[2018-07-15-WWE-Extreme Rules] Seth Rollins vs Dolph Ziggler (30-Minute Iron Man)

[DMJ]

Going to post my full review on my blog (Kwang The Blog), but was particularly interested in others' feelings about this match. Let's discuss!

Seth Rollins vs. Dolph Ziggler in a 30-Minute Ironman Match for the WWE Intercontinental Championship. Going into this, critics and fans were somewhat split - on the one hand, Seth Rollins has been a roll, having great matches on TV and drawing the best crowd responses of his career. Ziggler, meanwhile, is almost his perfect physical foil and his partnership with Drew McIntyre has helped revitalized a very stale character (the less we say about the "music-less entrance" gimmick the better). On the other hand, Rollins and Ziggler have wrestled multiple times in the past month, including having a 25+ minute match on RAW not too long ago. Was the audience really clamoring for a third match? Rollins came out and scored two pinfalls in relatively rapid succession - which, in most cases, I would enjoy - but here, it was wholly inconsistent with the rest of their feud (where each guy has had to bust out increasingly risky and devastating moves to get even a single fall). Up 2-0, Rollins started playing to the crowd a bit, mocking Ziggler by stomping his foot and calling for a superkick (or another Curb Stomp?). When Rollins was a heel, his offense elicited babyface reactions, so now that he's actually getting some momentum as a babyface he figured he should heel it up a little? McIntyre came in at this point and, though he cost Ziggler another fall, he destroyed The Architect to the point that The Show Off was able to win back two of the falls. By this point, though, the story of the match became the crowd's general indifference. Early in the match, a vocal minority of the crowd was cracking each other up by counting down the seconds for each passing minute and making the buzzer sound ala the Royal Rumble. By minute 15, though, that was all that most of crowd seemed to care about. Was it insulting to the performers? Definitely...but to blame the fans for not getting into the match is to ignore the WWE's own role in making it happen (not to mention Rollins and Ziggler and the agents themselves, who clearly had an idea of the story they wanted to tell, but just as clearly didn't have the right idea of what match the crowd would want). 4+ hour shows are too long and the burnout factor is nothing new. There may have been fans expecting Hulk Hogan, disappointed that the B-show they bought tickets for ended up being the B-show they bought tickets for. There may have been fans expecting an actual US Title Match (Jeff Hardy has a fan base, folks). The crowd's patience for "non-moments" had worn thin by the end of the show to the point that a laborious RAW rematch just wasn't going to cut it. Rollins and Ziggler worked hard for 30 minutes, but there was a disconnect between the match they were selling and the match the majority of the crowd was hoping to see as the culmination of the show entitled "Extreme Rules." As anyone could've predicted, there was suspense in the final few minutes of the match, but the clock earned it - not the competitors. That's not to say there weren't individual moments of quality action (including McIntyre's impressive beatdown), but as a whole, it felt like a sampler of, not an improvement on, their other two televised matches from this summer. A disappointing, disjointed match that, on another show, in front of a different crowd, may have inspired "This is Awesome" chants, but wouldn't deserve that praise any more than it deserved the ire it received. (3/5)