Kalisto & Sin Cara beat The Ascension to win the NXT tag team titles in the opener. The Ascension are a throwback to bruiser teams from the 80s like Demolition and the Road Warriors, and have been on the fast track to the main roster for months now. There was literally nothing left to do with them as champions, and in fact their only real storyline was that they had run through the entire tag team division multiple times and had no competition. Kalisto is a well-thought-of masked wrestler who will hopefully be replacing the departing Rey Mysterio as a mask-selling machine when he makes it to RAW. The Ascension should be debuting soon on the main shows, but lack of size, and age of both guys is going to be a major stumbling block for them. The worst thing is that their entire act was centered on their awesome entrance with dark and foreboding classical music, and then it got changed to generic hard rock that the WWE merchandising team can sell on iTunes. They’ll be coming into the big show having lost everything that made them a unique and marketable act in the first place, and that’s kind of unfair to them. But you can’t make a living working in developmental for years and both members of the team are on the wrong side of 30 years old. It’s time to either find a role for them on the main roster or cut them loose and start fresh with younger prospects. Especially because neither Konnor nor Viktor offer anything particularly memorable as wrestlers.
*8 of 10 points
Baron Corbin “debuted” with a 30 second squash of environmental crusader CJ Parker. Parker is a guy who has been stuck in developmental for years now and is going nowhere. Corbin is a former football player who looks to be doing a “Sons of Anarchy” inspired biker gimmick and that’s certainly not the worst idea at the moment. Corbin has the three traits needed to be a top level WWE superstar: He’s tall, muscular and has a full head of hair.
*4 of 10 points
Speaking of hair, Enzo Amore beat Sylvester Lefort with a rollup in a hair v. hair match where neither man ended up losing their hair. Because wrestling. Enzo, doing a Jersey shore Italian gimmick, has more charisma in his ring entrance than most of the main roster does. If this was a world that still tolerated managers, he would be an awesome manager. As a wrestler, well, he makes a great manager. As an old wrestling fan, I was tickled to see that instant hair-removing cream had made a comeback as a plot device, because it’s never not awesome.
*5 of 10 points
Japanese superstar KENTA was introduced with his new name of “Hideo Itami”, and doesn’t that just roll right off the tongue? The patented NXT Random Name Generator strikes again, but us internet nerds will rage about it for a few weeks and then Itami will start kicking dudes in the face and we’ll move on to more important battles, like “whatever stupid name that Kevin Steen is going to be stuck with”.
Bull Dempsey steamrolled former hot prospect Mojo Rawley in under a minute with a flying splash. Mojo was a high profile project of the old regime, a former football player with high energy and a good Michael Rapaport impression and nothing else, and has completely stalled out after a hot start. His finish was sitting down on his opponent’s chest, if that helps to visualize how limited he was. He’s probably too old to retrain or repackage and I’d expect him to be cut loose soon.
*2 of 10 points
Charlotte retained the Women’s title over Bayley with her flip neckbreaker in a decent match that was still light years ahead of the junk put out on RAW these days. Charlotte is the daughter of Ric Flair (named after the city, naturally) and Bayley does a gimmick where she’s a naïve wrestling fan fighting as a constant underdog. The drama was great, the match too.Great womans wrestling.
*8 of 10 points
Adrian Neville used questionable morality to keep his NXT title in the main event, defeating Sami Zayn, Tyson Kidd and Tyler Breeze in a four-way match, stealing the pin on Kidd after Zayn did all the damage. Zayn should have been on the main roster literally a year ago and gains nothing from getting stuck in NXT for months on end, but man are the matches great at least. Great wrestling match at all.
*9 of 10 points
pics (c) of wwe
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen