Statto

It feels like it's actually been quite a few years since "Raw after Mania" had been the wild ride of debuts, returns & happenings it once was. Not since before covid, maybe longer. Suspect it'll be different tonight.

This is a long running debate between a mate & I. I'm Team Cathy, he's Team Jackie. It's our own pro wrestling tribalism. I'm right.

I don't really have much to add about a fantastic night two that hasn't already been said, except that AJ Styles is so massive right now it's like Zac Efron is playing TNA AJ Styles in a movie. Edit: genuine edit to reply to Bacon without double posting - there is a 2hour kick-off show for Mania, but they no longer put any matches on it (last time they did was the empty arena covid one). I usually sit through them out of a sense of duty and they used to be right chores of JBL, Lawler & Pete Rosenberg prattling endlessly, but this year's were actually rather good. Lots of nice pre-tape sit down interviews etc, and a fun panel in Cole, Mcafee, Punk & Big E.

I've been a big proponent of them sticking with 2 nights after covid as the first two years presented a pair of easily digestible 3hr shows on consecutive days (excusing the lightning delay). But now here we are with a 4.5hr night one. It was a decent but not spectacular opening night, IMO. Zayn vs Gunther (including entrances, more on that in a moment) was best thing of the night by a country mile. Uso vs Uso was a massive letdown as I've loved those boys for years. The main event was pretty good for what it was but 60 minutes from Cody's entrance to the fade out was not what I needed in my 22nd hour of being awake. That's on me I guess. Everything else I felt was 'fine'. Nothing offensive but nothing I'll remember too much. Entrances - when someone made that lovely best entrances thread a month or so ago I said I was pretty sure I liked wrestling entrances more than I like wrestling matches, and there were some decent ones last night. Sami's was the best though for the relative normality of it all. Given that entrances tend to be designed to make people look like superheroes, Sami's stood out through showing the humanity of the father & husband with his family, the nervous athlete getting the pep talk from his (recent) coach, & the final pump up from his best mate. All lovely "sports" stuff. On that front, I'm really starting to see the influence of Lee Fitting (the bloke who took over from Kevin Dunne, formerly of ESPN) on some of this stuff. In particular the pre-show was even more heavily influenced by College Gameday than ever before with the pre-tape sitdowns, reporters in different locales across the stadium etc. There's always been elements of it but the way they're doing it now is basically carbon copy (and it's much better for it). Even got actual Tom Rinaldi in! Finally, me & a mate have a WrestleMania tradition (going back minimum 15 years) of texting each other our match predictions for the night. For the first time ever I was 100% correct on all 8 outcomes last night (counting the ladder match as 2 results). Edit: Oh yeah, Samantha Irvin is fucking awful, despite what Michael Cole wants to tell you.

I do enjoy things like that where the people very likely have no idea. I follow the Twitter accounts of several bars in Tuscaloosa, Alabama & about a decade ago one of them would routinely post the results of their regular student darts tournament - which was often won by a young man named Kevin Keegan. I regularly replied to the tweet to try to get them to find out if he knew he had a rather famous namesake in the UK, but they never replied.