Rolling Chris and Kevin's Bogus Journey 2017

god WM crowds are the worst

I haven't watched NXT much since Takeover Toronto. I don't know why I gave up on it exactly, but the slow turnover into a TNA alumni brand is certainly part of it. If the rumours are true and Nakamura gets called up to Smackdown this week then I may be done with NXT for a while.

The 3way tag from nxt was bundles of fun. My 2nd fav match of the year so far after aj-cena.

Yeah, those are my favourite guys left in NXT easily.

I'll definitely watch that match at some point.

Mania predictions?
ARMBAR: Stroman
Cruiserweight title: Neville
IC title: Corbin
SD women's title: who's even in this match?
RAW tag title: Enzo and Cass
US title: Owens (Jericho should win and get revenge based on storyline alone, but he's leaving again, so ...)
AJ vs Shane: AJ
Miz/Maryse vs Cena/Nikki: Cena/Nikki
RAW women's title: Charlotte
Universal title: Lesnar
SD title: Wyatt
HHH vs Rollins: going out on a limb and picking HHH
Reigns vs Undertaker: Reigns but goddamn will I be rooting for Taker like I never have before

Shamefully, except for neville - aries, i really really dont care about any of the matches. I will watch hoping they all turn it on for mania but wins and losses dont really matter to me cos none of the matches matter to me.

Asuka vs Ember Moon was great, people. Looking forward to the rematch already.

dont see myself even attempting to stay up for Mania this year. the Rumble is the only WWE show i've watched start to finish siiiiince, idk, the Cruiserweight Classic finals? and the Rumble felt like a let-down at the time. WM is usually where I try to drop back in but this is a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE card. i don't see where the quality is coming from.

Taker is sad to watch these days. he needs to hang it up, stopped being fun a long time ago. this match with Reigns is obviously just gonna be a finisher-spamming "epic" (depending on how long / hard Taker can go) and at this point idgaf who wins. I don't get annoyed about the Roman Reigns thing anymore. I just don't watch (tho tbf that is not solely due to Roman Reigns). depressingly i'm not even interested in the prospect of a potential Taker retirement here. he's been a ghost ever since they killed off the Streak.

Lesnar / Goldberg is sure to be a spectacle and i can see casual fans being extremely into the moment. otoh it's also a tremendous waste of everyone's time. i guess Goldberg is out after this so Lesnar wins and gets his heat back? can't imagine it'll be much of a match either way. and everyone's another year older and they still have no-one anywhere near being ready to carry things.

Jericho / Owens, ok fair cop this should be good and their segments have been the only thing i've gone out of my way to find on Raw this year. these two guys have somehow managed to turn this into one of the best stories of the decade in spite of every mechanism the company has in place now to stop that from happening. kudos to them for that.

HHH/Rollins ffs WHY is Triple H in a WM main match AGAIN?! dude just needs to let go. Rollins has some awesome attributes and some truly horrible ones. i like his matches ok without ever really loving any of them. would expect this to fall squarely in the "good-not-great" camp. they're running this story way too late in the day. gaf

WWE Champion Bray Wyatt vs Royal Rumble winner Randy Orton for the WWE title at Wrestlemania in 2017 lol are they fucking serious get to fuck

i can dig the mixed tag match, that should be a lot of fun, but it's not gonna tempt me into watching the show when i can catch it later.

same goes for AJ / Shane, which is a massive waste of AJ imo in that he should really be having 5* main-event classics at every WM he has left. but i guess they see Shane as a top draw now and this is probably some kind of compliment to AJ. no doubt both guys will try to kill each other and i'd expect it to be leagues better than either man's match from last year.

Corbin to flatten Ambrose plz.

i don't think the rest of the card really calls for comment? i guess i object to them filling out the women's matches and sacrificing any quality just so that everyone gets a payday, but then otoh good that they all get a payday.

Whole card is just one big fuckin MEH, basically. k negative rant over, i hope everyone enjoys the show :)

course there is always hope that they over-deliver on the card, as they did a couple of years ago (was that 31? i think so). NXT last night was better than the card would've suggested. we can but hope!

am frustrated, made this

https://s29.postimg.org/j76f43ymf/nxt.png

assuming the next one is roode vs ohno (one year older than nak) it's gonna keep going up

"it's a developmental brand" get outta town, it's the throw-a-bone-to-the-smark brand, has been for ages and it's entirely "our" own fault in that this is what the hardcore fanbase (straw man alert) wanted for the longest time and it emerges that actually it kinda sucks and the whole thing works waaaay better when you've got actual real life rookies on screen who over the course of months and years learn how to actually do the job properly.

couldn't be less interested in what they're presenting right now compared to how it was in 2015 (and yes obvs guys like Zayn and Neville weren't unknown quantities at the time but they were exceptions i think) because obviously Bobby Roode knows what he is about but if you're not gonna bother giving a guy a story to tell then what is the fuckin point?

in this NXT has basically become the smark-friendly version of Monday Night Raw in that it is crammed full of quite-good talent but no one in the hierarchy is the least bit interested in putting that to work in the service of entertaining tv. when they succeed, they succeed in spite of themselves.

i mean i agree with everything you said i just picked that title to be snarky

lol surprise demotion to the preshow for IC match

I am actually physically at wm atm ask me anything

This is my first time watching wrestling

Are you having a good time?

Kinda boring

I liked that guy in the beginning with the trombone

i'm a bit behind already but holy shit these raw women's entrances

Didn't know wrestling got so cuddlestein mountain

Weird match order thus far but this has been one of the best Mania undercards ever.

Crowd hates Cena so much

Didnt mean to start watching this atm but ive got toothache thats keeping me awake.

So JBL just said Shane O is the best at strikes, kinda like how they used to put over mmataker. All they do is go on about Shane.

I feel so embarrassed for the best wrestler in the world.

Shane: built like a nfl linebacker and ripped to the bone. Also getting most of the offence.

15 mins in and im so happy that shareholder and boss Shane Macmahon is making that annoying upstart AJ Styles look like a chump. Ive only watched a few Smackdowns this year, im sure AJ is some nobody who cant wrestle and this grey haired old dude is the wrestling bad ass who deserves to fucking dominate. Not sure AJ has had one move that hasnt been a counter to stop him losing the match.

Shane just went through a table and AJ tried to hit just 1 move... and was unsuccessful to Shane's impeccable ability to counter this chump.

Wait, the underdog won! How???

KO-Jericho was really good. Now i need to go back to bed.

will vince succeed in making the audience too tired to boo

nah

SPOILERS

The show peaked with the Hardys comeback and win, from then on it was a steady stream of "who booked this crap?" and in the end they were indeed too tired to boo. Five hours is too damn long. Taker's farewell was memorable though.

Wait a goddamn second...

MOJO RAWLEY WON THE ANDRE BATTLE ROYAL??????

with gronk interference

The new NXT title belts are made by a London-based company, who've also made new tag belts for PROGRESS (thank fuck for that, 'coz that styrofoam shield is cheap af).

My favourite part of wm so far - how The Miz is the biggest babyface in the company.

rusev should be tbh

Maybe he'll come back as Farmer Rusev AKA the modern day Hillbilly Jim.

I watched a few highlights of the smarked out RAW after Mania. Angle as the new GM might get me back into RAW, because his backstage skits and short stints as Smackdown GM all those years ago were tremendous. Any chance they get it right with Reigns this time and turn him into a prick heel who trolls the crowd every week with two line promos?

The "superstar shakeup" could be interesting, the tag scenes and women's divisions on each brand are burned out on fresh matchups.

I always want to hope it will lead to something great but man i kinda presume aj gets buried on raw as reigns bitch or something while smackdown is blandy boreton (c) v. seth or ambrose having the same bland match for 12 months.

Anyone remember american alpha?

im going to smackdown next tuesday, which i guess will be post-shakeup

The Mauro Ranallo/JBL bullying story is fucked up on so many different levels.

Did the WWE think that Stroman would become a megaheel by giving Reigns the mother of all beatdowns?

Shibata vs Okada was must see. I criticize Okada a lot for his selling and comebacks, but not this time. Awesome stuff, and totally different than any IWGP title match in recent memory that didn't involve Minoru Suzuki.

yeah the JBL thing is a mess alright.

figures more widely in the current cultural moment too, what with Trump approvingly retweeting praise from JBL the other day, JBL being the sort of "self-made" millionaire that should be aspired to according to that particular weltanschauung, that he has supposedly given Vince numerous stock tips over the years as they have bonded over their shared status as wild-west capitalist pioneers, the fact that Vince apparently wholeheartedly endorses and even encourages this bullying culture by offering protection to his enforcer, the McMahon-Trump connection, the fact that a guy who was sexually abused as a child is down for his personal muscle to be soaping up terrified young men in the showers, "GRAB EM BY THE PUSSY" etc. etc. etc. etc.

there is something very deeply wrong with these ppl, no doubt about it. unfortunately it seems like another one of those things that ppl don't really give a shit about because wrestling.

Idk it seems like its getting widespread coverage. JBL has always been a bully, a nasty piece of work but it was kinda assumed he, and the company, grew out of it. With these recent examples, it is obvious he is still a ghastly human being. Its a shame that Vince has final say though, cos the bully, his friend, stays while the one everyone else loves is basically out of a job.

If only he wasnt fox news royalty, and he could just get thrown the fuck out in shame, like demott was.

(I presume the "old school" culture dies with vince right? I cant see hhh siding with jbl over mauro.)

I think Justin Roberts wrote that HHH supported the bullying culture, although now that he's an exec and in charge of developmental he may have changed his tune. It's impossible to say what HHH merely tolerates because he works for Vince and what he really believes is right (i.e. what he'd be doing if he was in charge).

Meltzer has been calling out ESPN for shoddy journalism in ignoring the story, but it's obvious that ESPN's "coverage" of WWE is paid advertising (from WWE's perspective) or puff piece journalism (from ESPN's perspective), they never had any intention of covering it like a "real" sport and it's frankly kind of shocking that Meltzer doesn't understand that.

I'm really not trying to pick on Meltzer because he's just doing his job, but the MSM for the most part doesn't see a story here because it's "only" wrestling and this isn't a big enough scandal to get the attention of non-wrestling sports fans (unfortunately).

you seriously think meltzer doesn't understand the relationship between ESPN and WWE? it doesn't make his crusading any less valid, he's always hated this sort of thing and he'd love an opportunity to bring attention to how antijournalistic it is

and it probably wouldn't have become such a thing if coachman didn't speak a bunch of bullshit

He probably gets it, but he never explicitly calls out ESPN for being paid shills for WWE, perhaps for political reasons. I look at it as tabloid entertainment "journalism" -- when covering celebs, they can report whatever they like and ignore other things, depending on what kind of coverage (i.e. positive or negative) will make them the most money. It seems silly to call them out for not doing "real" journalism when they never claimed they were.

Shibata may have suffered a career ending brain injury in the match vs Okada. First Honma, and now this, fuck. Originally this was thought to be an elaborate angle to give Shibata some time off but now most news sites are reporting that it's real.

I wanted to bring up the shibata thing. I obviously dont follow njpw that much but okada has had like a perfect meltzer year? And someone may be braindead because of it? Where does it end? I watched wk11 and i LOVED naito-tanahashi working bodypartz, possibly one of the best matches ive seen in years, but I feel like too often these big hype matches* are just a mess at this point? 4 rainmakers and tokyo dome makes a 6 star match? Shibata nearly dying is a 5 star angle?

Okada, tanahashi, omega, naito, previously aj, nakamura, ibushi etc. - these guys are the epitomy of sports entertainment when they want to be! No-one needs to get eddie-ed and stevie richards-ed!

*this includes the ospreay-ricochet flippy shit too

Ps. I do wonder if the great *safe* worker exists? Is it Cena? Will a njpw guy ever do it? (And yes this is understanding thay njpw dojo guys are *better* than most workers) I really do occasionally wonder if the miz will ever have a 5 star match - almost certainly never.

I share your discomfort. I've enjoyed a lot of recent NJPW, but something like the top-rope dragon suplex in the Omega/Okada match, however dramatic and exciting, is just so stupid. It makes me think of the way that the escalating violence of the AJPW/NOAH style from the early 90s to the late-2000s culminated in Misawa's death.

Ric Flair managed to be hugely successful and beloved by at least two generations of hardcore fans while working a pretty safe style. Randy Savage, too, although I've heard that all those top-rope elbows caused a lot of damage to his hip. For a more recent example, Chris Jericho strikes me as relatively safe.