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Royal Rumble 2015 Reaction Show w/PWO crew


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Will is joined by Dylan and Dave from the Wrestling Culture podcast, Johnny & Pete from Titans of Wrestling, and Kris Zellner to walkthrough the 2015 Royal Rumble. They discuss the four tag matches that opened the show and ponder if Cena/Lesnar/Rollins was a match of the year candidate. They also ask, was this the worst booked Rumble in history? Is this a show that looked good on paper but just failed in execution. All this and MUCH more!

http://placetobenation.com/royal-rumble-2015-reaction-show/

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I don't think anything about the Rumble match looked good on paper.

 

No Diesel push. Rusev was just in there for a long time. He did nothing of note.

No spectacular eliminations, just guys falling off

No buddies forced to square off. You could have did Miz vs Mizdow here.

No future feuds set up. Remember they used to set up stuff like Michaels vs Angle here? None of that.

 

This is the EASIEST match ever to book. You have to be actively trying to fuck up the match this bad.

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Here's the key counter-argument to Johnny's "inorganic work" idea ... in kayfabe terms, what the fuck is Bryan's elimination meant to say about anything? Who screwed him?

 

He got eliminated fair and square, no cheating, no double teaming, nothing. Just a bog-standard elimination.

 

So what's the angle? "Bryan got screwed by the booking"?

 

That would be worse than the very very worse shit of Russo and then some. There's basically no way to make that work without booking a storyline that pulls back the curtain on how wrestling works and saying "yeah, this is scripted and fake", which even WWE in 2015 wouldn't do.

 

There's no way in hell that was their plan. And the way that elimination was booked was so fucking terrible, that there's no real way out of it based on what happened at the Rumble.

 

All Bryan can do as a babyface is say, "yeah, I was eliminated but next time I'll try harder". Which is about as lame as it possibly gets.

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Just curious... does anyone else think that this looked good on paper but didn't work because of the live crowd?

 

I think a Royal Rumble crowd in that city (and the same would hold for certain other cities) exacerbated the situation. But the way that Rumble was booked wasn't working anywhere. You could argue that the only people booked to look strong at any point, for any amount of time were Bubba, Wyatt (briefly, before he settled into doing nothing and waiting around so that he was there late), maybe Kane/Show, and Rock. And arguably all of them looked like shit along the way. Forgetting for a moment the decision to bounce Bryan when they did and the decision to give Reigns the win. Nobody looked impressive.

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I still need to listen to this (and wish it had dropped a few hours earlier when I was on the bus back to MD and could have used it), and I may write up a road report for P2BN if I can get my head out of my ass and find a balance between anecdotal experience and talking about the actual show since I'm not DEAN or a Phil or Tom and can't make that sort of thing flow well, BUT...

 

One thing I'll mention is just how thoroughly Mizdow hurts the tag team title matches. I don't think I saw one spot that entire match because we were all just staring at Mizdow the whole time. The entire crowd was. No one was watching the rest of the action and we were all trying to figure out what was going on just by watching MIzdow on the fear that if we looked away from him we'd miss something hilarious. I enjoyed watching it thoroughly but I didn't watch a tag team title match at all. At points in the last three years, the tag titles were actually a fairly big deal and here Mizdow was a fairly big deal and they were just a distraction from 10K plus all cheering wildly for him.

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I don't think Johnny was completely out to lunch. They were clearly trying to get a degree of sympathy on Daniel Bryan with his hard luck story. Not to the extent that it completely hijacked the show and ruined their planned WrestleMania main event, obviously, or was an attempt to non-organically manufacture the reaction he had last year.

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