Stiva

Yeah, Sami has to have the briefcase since it seems like the natural progression of his character and the promos he's been cutting. As for the women, I can see Becky beating Lacey in the opening match but succumbing to Charlotte later on in the evening. You would hope that Lacey Evans would cost Becky the title in order to keep her strong but I'll bet pounds to pennies that Charlotte gets a visual pinfall. Other than those two matches, the card seems as haphazard and slapdash as usual.

I'm glad we've got away from the trivial business of Ric Flair being hospitalised to go through the important business of dick waving.

I think the reveal on screen should have probably coincided with him being there live. He reveals himself on screen, the lights come up and he's standing behind whoever it is he's working with. That all depends on them having someone lined up for him of course.

Kennedy was the rare combo of being absolutely awful to watch and, by all accounts, absolutely awful to work with. He would kick his legs on suplexes in an attempt to make things look "real" which gave his opponent twice as much work to do in terms of lifting his useless ass over.

Having now watched (most of) Raw, there was one small detail that really jumped out at me as a real issue. It was during Wyatt's Firefly Fun House which, I do believe, does a genuinely good job of being vaguely unsettling, even if there appears to be no wrestling pay-off to it. So, you have this laser-focused segment that should absolutely exist to be a distraction from the main show and to be something out of left field in the 3 hours you're giving them. So, what do WWE do? Halfway through the segment, they switch to a camera in the arena that is filming the Titan Tron so that the entire point of the skit is done and everyone who was momentarily distracted from the idea that this is a live show, oh my god honest, 1200 episodes pal, is swiftly reminded that it's just that. I'm assuming Bray's idea is that these segments are supposed to be alien, strange and divorced from the general tone and feel of a regular WWE broadcast. So what do they do? They switch camera angles IN A PRE-RECORDED SEGMENT to make sure it feels as identical as everything else. I'm no Wyatt fan but at some point, this is just self-sabotage.

12 years ago, Cody Rhodes debuted on WWE TV and now he's heralding a competitor to WWE with a hugely appealing creative direction. My question is; which "superstar" who has debuted in WWE/NXT since January is going to be massively influential 10 years down the line and we don't even realise yet? I'm plumping for Eric Bugenhagen

I fully agree. For as much as Jericho is beat up in the ring, his mind for wrestling is clearly vibrant and creative. He was booking his own WWE feuds from Michaels onward and, while he had a few misses in there, you can't deny that he had the most over angles/programs in the company whenever he put his mind to it. When you plug his mind into Cody's unperturbed vision and Janela's rampant creativity, you're going to end up with something that you're not going to see from WWE. Before this year is out, there's going to be one AEW program that has everyone talking and hyped, you can see it coming a mile away.

Fuck, this is absolutely awful news. Shocking and tragic all at once.

Hard-hitting match that was nothing more, nothing less. Everyone is not kidding about the chops; Benoit was hitting those like he wanted people in the concession stands to hear them.

Back into PWO2K with some of the matches I missed on last watch. I really dug this, even if it was largely anchored by Ohtani being ridiculously charismatic and filling his performance with so many fantastic little touches. That's a bit harsh on Tanaka as his work was good as he laid stiff shots and kept on finding quick, smooth reversals into the armbreaker which made up the meat of the in-ring story. This escalated nicely and even with the miscommunication at the end, had a hot finishing stretch, in which they didn't neglect the main focus of the match to that point. Good stuff.

300 million dollars down the drain so their President buddy has some American Football he can watch without being triggered. Amazing

Also, the pre-show is airing on free TV. It's ITV4, which isn't the most-watched channel in the country but it's a foothold on terrestrial TV in the UK so that may well be where the AEW TV show ends up. I actually wouldn't be surprised to see it end up on BT Sport where they can market it against WWE in their battle with Sky.

I'm hoping AEW continue their style as they move to TV but, on the whole, I'm not sure that's really a style that will grab young people's attention. I think it might grab older viewers who don't watch WWE week to week anymore and move them back to a weekly wrestling product but the overall problem of young people not watching wrestling is a question I certainly can't answer. How do you attract people to 6 hours of pro-wrestling a week in an age where young people's media seems to be more easily digestible and disposable than ever? Make Ninja a backstage announcer?

It's also very telling that the women are getting less focus now that Ronda isn't on the roster and following on from stories that WWE are internally unhappy with the ratings they were fetching so I guess it's also Becky Lynch's fault in their eyes?

I know that there’s been a year or so since it happened but imagine if Bryan didn’t get the all-clear and he wasn’t on TV as a heel. These shows would have almost nothing redeeming on them. With regards to the production, the buck should always stop with Vince but Kevin Dunn clearly needs taken out the back and put out of our misery sooner rather than later.

Vince repeatedly mentioning that a guy can't do a Southern accent whenever he's brought up is absolutely manic stuff. Harper is a super agile big guy with a great look who can not only work the style they want out of their major singles guys but do it better than a lot of them with the added bonus of it coming from a heavyweight. They obviously know that enough to recognise that he'd be a big get for AEW but not enough to utilise him because he can't do a certain accent? The leaps of logic baffle the mind.

If there's a tiered subscription, the more expensive options are probably going to be for more current content which is the absolute opposite of what I want. Sadly, I (and probably everyone on this board) am probably in the minority with that but you'd hope that a more expensive, tiered subscription saw more efforts made to archive, restore and present older footage in addition to their own terrible original content. Basically, if they're asking us to pay more, they need to deliver more.

Even the website has a ton of Vince-isms. I read the recap of Smackdown and we had "Kevin Owens SAVAGELY attacked The New Day", "Elias and Shane McMahon BRUTALLY ASSAULTED Roman Reigns" and "Lars Sullivan DEMOLISHED several superstars" Without going into why you're running 3 heel beatdowns on the same show, you can almost hear Michael Cole saying all of those sentences as you're reading them.

I've fallen off Impact in recent weeks but anything between The Lucha Bros and LAX is something I'm on board for.

I'm incredibly interested in where this new Wyatt gimmick is going but I have to wonder how it translates into an in-ring change. Though having him return through a series of vignettes makes a lot of sense considering they're what got him so hyped in the first place. Also, the constant name changes are starting to give me whiplash. So much of this seems like they're bouncing wildly from one train of thought to the next.

Yeah, that's some high-level business right there. If that's how they're going to present their product going forward, I'm all in (lol) for their TV show.

One of my favourite matches from Mania weekend in which Dominic Garrini worked as if he could feel no pain. A flat-out awesome, wild brawl around the arena where both guys took huge punishment that felt like a real out-of-control Southern fight. Garrini was an absolute bumping machine here though, channelling Foley in that he took crazy hit after crazy hit and just kept on moving forward. It went from the fairly mundane (though still wild) dive through Bishop and the front row before culminating in a big bump into thumbtacks by way of a unbelievably nasty, back-first crash through an entire section of seats. At one point, Bishop is just nailing skewers into Garrini's EAR before Dom responds by nailing them into Bishop's forehead. Finish comes when Bishop and his second handcuff Garrini to the turnbuckle before dousing him in lighter fluid and motioning to set him alight before Garrini surrenders. That finish seems hokey when written down but the match played out in a way where it felt like one guy getting set on fire seemed like a likely and realistic outcome. A crazy war and when you look at this and his Bloodsport match, Sunday morning must have absolutely sucked for Dominic Garrini

I’m only 2 matches into the AIW Slumber Party Show but man, Dominic Garrini takes one of the nuttiest bumps this side of the 90s ECW Arena in his match. Between that and Bloodsport, he had quite the Saturday.

Lacey should just be a general fly in Becky’s ointment as she’s busy with a top feud. If they can get Sasha back, it should probably be her. If not, Naomi maybe? Really, the women’s division is small enough that they should all be interacting with each other anyway with Becky being the bonafide top dog who they orbit around.