[1998-06-15-WCW-Nitro] Randy Savage vs DDP (Cage)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

This is a pretty big TV main event. WCW continues to have no idea how to film a cage match. Roddy Piper is the referee. Go away, Roddy. Savage is pretty heavily favoring his leg, which I think is partially storyline and partially legit - he had been working on a bad wheel for months and this would be his last appearance for a long time and served as a way to write him out to have surgery. Piper gets in Savage's face and ends up eating a piledriver. No heat for all of this, as fans chant for Goldberg and ECW the entire time. Piper ends up fighting DDP as well. This is a trainwreck. The cage raises (I suspect foul play by Ole Anderson) just enough for the NWO black-and-white to enter the ring and attack Savage. Lots of guys try climbing the cage to make the save and can't. It's cool that they are trying to copy old Omni angles, but no. Anyway, the big story here is that Savage is done. Nash finds the cage controls and is able to raise the cage. The heels bail and they go off the air.

[soup23]

I guess Cages were popular on this Monday night. Holy shit does WCW need to learn how to film this ans the pixels on my tv were going wild. This was a big time match and had some glimpses of what made their 1997 feud a lot of fun and memorable 17 years later. However, this also felt like Savage was really limited, DDP was pretty uninterested for some reason and Piper again needs to go the fuck away forever. Piper then fights DDP. Holy shit, what a disaster. Hollywood NWO comes down and Hennig has already turned again. Who would trust this guy? They beat up both in the cage until Nash makes the dumbest face imaginable to show he knows how to raise a cage as the show goes off the air. (**)

[Migs]

The overuse of Buffer by this point was really douchey. His introduction of Page was stunningly bad - "He comes to the ring with no affiliation! He represents his own utter indignity!"

 

I'm sort of sad to see Savage go - his character was such a burst of energy on the shows earlier in the year, even if he unfortunately just could not pay it off in the ring at this point.

 

Why is there a roof on the cage? Had this been used in WCW before?

 

The match itself is fine, and the angle at the end is fine too, but nothing great.

[PeteF3]

These guys try, but Savage sadly just doesn't have it anymore. There are glimpses of their past chemistry, but the match is wrestled at half the speed and intensity of those great '97 matches. Piper is useless and it's absolutely absurd that the last image before the run-in is Piper singlehandedly beating the shit out of both guys. I guess the big takeaway from the post-match beatdown is that Bischoff hit Savage in the knee with the chair, because Bischoff and Piper are the two guys who need to be put over in this angle. Nash makes the laziest attempt at opening the door you'll ever see--just watch it and see what I mean--before running (!) to the back and raising the cage. This prevents the need to GET SECURITY--GET THE POLICE OVER THERE AND GET OLE ANDERSON AWAY FROM THE SWITCH. Almost no real heat for any of this mess and we go off the air in about the least intense way possible considering we should be seeing a giant steel cage war between two factions of stars. What a sad capstone to a great feud.

[TravJ1979]

Hated everything about this.