BomberPat

Money talks, so I'm sure plenty will go back. We might see a few more dissenters, but in practice all that is likely to mean is that the format of the shows moves away from the "BIGGEST EVER" Battle Royals, Tournaments and Royal Rumbles, and to something more closely resembling an ordinary undercard, likely still propping up the "dream matches" and freak show fights of the main event picture. Because the Brock Lesnars and Tyson Furys of the world still got out on time, and can continue making six or seven figures for five minutes' work next time around. 

3 minutes ago, David said:

I don't. Regardless of it being WWE staff, an NBA basketball team, someone from Game of Thrones or whatever, them being delayed due to mechanical issues with their aircraft would still be pretty much a non-story. It would be mentioned in passing, more likely in the case of the NBA example due to it potentially fucking with scheduling and suchlike, but it's not headline news at all.

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/manchester-city-pre-season-tour-china-flight-delay-plane-a9005056.html - the Independent reporting on flight delays affecting Man City's schedule in July.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/cricket/south-africa-in-india/flight-delay-frustrates-faf-du-plessis-ahead-of-test-series-against-india/articleshow/71229971.cms - Times of India reporting on flight delays meaning Faf du Plessis was late arriving ahead of the Test series last month; reported in all major Indian papers.

https://www.nbcsports.com/washington/nationals/nationals-face-eight-hour-plane-delay-trip-milwaukee - NBC Sports reporting on the Nationals being delayed for eight hours in March.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/james-van-der-beek-kept-195300223.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAI8dh-7S0z38Gb-vSCdxUb--KvvCgaYeumKOx9q-ySZeP8lzUk3ggBbbF39sc8_LiR8Zr4mWaJz9la--ux5CTpIOdmdnd2YF9bTwqaLdPzKthANi5BQecPs07XwxOmdZ9xZAsGA7QxghcFWk969ZiQ0zG1KDPtTD1F9RZFR2fago - Yahoo! Entertainment reporting on James Van Der Beek's flight being delayed, with no real underlying story whatsoever, just as a fluff piece.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7187561/David-Furnish-left-RAGING-details-delays-Air-Canada-flight-fans-turn-rude-star.html - The Daily Mail reporting on David Furnish's flight delays.

Those are just recent examples that came up on the first page when searching '"Flight Delay" "Sport"' and '"Flight Delay" "Actors"'. I'm sure if I followed international sports a little closer, I could think up others.

I don't want to labour this point any more than I already have, but even "the majority of WWE's crew were delayed in Saudi Arabia when they had a live TV show to film in a matter of hours" is a story. That's worth a clickbait sidebar article if nothing else - I'm not suggesting this was going to be on the front page of the Telegraph - but we've got nothing. That's because there's no mainstream interest in wrestling stories, not necessarily because it's a non-story.

I'm not a conspiracy guy. I think Al Qaeda terrorists did 9/11, Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, Jeffrey Epstein probably committed suicide, and only a few world leaders are shapeshifting lizard people. But the fact remains that there's an official statement, a statement regarding one out of at least two flights affected (so, even if we take the official account at face value, only one of the two delayed flights is actually accounted for by an airline), and then there's accounts from people affected which, reportedly, directly contradict the party line. If Meltzer's to be believed, people who work for WWE have consistently given a version of events that differs from that given by WWE - this is backed up by Hugo Savinovich and others, and given weight by the delay in broadcasting the show, and by question marks around WWE's earnings from the Middle East not matching up to what was expected. There's plenty of reason to think that it's something worth looking at with more detail.

Quote

I work with Forbes contributors. They are very much vetted and paid. To write for Forbes as a contributor takes a shitload of credibility in most cases, and is considered something of a holy grail among freelance writers and journalists. There are well-known CEO's and tech industry leaders who write regularly for Forbes, and they're all paid.

I've looked into this, and admit I'm behind the times - it used to be the case that Forbes contributors was a bit of a shitheap, but they seem to have tidied up their act in the meantime. Their wrestling coverage is still pretty dogshit, though, and I'd be hard pressed to consider a contributor to Forbes' wrestling section "mainstream news".

The fact is, mainstream journalism doesn't touch pro-wrestling - that's true in North America as everywhere else. WWE can get a PR fluff piece on a chat show, but you're not going to get people looking into their business practices or behind the scenes goings on. If it did, for example, any number of news sources could have picked up the Jordan Myles T-shirt controversy for easy clicks as easily a bit of Woke performative outrage or a bit of "political correctness gone mad" huffing and puffing depending on their demographic, but they didn't, because no one looks closely at wrestling. No one gives a shit. 

5 minutes ago, The King Of Swing said:

If it does turn out to be nothing though then surely Meltzer has completely flushed what actual credibility he has? This goes well beyond a "plans change" goof.

Meltzer's line is that everyone he's spoken to that's involved with WWE has told him a consistent version of events that differs from what WWE are saying officially. 

I'm not sure we'll find out the truth any time soon, but this is going to be massive shoot interview fodder in the years to come.

23 minutes ago, The King Of Swing said:

To be fair any random can make any claim they want on Reddit. Even though that does seem somewhat believable.

Hence my pinch of salt caveat - I wouldn't put too much stock in it, and it's certainly not an explanation of what happened here, but it's a talking point if there's a precedent for Saudi Arabia doing business in this manner. 

Yes, there's anger that Trump is backing Saudi Arabia, but so much of that is based on Trump's "Oops, I said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet" approach to politics. The US has always mollycoddled Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia has always got away with murder, both literally and figuratively, for as long as the western powers have kept them propped up and turned a blind eye to insane levels of corruption.

I don't think it's a non-story at all. Even if the story were just mechanical issues and we took it all at face value, if this were something higher on the cultural pecking order than wrestling, it would be headline news. I 100% believe that. The fact that it hasn't troubled the headlines at all, even on that level, is because it's Just Wrestling. That there's no impetus for anyone to look further into it despite plenty of reasons to question the legitimacy of the official account is absolutely because it's Just Wrestling. It's not about espionage and brown envelopes, it's about there being in excess of 200 WWE employees and "independent contractors" and their families that any journalist could speak to about this. There's no shortage of first-hand accounts potentially out there. From Meltzer's reporting, people who spoke to him believed there was something untoward going on. That's not to say there was something, but people directly involved certainly believed there was.

Out of interest, I searched the "News" section of Google to see who has picked up this story. The search term I used was "WWE Saudi Arabia". There was, as you say, an article from Forbes - but from a "Forbes contributor", which is effectively unvetted, unpaid, bloggers used to drive SEO numbers, not actual Forbes writers. Next we have Bleacher Report, in their "WWE" section. Every other story is from dedicated wrestling "news" websites, gossip sites and news aggregators. With the exception of this, from The Sun's sports page - https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/10275665/wrestlers-wwe-statement-saudi-arabia-flight-delays-smackdown/. Again, though, this is really just the same information any of us could have garnered from Tweets.

So that's basically zero coverage from any mainstream news source, outside of The Sun's website (I don't know if it made the paper). You might believe that's because it's a "non-story", and you might be right, but I think it's far more likely that no one's touched it because it's just a wrestling story. Only people already paying attention to wrestling have encountered it.

In the interest of balance, AJ Styles more or less confirmed the official account on a live stream;

Quote

• There was an unspecified issue with the plane and they were originally not allowed to board. Something with paperwork.

• They had called for a refueling service, but the servicemen, they were told, had gone home for the evening.

• By the time this was sorted out, the pilots were no longer cleared to fly because their shift had timed out. They were then asked to find a hotel and wait for the next flight.

• There were no guns or anything crazy like a hostage situation. His wife called worried about the rumors.

• Once the finally got on the (second) flight home, one of the pilots sat with them in the cabin and explained there was some kind of service issue.

• He’s not sure what happened with Vince and the Royal Prince, and it’s not his job to speculate.

• Just wants to go to work and do the best job he can, and mentions there are a lot of good people at WWE, and are all on the same team.

• Missed his son’s wrestling match and was very angry about that, but is just happy to be home. Here is the link:

https://mixer.com/STYLESCLASH

The conspiracy-minded among us may wish to point out that this account came out after Meltzer had Tweeted about WWE actively trying to encourage wrestlers to record videos confirming that it was a mechanical issue, which is clearly not suspicious at all, and couldn't possibly have led to AJ Styles' "I just want to do my best, and we're all a happy family" tone here.

I would also add that, particularly with the comments of the Reddit post on how Saudi Arabia does business in mind, that AJ Styles and others were told there were issues with paperwork doesn't necessarily mean there were issues with paperwork, if you get my drift. 

I get your point, but they're fluff pieces. Rick is probably closer to the truth in that they're news broadcasts picking up a press release, and that's very different to actual journalism. There's no one doing deep dives into the machinations behind wrestling, just repeating the stuff they're given to fill five minutes of TV time. There's no one actually looking into this kind of thing.

Reddit, so pinch of salt, but here's something that somewhat rings true;

There is absolutely no way they're going to do a TV storyline where the catalyst is that they printed a racist T-shirt. Especially not in NXT, where the brand is still a babyface entity in the way WWE isn't. 

Maybe Myles is trying to work his own angle out of this, but there is no way this is a WWE angle.

I still think wrestling is completely off the radar for most people who would be in the position to make that argument, though.

Any time any major news source has made any reference to Trump's connections to WWE, it's never been more than "lol, he did the fake fighting", and wrestling as a byword for low culture. If you wanted to do a deep dive into Trump's connections to the McMahons, there's likely far juicier stuff to find in there - most commenting on Trump's work with WWE barely even referenced that Linda got a cabinet position, let alone that, in spite of how much time he spends on Twitter, Trump only actually follows 47 people - once you remove his businesses, members of his family, members of his cabinet, and FOX News personalities, you're left with - The Drudge Report (right wing news aggregator), Diamond and Silk (right wing pro-Trump bloggers/podcasters), Mark Burnett (producer of The Apprentice), Geraldo Rivera, Gary Player, Piers Morgan and Vince McMahon.
So seven accounts, only four or five of whom aren't specifically presenting themselves as news sources, one of them being Vince. The timing of Vince relaunching the XFL, off the back of Donald Trump's attacks on the NFL, are extremely suspicious, as are Vince's political donations and machinations over the years.
Linda is the chair of America First Action, a significant SuperPAC that spends tens of millions attacking Democrat candidates, and worked at the behest of Giuliani to dig up dirt on Trump's political opponents around the Ukraine deal. 

That's all surface level stuff - but knowing the relationship between Vince and Trump goes back decades, and knowing that they've both been tied up with all manner of shady schemes, any legitimate journalist worth their salt would have a field day digging into it all. But, even with the President of the United States involved, it's Just Wrestling, so no political editor is going to put up the cash for that story. 

Even as a Trump attack piece, this is Just Wrestling. I know people who, when told that the Ultimate Warrior had died within days of appearing at Wrestlemania, replied, "yeah, it's all scripted, isn't it". If this so much as troubled the headlines, you'd get comments saying, "it's all fake, who cares?". There's no interest. But, again, imagine that 150+ people tied to any other multi-million dollar, televised, entertainment franchise were in this position - any sports team, any TV crew, any movie stars, it would be headline news anywhere. Especially if the person managing it all was a documented close personal friend of Donald Trump! But it's Just Wrestling. Even if the story were just as simple as "delay for 18+ hours due to mechanical issues, stranded in Saudi Arabia", if it were the cast of Game of Thrones or whatever people watch these days, it would make headlines even without any suggestion of wrongdoing. But it won't, because it's Just Wrestling. So we're left with Meltzer being the only person talking about it, and being woefully ill-equipped to do so.

I don't watch enough NXT to be frustrated by Mauro, so still tend to find his enthusiasm outweighs the annoying soundbites.

Even with the soundbites, they feel genuinely him - you get the impression he's shown up with a notebook full of lines he wants to fit in, but they're at least his lines, and that's a step above Michael Cole clearly echoing lines fed to him through his earpiece. And I say that as someone who thinks Michael Cole is low-key one of the best announcers they've ever had.

Nigel can be a lot worse than Mauro when it comes to one-liners and catchphrases, as most of his don't even make any sense. 

I just don't think anything he's doing is in line with how WWE book, or have ever booked, and I've seen absolutely nothing to suggest it's a work.

Maybe he is committing career suicide - this is coming not long after Myles took a leave of absence for undisclosed reasons for some two months, and off the back of multiple stories of NXT morale being low and talent not getting promised perks and pay increases. Maybe the shirt was the straw that broke the camel's back and he wants out.

The dullest of answers, but the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle.

I said earlier that I felt it was technical issues, but technical issues wouldn't have resulted in wrestlers being told they had to return to their hotel and not being allowed to leave. I would assume that wrestlers and crew used to travelling on WWE's insane schedule, some of them having wrestled for decades, would have at least an idea of what technical issues look like, and what standard procedure is in that instance.

That said, one of the airlines involved (Air Atlas) did issue a statement about the initial flight, that backs up the technical issues story, so Occam's Razor explanation would suggest that's what happened. 

It's everything after that which becomes murky. Talent not permitted to leave the hotel. WWE's statement that WWE superstars "chartered their own flight", which clearly wasn't the case, judging from social media posts by multiple members of WWE talent and crew.

Hugo Savinovich said that Vince got into an altercation with the Saudis over money, and delayed the broadcast of Crown Jewel in Saudi Arabia. I can't see any reason for Hugo to bullshit people, and he's well-connected, though apparently yesterday Hugo was told by someone in WWE that this was "just hearsay". In any event - the show did air late in Saudi Arabia, and there have been question marks around WWE's last quarterly earnings report in relation to Saudi money.

I don't think seasoned travelers are posting things like "never again", asking for fans' prayers, or posting passive aggressive comments like Luke Harper (and those commenting on his IG post) have been, for a simple mechanical issue. These are people who travel constantly, and have likely put up with every kind of travel complaint imaginable - I fly short haul pretty often, though nothing like a WWE schedule, and have put up with delays, cancellations, diversions and everything else, so can only assume that people travelling far more often than me have seen their fair share. It's going to take more than a mechanical fault and a delayed flight to garner the kind of reactions we're seeing.

Everything adds up to it being a much fishier story than the WWE version of events. I don't think it's anything as dramatic as a hostage situation, but it feels like a quid pro quo situation where someone wasn't getting enough quid for their quo. Obstruction, or being willfully unhelpful, rather than actively holding people against their will. Passive rather than active.

I also wouldn't read too much into Meltzer touching it and mainstream media not - wrestling is alien to the majority of journalists, and even stories with potentially huge ramifications won't get picked up. Imagine if this scenario were taking place with, for example, the Man City squad, or the England cricket team, or the cast of the next Bond movie. Even at the point we're at where it's nothing but speculation and gossip, it would have been making headlines - the reason it's not is because it's wrestling, not because there's no story.

Is there any precedent for WWE doing a work, based around a lower midcarder guy's merchandise, with only one wrestler actually involved, when that wrestler hasn't even been on TV for the better part of three months? 

Just now, Devon Malcolm said:

It's entirely possible, Italian horror films and the naming of them has always been a fascinatingly confusing subject. Even George Romero's zombie films used to get roped into the confusion.

Oh God, yeah. 

If I remember correctly, it's because Dawn Of The Dead was released in Italy as "Zombi", then Lucio Fulci (who, along with Bruno Mattei, pretty much created a cottage industry of Italian faux-sequels) retitled an unrelated zombie move as "Zombi 2", to cash in on Romero's movie. To confuse things more, that movie was released as "Zombie" in the US, but Zombi 3 was Zombie 3 in the US. Various American distributors then packaged entirely unrelated international movies as "Zombie" sequels, so it becomes completely impossible to follow pretty quickly. I think there's an edition of Night Of The Living Dead out there somewhere called "Zombi 0".

I can't remember the specific set of circumstances that led to this being the norm, but it basically comes down to lax copyright laws in Italy in the '70s and '80s, and a slow release time for US films to make it the Italian market, so unscrupulous directors would try and capitalise on big names. Bruno Mattei even made a film called Terminator 2 in 1989, which is actually an Alien rip-off, confusingly...and, just to muddle things more, it was also released as Alien 2, and Contaminator.

Moving away from horror, but I actually unironically love a specific sub-set of these Italian knock-offs that just mash up Mad Max, The Warriors and Escape From New York. There's a ton of them, and all wonderful.

Ah, you're right - I think both may have had the "On Earth" tagline at some point? I was sure I'd seen Contamination with the Alien 2 title, but I've obviously just conflated the two. 

Contamination has music by Goblin, while Alien 2 has music by Oliver Onions, so they're both hitting all the right notes for bonkers derivative Italian cinema, anyway.

15 hours ago, King of Hamptons said:

 

Last night I watched 

Contamination.. A Italian scifi horror film of a alien cyclops creature that uses human agents to place eggs all over Earth. The eggs release a gelatinous goo that causes people to explode when they come into physical contact with the substance its badly dubbed but a lot of fun. Bought it in the Arrow Video sale for a fiver. 

It was on the Video Nastie list in the 80s.. For its exploding body's in slow motion.. Its pretty tame compared to today's standards. 

Worth a watch though! 

I have a soft spot for this one, as mad as it is. Like a lot of Italian horror of the period, the human characters are almost uniformly unlikeable, and dripping with misogyny. 

It was released in some markets as Alien: Contamination, and I'm pretty sure at one point in some places as Alien 2, as was the style of Italian knock-off cash-ins at the time. It was basically Italian filmmakers trying to make what they guessed the sequel to Alien might look like (Aliens arrive on Earth), but without either the budget or the license.

9 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

You watch AEW!

Yes, and it's my biggest criticism of their style, and of modern wrestling in general - the rot set in with WWE long before AEW ever came about, so anything that deviates from that sense of what constitutes an "epic" in a post-Undertaker vs. Triple H self-indulgent finisher-fest world is fine with me. Variety is good.

They have most of the women's division available, plus Bryan, Owens and Zayn, Shane McMahon, and whoever they've managed to get out of Saudi Arabia already. They'll have been calling in favours to get some of the NXT roster flown in too, I'd have thought. I wonder if they've had The Undertaker on the phone.

You always hear stories about some of the old-timers in the back bringing their gear to every show, just in case a significant part of the roster are delayed and they need someone to fill in. I doubt it'll come to that, but I've always wondered how WWE would actually approach that - will we get a Jeff Jarrett match out of it?!

Thinking about Brock/Cain and the finish for Fury/Strowman - I wonder how much of the way Brock/Cain was booked is because the Saudis couldn't get UFC, and so wanted something that resembled UFC enough to fill that gap. Maybe it was presented locally as if it was a legit rematch.

With the Fury/Strowman finish - I kind of like that WWE realise that they're running these shows to an audience who haven't been jaded by 30+ years of TV wrestling, so can get away with finishes that wouldn't get over elsewhere. If the audience haven't learned that a count out or a DQ is a "lesser" finish than a pinfall or submission, then it casts that result in a different light.

It didn't go twenty minutes and feature fifteen finishers, so I'm happy with it.

The thing is, it's not really on us to bridge the gap. It's all well and good to say "let's try and find compromise, it's the media that's made them racist", but the media isn't going anywhere, and they're not getting any less racist.

Jonathan Swift said that you can't reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned in to - racism is irrational, and stupid, and trying to argue against it rationally obviously doesn't work, or else it wouldn't exist. I've lost count of how many times I've pointed out that some bit of racist rhetoric or cooked up Islamophobic story isn't true, provided evidence, and got a response that's basically, "yeah, but it feels true". It's the political equivalent of believing an urban legend because it definitely happened to a mate of a mate of a mate.

Now, if I was doorstepping, or campaigning? Yeah, it absolutely falls to me to try and reason with these people. I've done it before, when someone has launched into an anti-immigrant rant on the doorstep, I've tried to get them to a point of identifying their actual problems - it's rare that they're going to flat out say, "I don't like foreigns" (though some will), so you'll get stuff about benefits, about using our health service, taking our jobs, taking up homes, and so on, at which point you say, "okay, so the issue is with resources", and find a different angle from which to discuss the problem.

But if I'm just talking personally, posting on a message board, or otherwise not in a position to try and win people over? Yeah, I'll probably tell the racists to fuck off. Yes, it can be argued that they arrived at their bigoted opinions through the influence of the media, or maybe through family, or their social circle, or whatever, but in the moment, I couldn't really give a toss about that. When members of my family are in tears because they've been racially abused, my first instinct is rarely to say, "have you considered talking to the racists and finding a middle ground?" or "have you tried suggesting that they read the Guardian?". 

Seen some clips of Strowman/Fury, with Fury looking a bit naff, and the entire Cain Velasquez vs. Brock Lesnar match.

I don't think there's anyone in American wrestling better at fitting a story into a short sprint of a match than Lesnar. It's not how I'd have booked it, but it's probably, in spite of his loss, the most protected Cain Velasquez could have looked. If the title hadn't been on the line, I'd have had him go over in a match of that length, and had Brock win the rematch, but for whatever reason they felt the need to involve the belt.

It also illustrates what I've long said about Brock - people criticise him for having a "formula", but he's the least formulaic guy in WWE, and genuinely the least predictable. No one else is having mad worked shoot matches, jobbing to Goldberg in seconds in the main event of a pay-per-view, having weapon-filled plunder-fests, plus the kind of matches he had with Bryan, AJ or Balor. You genuinely never quite know what you're getting with him, and that's why he feels so special - it's not just that he's booked stronger, or booked to be more important, or more dominant, he's the only person on the roster who's booked like a real human being, and a real fighter; sometimes he'll lose because of his hubris, but he'll learn from his mistakes, and he'll adapt for his opponent, change up his gameplan based on what didn't work last time, and everything else you don't get from the usual WWE "every match exists in a vacuum" house style.

Now, what I was expecting was that we'd get something akin to how the match went, Brock wouldn't be able to beat Cain that easily, and he would bust out a couple of lucha spots to catch Lesnar off-guard - I figured the involvement of Rey Mysterio was as a precursor to Velasquez doing some of that stuff. So I'm hoping that's how things go with the rematch instead.

The entire presentation needs to change drastically, and in such a way that we no longer have the Vince vs. The World dichotomy. So that we're no longer looking at every booking decision and analysing it to figure out whether it was down to appease the shareholders, the advertisers, the Saudis, or Vince, and instead following the story and spending this time talking about where it might be going next. So that we're no longer looking at WWE as a company in constant conflict with its own fanbase.

I don't know how they even begin to do that, without a serious, long-term period of restructuring the fundamentals of how WWE presents wrestling, and there's no appetite for that within the company or without, as far as I can tell.

Kenny did an Undertale entrance in NJPW too, and is apparently matey with one of the developers. I've seen a few people raving about it on Twitter, and know a few people - some wrestlers - who absolutely loved it and are obsessed with the game. All people younger than me, so probably more in line with AEW's key demographic.

Personally, I know Undertale is a video game. That's literally the extent of my knowledge. So I wouldn't have known that's what he was doing, what the costume was, maybe would have guessed that the intro was just generic JRPG-influenced fluff, rather than a direct call-out to that game in particular. 

Mostly, I just feel like Kenny is a victim of the "let the talent tell their own stories" approach. He's trying to tell this sweeping narrative about a wrestler losing momentum, and having to go outside his comfort zone and unlock some new thing inside of him to come out on top, and being pushed to extreme violence by his opponent - but he doesn't have the acting chops to pull it off, the rest of the company barely seems to be following the story along with him, and it's a story that should be stretched out over months once the character is already established, not over a matter of weeks in a brand new company. Like you said, I don't know who this Kenny Omega is, other than a nerd who we're told is the best in the world, but who keeps losing when it counts.

Something I found interesting in how Omega has been presented was in his match with PAC, and to a lesser extent in previous matches, particularly against Jericho; the fundamental truth of his wrestling style was being treated as a negative. While The One-Winged Angel is extremely well protected, he rarely gets to the point of being able to hit in, because it relies on an elaborate sequence of set-ups to get there, and he keeps getting cut off. With a focused announce team, that's actually an interesting story, and something that fits the "sports-based presentation" angle - he has to change up his gameplan to be able to win more in AEW. But that only works if he actually changes.
Similarly, the feud with Moxley has been built around how Omega needs to "get serious" - but even in his choice of weapons, he's still joking around. And even when he's in big brawls with Moxley, he still takes a break to play a drum solo, to pose, to joke around - so he isn't getting serious at all, he's still the same guy.

4 minutes ago, Supremo said:

 him and Becky had anti-chemistry together.

This is a huge part of it for me. If it weren't for the fact they were booking him to go over Lesnar, I'd say there was a conscious attempt to emasculate Seth since he and Becky went public - and I'm still not entirely convinced this wasn't the case.

If I were to think of WWE as playing 4D Chess in this instance, rather than just winging it, I'd say that WWE don't want Becky Lynch to be seen as being in a relationship, either because it undermines her as a independent woman for female fans living vicariously through her, because it undermines her being seen as "available" to male fans, or because Vince is a lunatic with weird views on women and doesn't think that Seth and Becky being a couple is "believable", a la Rusev and Lana, or Vince thinks Seth is already inherently emasculated by dating a woman more over than he is. He thinks Seth is the Marc Mero to Becky's Sable.

So Seth has been booked to look like a pathetic loser, because on some level Vince already thinks that what he is. Because all of this terrible babyface booking is post-Wrestlemania, post-Seth and Becky being an item. Pre-Wrestlemania, he was winning the Rumble, beating Lesnar, and knocking about with The Shield, post-Wrestlemania, he became Becky Lynch's second banana, dropped the belt right back to Brock, dropped the tag belts to a first-time team of midcarders, all the nonsense with The Fiend, and so on.

I honestly wonder if they're consciously allowing him to crash and burn, in time for Roman Reigns to step back up to the plate in Wrestlemania season and be welcomed with open arms now he's not the primary object of the fans' disapproval.

There's a broader issue of top babyfaces in general, though, as a result of 20 years of booking the WWE itself as a heel company, exacerbated by CM Punk and Daniel Bryan's main event runs being defined by not being WWE's idea of what a top guy looks like, and Bryan's run in particular teaching the audience that if you don't like something, and make enough noise about it, WWE will change their plans, meaning that any top babyface is automatically, paradoxically positioned as a heel to a significant portion of the fanbase, because they're the "Corporate Champion" by default.

It would all have been worth it if that Rowan lookalike from a couple of months back was driving the forklift.

Is it "traditional Labour voters" that doubt Corbyn, or is that just a cooked up narrative - genuine question?

The most recent poll I remember seeing of Labour members, saw a decline in confidence since the last election, though was still mostly positive. I don't think I've ever really seen anything broken down by demographic, though.

Extremely anecdotally, but much of what I've seen from family and friends is that the older Labour members who had been turned off by Blair and New Labour have gravitated back to the party under Corbyn, because they see him as a return to the Labour values of their youth. I agree with David that reverting to the New Labour playbook would only serve to further alienate the "heartlands" where received wisdom is they've turned their back on Labour because they felt neglected by them.

Jeremy Corbyn is at his best as a campaign politician, and I feel Boris Johnson may well be at his weakest as a campaign politician on a national scale, so it's going to be interesting to say the least.