Pinc

Cena might be my favourite wrestler ever but TV ratings declined consistently throughout his time on top, no?

Anyway. Cody isn’t being booed so I don’t think Cena is the right comparator. He’s not moving ratings on Monday the way Sami has been on Fridays. By the available evidence Sami is the needle mover of the two.

13 minutes ago, gmoney said:

No way. Sami is Mick Foley to Cody's Steve Austin. And they don't hotshot the belt as much as they did then, so he didn't get a turn. YET. There's no reason if Sami's a good a performer as we think he is he can't get people as invested again down the line. 

That’s how I’m left feeling really. Like that Raw in January ‘99 ended with Rock winning anyway after Austin’s run-in. If you’re alright with that then sound.

3 minutes ago, d-d-d-dAz said:

The one thing that this conversation seems to ignore is that Cody has been over, too. This idea of resentment or heat building hasn’t come to fruition, yet. I think people - in the main - are enjoying the multi-faceted story.

Och aye and they deserve credit for that. I’m not saying this means Cody will be booed or anything. Just that his win will definitely do less for both business and fan goodwill than a Sami win would have here.

4 minutes ago, d-d-d-dAz said:

I think there is a real question about whether Sami is forever over, or if he’s only this over in the context of this storyline.

I don’t know if Cody is going to be the guy, it certainly seems like he is going to be, but again he only makes sense as a pick if they’re going to run with him as one of the main faces of the company moving forward.

Sami's best chance at being forever over was by winning here. Cody will now win a match everyone expects him to win that will be remembered as a comedown from the month before.

There was no way out of this situation with both Sami and Cody getting their optimal outcomes, but Cody's chance at that had already gone because of Sami catching fire at an inconvenient time. That was out of their control, but the optimal Sami outcome was still in play. It's gone now though. By their choice.

27 minutes ago, d-d-d-dAz said:

The thing is, I think we’re supposed to feel disappointed. We’ve just spent so long with badly booked wrestling, not-that-evil heels and cold babyfaces, that we’ve got used to feeling numb so this new feeling of anger and disappointment is weird.

But if wrestling is functioning, we should get annoyed when Drew doesn’t win in the UK or furious when Sami doesn’t win in Montreal. 

Like @Supremosaid though, it should just intensify our desire to see the big evil nasty beaten eventually. Instead, sometimes, wrestling fans just go ‘no, I haven’t been worked, this is just bad and I am now not going to engage with the process at all, you’re all dumb and I’m right.’

It’s a shame, because if they just switched the title every time they do get an over babyface, nothing would ever get this hot.

I agree with all of this in general. I was in Cardiff for Clash and obviously would've popped for a title change, but I didn't think it was the right call ultimately.

Sami is a different case though. Longer build, more meaningful, and their metrics are all trending up for the first time in about 20 years. Its much closer to Punk-in-Chicago than Drew-in-Cardiff. And that one big Punk win turned him into a genuine drawing card to the point that other wrestling companies were still milking it ten years on (not to mention UFC using it to draw a big house for Punk's second fight there). They could've added Sami-in-Montreal to that Piper-in-Portland list and they chose not to.

If Sami had won, this thread would not be full of people saying they should have stayed the course with Roman.

That finish was a horrendous bottlejob and anyone defending it is a bootlicker.

I think the only way to make both Sami and Cody at Mania is to have Cody turn heel on Sami, one way or another. Otherwise, I think they do have to trade one off against the other to some extent. Two title defences over Mania weekend telegraphs the result and robs the Night 2 winner of about two-thirds of their heat.

If Roman is taking a break after Mania anyway, I think its actually a pretty easy decision. Sami is your new top baby and Cody your new top heel. Roman can come back as either when he's ready.

Sami wins in Montreal and Cody turns heel by cheating to beat him at Mania. Roman faces Jey.

If I didn't know better I'd think they were trying to turn the crowd against Cody with that Roman promo. "I'd rather talk about Cody Rhodes, someone who actually deserves my attention" (paraphrase). It did elicit a few boos as well. Not a good sign.

Oh that Becky Lynch/Seth Rollins Applebees promo. Can’t believe that was allowed to air.

I haven't been watching WWE weekly since AEW started and this is the first time I've thought about coming back. Not because I thought the Sami angle was great (I actually thought it was overlong and made Sami look like a tit for not stepping in sooner), but because the people who do watch every week clearly got a lot more out of it than I did.

Given that they probably need to keep Sami away from Cody's title shot lest they turn the latter into Batista '14... is there anything to be said for Solo & The Usos vs Sami, KO and Steve Austin for Mania Night 1?

Have Austin guest host a SmackDown and do a begrudging respect angle with KO to plant the seed. Elimination Chamber is about to go off the air with The Bloodline beating down Sami and KO again, and then the glass smashes? Yes please.

18 minutes ago, DavidB6937 said:

They should've catered to him better though. He was always seen as a major star way before Punk. Phil didn't make MJF.

They should've tried to continue the whole Sympathy for the Devil/holding Tony to ransom/worked shoot thing, so that all the build from last year still felt like it meant something. Rather than memory holing a year's worth of character development, presumably because they didn't want to evoke any memory of Punk while that whole situation was still legally dicey.

As far as his current character goes, MJF might as well have been off TV for the last year and returned the week after All Out to challenge Moxley. Now that I think about it, it reminds me of how the WWF fucked Austin's character once the InVasion ended in 2001. Having him inexplicably come out as a babyface to help Flair against Vince and Angle and just... never mention his heel run ever again (in canon). I always maintain that fucked Austin's post-2001 character worse than the actual heel turn at Mania X7, ill-advised though that proved to be. I really hope MJF's enforced reset doesn't hamper him the same way. He really should be among the top guys of his generation.

MJF is floundering a bit, but its largely because they spent a year getting their ducks in a row for MJF to take the title off Punk in a generational torch passing thing that played off both their characters and mutual history. And then Punk fucked everything up.

So now there's no continuity between MJF as champ and all the great character development he did last year. In stead he beat a guy he had very little history/chemistry with after a short build and he's trying (but so far failing) to make the most of it.

Seth Rollins is laughably miscast as charismatic wrestler Seth Rollins with the laugh and the coloured garb. Among the most actorly acts of any kind I’ve ever seen. Like Iain Lee unaccountably forced to do Lionel Blair’s gimmick against his will. He’s not characterful enough to be anything more than a white meat babyface in my eyes. And the cumulative decade-or-so of pushes as anything else has left him with a really weird legacy.

His original World Champion run as an apparently conniving heel was a misstep as well. That comeback promo where everyone was made up they’d finally get to just cheer the slightly awkward/boring guy with the pleasingly flashy offence, only for him to start dropping heel lines halfway through was illustrative. Hard to think of a single promo chilling a character’s momentum to such an extent. Whatever the opposite of a pipebomb is.

I continue to enjoy MJF's cheap heat and don't really get the widespread objections to his promo. It'd be grating if it was all over the shows, but when its just one performer who always takes the low road it works.

He's very like Todd off Coronation Street. Even when they say they loved CM Punk as a kid/have really got Sean's best interests at heart, the real MJF/Todd always surfaces in the end.

The name on the contract does say Khan...

I've been dipping in and out of AEW a bit the last 6 weeks or so but can someone explain where the fuck Eddie Kingston is these days?

I know he had the real-life fall out with Guevara. Is he still being punished for that?

5 hours ago, thevestofdeanambrose said:

Do you think we are going to stick or will Southgate twist with a 5?

I think he'll definitely go to the 5-2-3 thing we played against Germany and Italy in the Euros. I think Southgate might do something characteristically wacky with Bellingham too. Either dropping him or pushing him into the front 3 to accommodate Rice/Hendo in the centre.

8 hours ago, LaGoosh said:

Why was Danielson dressed like a 12 year old in that segment? On his knees begging Mox...he looked like a right twat.

The whole segment was a misstep for me. Loose cannon Moxley pausing to listen to a soliloquy on his way to confront the fella who just cost him a world title? Not sure why they'd want to neuter him like that.

If Regal can't take a bump, still no reason why he couldn't give Danielson a Paradigm Shift while Regal made his escape. BCC's whole thing is that they sometimes scrap with eachother, so it wouldn't even have to mean sustained beef between Moxley and Danielson.

Danhausen is just a facepainted version of Keith Allen in Naughty Christmas. They both even claim to be nice.

This same thing just happened to me. Was briefly logged in to the accounts of two other posters, very strange. Needs sorting quickly.

Jungle Boy is fine as a white meat face but doubt he will ever be interesting enough to carry proper main event feuds. 

Punk needs to have a heel run somewhere where he embraces the toxic-dickhead-no-one-likes character. Otherwise that'll be his real life gimmick from hereon.

4 hours ago, Kamaras-Tash said:

I get the feeling Punk has gone into AEW thinking he's gonna be their Undertaker locker room leader type and they've just gone nah you're alright mate which is why he was crying about people not taking his advice etc

Aye I reckon its a bit of this, and also that the Chicago crowd that night was as split as it had ever been for a Punk match. Including that moment where a fan in the front row flipped him off.

I reckon he’s seen that and thought ‘THIS IS ALL COZ OF HANGMANS PROMO THAT NO ONE NOTICED TIL I POINTED IT OUT :@‘ and marched backstage with a titty lip. Whereas it was actually because the build to the Moxley match had been weird with the hasty squash/rematch thing, and he got out promoed in Chicago by Ace Steel earlier in the week. Like Eminem murdering Jay-Z on his own shit.

It would be really nice if they could get to a point where MJF somehow turns face as he wins the belt. And then Cult of Personality goes off.

26 minutes ago, DavidB6937 said:

I get that maybe you don't like him or whatever but I find this such a weird take. Like the whole fucking show is a bunch of actors and people playing parts. It's a TV show. Of course he's not really a supernatural psychopath.

We must enjoy fiction differently mate, which is fine like. There's no explanation - in the canon of the show - for why the camera crew knew where all the Wyatt cosplayers dotted around the crowd would appear, right on cue. And that bothers me. I'm not choosing to find it bothersome, its an automatic response while watching the show. Makes it less believable, less immersive.

All it takes is a bit of forethought, have the characters start appearing in the crowd but the camera only catches them incidentally at first. Have Bray walk out of something (anything!) other than a backlit door with a smoke machine behind it. You can hit all the same character beats while giving my subconscious mind fewer reasons to ask questions about what I'm seeing. I'm not asking for it to be hyper-realistic at all, just internally coherent.