Stiva

New line of merch on WWEShop coupled with some special ref type angle down the line?

Another real slog of a show from WWE. The work was all fine but man, halfway through the Rumble match, all I could think of was HHH/Cena and how it felt like it took place on a totally different show. My main takeaways from the Rumble match are that Braun/Bryan will be awesome if/when it happens, Elias is definitely on the right path to stardom and Randy Orton being strangely super over in Saudi Arabia is something I still can't wrap my head around.

Reigns honestly needs to be off TV for a good while. Beating Joe is going to do him no favours, on top of the terrible booking he's been subjected to. Keep him off TV until after Summerslam (where Lashley may win the belt), have him return in a way that makes people pop for him and hope that he's kept away from the sabotage that's, seemingly, always assaulting him.

Did Cole just say "Ariya Daivari and his brother...Daivari"?

Man, these poor guys haven't even got called up to the main roster and they've already lost their surnames.

Ha, that was a pretty funny finish. Only saw the finishing stretch but it felt like a house show ladder match

"What is Finn smiling at?" seems like it should be a meme

Bludgeon Brothers should rebel and start smashing everything to bits with those hammers

Yikes. OK, them running a full Saudi propaganda vid is a bit much.

They seem less interested in the in-ring stuff and more about the poses, catchphrases and signature spots. They seem to be getting the reactions.

Broken Matt cracks me up, man. I love how he always changes up his early spot where he stops and shouts something. Him telling Viktor that his cartwheel was "TREMENDOUS!" was fantastic on Raw

Really dug the Cruiser match. 205 Live is shockingly consistent these days.

Hunter must have botched his spray tan

"No matter what is happening in my universe" is absolutely how regular people talk about their problems

The spot-calling is ridiculous and the whole thing is kinda bland and formulaic but it's exactly the match they should be working for this crowd.

And there's the first ham-fisted reference to Bruno

Ha, I love how the crowd is popping for WWE tropes like HHH spitting water and Cena running down the aisle. This is like a crowd that Vince has created in a lab.

Seeing a lot of people say that they should give Kofi the Rumble win. Yeah, hold a marquee show in a new, rich market and end it with Kofi Kingston winning

I wonder how hot the crowd will be? I mean, its sweltering heat so I know theyll be warm but in terms of reacting to the show

Simple studio wrestling but I came out of it really digging Eddie Golden. He wasn't reinventing the southern heel wheel but he was playing one really well as well as knitting the whole match together, feeding Styles at the right time and he even looked good in the post-match beatdown. Does Jeff G Bailey punch a fan that tries to grab him? That guy was/is something else, man.

Fun match that manages to be refreshing in the context of recent brawls than anything else. With regards to Ki, he whiffs a couple of strikes and still looks green but he's just so naturally smooth at times; the moonsault to the outside is beautiful and the height and impact he gets on the big spots makes them look great. Cool to see that the crowd could still pop for a match like this without 100 table spots and they deserve credit for that. Monsta Mack was perfectly fine in this, finding some interesting ways to splat Ki all over the ring, put it all together and the match works. Indy refs are still counting way too fast for my liking though.

On the subject of merch sales, I remember Bryans merch being uniformly terrible at the time with fake beards and bad shirt designs based around him having a beard. Compare that to 08-09 Hardy when it seemed like every kid in the arena had those day-glo arm bands on

Coach's call during the Braun/Nicholas shit at Mania is up there with the worst of all time. Graves was talking about how ridiculous it all was and Coach replies with "Look, he's out there, making a dream come true for this young kid!" Not only did it sound inauthentic, it was maybe the most tone deaf take on pro wrestling you could pull off. Graves rebutted by completely ripping it to shreds, talking about how it was a Tag Team Title match at Wrestlemania, not a Make-a-Wish request and he sounded genuinely angry instead of putting it on as he does when he's busting Booker's or Byron's balls. So yeah, he'll be no great loss to the booth and Booker will inject a bit of life into the commentary at the very least.

Holy shit at Smackdown. Their PPVs should have some fantastic matches without even trying. EDIT: Oh shit, they scrapped them! One more cosmic joke: finally give Smackdown a roster that could sustain their own PPVs and then stop them