Statto

13 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Well it can't be any worse than last year when absolutely fuck all happened aside from Lesnar clocking Rhodes.

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. 

17 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

However the biggest problem I had with your post was saying Cathy Kelley when Jackie Redmond is right there! 

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. 

It's unlikely to be a gimmick that'll take you to the world title, and it'd be very 1993 WWF/1998 WCW jobber, but JD Drake should definitely have a pro bowler gimmick.

They've hinted at him being such before (I don't know if he's actually a pro, but he's definitely a very accomplished bowler) and it just seems the perfect gimmick for a bloke with his look. 

I'd always been under the impression that the people who were on the roster page on the website were actually signed to some form of contract, anybody else was being used on a per appearance basis (even though some people not listed on the roster are sometimes far more regularly/prominently featured than those who are)

If that is in fact the case, only about half of the people who've been released were actually "signed" - Dasha, Jose, Stu & Boudreaux. 

Regardless, a bit of a trim was long overdue. I quite often pass the time while taking a dump by scrolling through the roster and figuring out who you could cull without anyone really noticing. It's a lot. 

I still remember the rumour that did the rounds back in the teletext pages days that the Royal Rumble was going up be at Celtic Park, but at the usual time to placate the US PPV audience. 

Wrestling. Outside. In Glasgow. Starting at 1am. In January.

"And here comes number 3, D-Lo Brown, charging to the ring... Oh no, he's slipped on the ice!" 

Yeah, and it would have given a more logical reason to introduce Dom to the mix too. 

Seems to me they've ended up with the tag they are doing rather than Rey vs Santos (mask vs hair?) as they wanted to get Dom a Mania match, so had him reinsert himself into his dad's business. 

If they'd had set up a faction vs faction lucha tag thing (maybe do it captain's fall as WWE seem less afraid to stretch their audience's mental capacity these days) Dom could have been brought in to make up LdF's shortfall in numbers. 

RE: match/night splits, IIRC last year it was announced a few weeks out for most matches (I think I remember match graphics saying "Wrestlemania Saturday" or "Wrestlemania Sunday", and those phrases being spoken on TV a lot), but previously it's been announced on Twitter on the Saturday morning.

Seems like it'll be closer to the latter this year. 

If it's American stuff you're after, this is the king:

They're still dumping on him on the app right now...

Nah, DJ Gabriel is from Berkshire. 

Justin Gabriel (PJ Black) is South African (but trained at FWA) 

We went to Toronto for our honeymoon and I became a bit obsessed with the Toronto Transit Commission. I still fairly regularly stick a video of one of the streetcar routes on.

506 Carlton is my favourite as it was the route that went past the place we stayed:

Bonus wrestling content - you know that fuck off massive sign with Hogan's face and part of the WrestleMania logo someone was holding up at Mania VI? Came off the side of a TTC bus that did. 

Yeah, the spectacular rise for Jinder was runner up in the battle royal on the pre-show to WWE Champion at the next PPV.

Although looking at it with hindsight you could see the spot he was in at Mania 33 as the start of a move to prominence - although he didn't win, he was the one getting pounced by Gronk which obviously was a moment that got a lot of mainstream media coverage. 

Based upon this discussion the other week, in our huddle on Friday morning I polled the team I have recently begun managing on their favourite musical artist (giving the caveat of it needing to be someone at least half the room had heard of, which might have skewed the results somewhat).

I manage 5 people between 20-25, and 1 bloke closer to 50.

All the twentysomethings answered with an act who had (in my opinion) peaked before the fan had turned 4, most of the acts had been active long before that fan had been born. 

I said Queen (giving the context I gave her that it was considered weird that I was listening to such "old" stuff when I was a kid). The older bloke said Pearl Jam (who just scraped through on the 50% rule on the basis I've got a couple of rock fans in the team) 

Glad I'm not the only one... 

But did you complete the peg game? 

The replacements thing is annoying, but I like Wrestler Wes and I'd like to remind everyone considering rooting against him in the final next week that he's at least won every episode he's competed in, unlike the bloke he's meeting in the final, who lost his quarter.

To Wes.

Having wussed out of the actual Gladiators bit of Gladiators and tried to rely on the fact that he's effectively a professional assault course completer. 

(The fact who wins Gladiators comes down to an assault course that doesn't even involve any Gladiators has annoyed me since I was a kid). 

Get yourself a Smithwick's while you're there. Glorious stuff. 

Can't forget... 

Yeah, it's another clunky thing about the Continental Crown. 

What it actually seems to mean is "everybody else barred from ringside", so I don't know why they don't just say that. 

I've watched very little actual lucha over the years, save odd bits on TWC back in the day. But I do quite regularly disappear down Wikipedia rabbit holes into that world, tracing through all the Hijos and Jrs and the naming conventions around that, etc. 

I always enjoy finding out the English translation of lucha names I come across, which tend to either be very cool or bonkers or both. This the makes me wonder if a wrestler being called "Cibernetic Arm" seems as mad to a Mexican as it does to me.

I recall a few years back there was a very cool looking coffee table book of photos of lucha masks which I'd have liked to have picked up, but I think it was very expensive.