[2000-09-24-WWF-Unforgiven] HHH vs Kurt Angle

[soup23]

This was a very good match. I think it is easy to see how high up the card Angle has been presented throughout the year to forget that he hasn’t had a match really over 10 minutes long for his entire career. Therefore by proxy, this was the most ambitious match of his career and for his part, he held his own. They worked a more WWF style brawl but it featured some fun spots and rib and arm selling from HHH. The belly to belly from one table to the next in particular was really good and played off the teases of what happened to Angle a month before. The problems with the match mainly result around the finish and this is certainly the first big mis step of the angle overall. Steph low blowing Angle aribitrarily felt really forced and out of nowhere. I think they could have shown Angle using the sledgehammer or in general being more violent to build up sympathy from at least Steph in that she was seeing the “bad” side of Angle. In addition, HHH is being built as sympathetic to a degree but his forceful kiss to Stephanie at the end felt out of place and overall he didn’t really deliver on his promise to Foley from earlier in the night of demolishing Angle. So each person came out looking worse than they did coming in even though there were certain positives to be taken from the match as a whole. Not an outright failure as a match for me but disappointing given how great everything had been up to this point. ***1/2 (7.1)

[AstroBoy]

I'm going to disagree and say this was a big letdown and kind of a mess. The vibe of this is just so weird at this point in the feud with Steph not really teasing any kind of loyalty to Angle anymore. Triple H is the face by default but it just doesn't work that well here. Angle was not ready to fill out a control segment in a match like this. He finally takes over after a few minutes and just resorts to slow-paced punch-kick offense and doesn't show nearly enough aggression or hatred or even gameplan. So we just get a few minutes of them trading punches and Triple H just takes over that way -- no transition, nothing paid off. There is a table spot and again Angle just slowly works over Triple H until he comes back after a few moves. At this point Triple H demands that Stephanie come in and make a choice even though nothing at this point of the match would really warrant that. She low blows him, pedigree, match over.

 

This really just felt like them sleepwalking through what was supposed to be a grudge match. If Angle was trying to work methodical then he wasn't focused enough or technical enough, no variation to his offense. The moonsault also seemed like just a strange thing to pull out late in the match. If Angle was trying to get over viciousness and hatred then he wasn't nearly hateful enough. Triple H just seemed to be along for the ride, content to lackadaisically go through a by the numbers match. His rib selling was pretty good for the most part.

 

To top this off, both the no-DQ stip and Foley as referee were totally pointless to the match. You could argue that Steph low blowing Angle was the result of the no DQ stip but that could have easily been done anyway. You have this match built up using the sledgehammer and brawls and yet they don't use any of that in the match at all. Kurt easily could have escalated this by integrating some of that into his offense and taken this to a more interesting place. I don't know -- the whole thing just felt like a bunch of ill-advised ideas that didn't really come together.

 

**