long while, the difference in commentary is night and day. They’re still shoehorning clumsy nicknames in but all three feel far more relaxed. It’s night and day if you haven’t been watching for a bit

Man, that crowd looks fantastic.

If Clash at the Castle didn’t….clash with the Newcastle game, I’d be watching my first live WWE PPV for who knows who long? The rumble where Edge returned maybe? Either way, the buzz coming back to WWE is good stuff and I’m intrigued to see them put on a strong stadium show with a really hot crowd.

They can still do the Cole attempts to take over The Elite from Omega angle without KOR and Fish. If anything, it’ll save us from seeing O’Reilly and Matt Jackson having a competition to see who can deliver the most business-exposing acting performance in backstage segments.

Also, the joker has to be Joe so we can get Joe vs Punk at Arthur Ashe, right?

Tony needs to give Ace Steel a raise because that man just got me to order All Out. What a fucking total home run of a segment, it’s almost completely justified and retroactively improved the last few months of really middling shows. Everything else was good too but man, that’s more like it.

The All Out card does look amazingly slap-dash when you consider it’s their de-facto biggest show and last years show clearly had a defined plan going in, along with two huge debuts at the finale. Kind of speaks to a lot of plate juggling and ego massaging

The Ernest Miller and Glacier tag team was fantastic fun in a way you’d never expect. And it wasn’t all Mortis dragging them to something good

That three weeks where they fully committed to a Palumbo/Jamie Noble feud over Michelle McCool was good shit. Like every other midcard idea with a spark of potential at that time, they never went any further with it

I do wonder what the eventual endgame for the MJF stuff will be. Wonder if he shows up at All Out in some capacity

Christian/Hardy wasn’t great but it had a valid reason for happening at the very least. Jobbing Cassidy to Lethal, even though it’s setting Lethal up for Wardlow, a match nobody believes he’ll actually win, is definitely the stranger match. They could have went with Lethal vs Trent for a similar outcome. I really hope Orange isn’t heading down the Darby route where TK thinks he’s bulletproof no matter what so he maybe jobs a bit too much.

Was talking to a friend tonight and he’s insistent that the Hangman/Silver team coupled with the renewed Elite drama is going to end up with Hangman as a heel and Silver as a singles babyface. Can’t think I’d ever thought of that before but when it’s spelled out like that, why not?

You could also have Dalton Castle and The Boys in the 6-Man tournament

They could do a lot worse than integrating the NXT UK roster to the US to really freshen the matches and programs up.

HHH, Michaels, Road Dogg and Jarrett around HHHs motorbike will be the Vince, Patterson, JR and Cornette around Vince’s pool for the new era

With Brock leaving, the only option they have is to bring Wyatt back, right? Everyone else is currently in AEW and Cody is injured anyway.

I wonder if, Pritchard in particular, does go, if they’ve even got anybody who could head up the booking that isn’t HHH? Do we get Shawn Michaels with the book of the main show? Is Ryan Ward still around the place?

Yeah, I’d wager this is going to get very ugly, very quickly. We’re through the looking glass now, boys. I assume Dunn and Pritchard fall next. Can Coach Tony K take advantage of the chaos? I notice they announced Hunter is back to work; does this actually end with him and Steph on the throne, as they always envisaged?

With regards to the Dark Order, they should team up Vance and Silver as a little and large strong boy team with Uno as the mouthpiece/occasional 6-man partner. Reynolds is perfectly fine but feels very superfluous at this point

Blood and Guts just hit over 1 million so I can kind of understand him seeing how far he can push it on tv for a rating. Didn’t the Moxley/Omega barbed wire PPV do good numbers too?

I’m also digging Nese as your arrogant midcard heel that can hold up his end in the ring. See the guys name on the TV card and you know you’re probably getting a solid 10 minute match. Agreed on Jane too; that genuinely feels like the missing piece that could propel him further. I love any time the ECW mark in Tony Khan pushes him to license music for people. As a catch-all now that work is going to see me fall behind; I thought Forbidden Door was out of this world great and, even it’s poorer moments were propped up by the insane crowd. Blood and Guts was hit and miss and probably too long but there were so many running threads and nods to history that I loved it in the end. Excalibur and Schiavone do a great job of bringing up moments in AEW where people have feuded or interacted before in times like this. It really does feel that the company is beginning to have a past and defining rivalries that they can go back to. Claudio is a superstar pick-up at a time where they needed him the most and I just hope there’s a plan for him beyond this initial period. Going to Kingston is a situation where neither should lose but I do wonder if Punk/Claudio is the tentative plan for Arthur Ashe with Punk/Moxley being the All Out main event. Either way, whoever said this is beginning to feel like last summer again nailed it. The crowds are getting really hot which helps but even things like The Acclaimed/Ass Boys stuff is good midcard work. Feels like all the belts are in the right places for them to move forward and have a good push into the autumn. Also, Rampage is the best hour of wrestling in god knows how long. What a consistently good hour that is

As awful as this story is, the more sickening thought is that this is probably just the surface