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205 Live


HarmonicGenerator

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Why is Gran Metalik seemingly exclusive to the Main Event brand and not on here?! I admittedly have not checked out any of those intriguing tag matches he's appeared in on recent episodes yet so maybe he's shit now but I doubt it.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Has anybody seen this weeks 205 Live, fucking dreadful hour of Television. Something serious needs to be done with this show, the slapstick approach is absolutely baffling to me. The Cruiserweight Classic was built around great matches, 2 guys who had a reason for wanting to win, with very well done video packages highlighting each Wrestler. This has descended into a farce. Fucking this week you had this stupid Noam Dar/Alicia Fox bollocks, it's STILL going on, it's actually giving me a migraine just thinking about it. You had a talented chap like Ariya Daivari opening a surprise box that turned out to be powder that exploded in his face when he opened the lid.

You have guys like Gran Metalik, Mustafa Ali, Lince Dorado, Rich Swann, they are all interchangeable, all faced each other about 90 times and traded wins/losses, it's mind numbing that we know less about these characters 1 year down the line than we did last Summer, the video packages have dried up, we get nothing like the Roddy Strong mini documentary that was on NXT. It's getting worse by the week.

Not sure how they fix this or if they just abandon it but needed to vent about this bastard show!!!

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It's because the current Era doesn't need Cruiserweights when you have the likes of Seth Rollins doing 450 Phoenix Splashes and Kevin Owens doing Swanton Bombs on the main roster. Most of our heavyweights are the size of cruiserweights in the 90s, and our cruiserweights are mostly tiny. A few years from now the cruiserweight division will be midgets.

 

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They need to ditch the cruiserweights as a separate gimmick. By all means have a cruiserweight title but all this different ring ropes and claiming it's oh so different isn't working. Just have the title and people competing for it on the shows like any other title.

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3 minutes ago, FUM said:

They need to ditch the cruiserweights as a separate gimmick. By all means have a cruiserweight title but all this different ring ropes and claiming it's oh so different isn't working. Just have the title and people competing for it on the shows like any other title.

Agreed. Some might argue that it gives the division its own identity, personally I think the purple bollocks just dilutes it into a shit brand. "Oh look, the purple ropes are on, it's time for the kids that nobody cares about".

The problem with 205 Live is that surely they have to have a bit of a high turnover of talent in order to keep it fresh. Having the same dozen guys gets very boring before long, even with a Neville and Aries thrown into the scene. But if you do that, then half of the division becomes expendable pretty quickly, and the Rich Swanns and Tony Neses of the world are sitting around doing nothing. I was looking forward to the show at the time, but upon review it seems all a bit pointless. It's a bit of a shit NXT really, worse because the talent don't progress from the division (thus far, anyway). Hot-shotting the title around a few times early on didn't help either.

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It's baffling, isn't it?

The Cruiserweight Classic worked because it was great matches, a novel concept for WWE, and it was presented in a way utterly unlike anything WWE had done before - it was the closest to a UFC-style presentation they've gone with for any show.

Why anyone thought that the logical follow-up for that was interminably long romance angles (where even the "pay-off" of Fox leaving Noam Dar is forgotten about two weeks' later!), shitty WWE comedy, cookie-cutter gimmicks and distraction finishes is beyond me. Even when two people are facing each other for the first time, it seems like we've seen it all before, the roster is so thin. If it weren't for the division giving Neville the opportunity to do his career best work, after years of floundering and doing nothing, I'd say sack of the whole thing.

I've always been against a Cruiserweight Title anyway - when guys the size of Rey Mysterio and Daniel Bryan have held the Heavyweight strap, what's the incentive to fight for one in another weight division that's clearly of lesser value? And in WWE terms today, what is the Cruiserweight division? It's so ill-defined. It's not everybody under 205lbs, because Finn Balor weighs less than that, yet he's not in the Cruiserweight division. So do people choose to enter into this division? And does entering into the Cruiserweight division mean you can't compete outside of it? Because TJP and Drew Gulak and whoever never do - but then why would any sensible wrestler limit themselves to that? And why is that not true of any other WWE title or "division" in history? If you were fighting for the Hardcore Title it didn't preclude you from challenging for the European Title. But then Jack Gallagher entered the Royal Rumble - what would have happened if he had won? Would he have just got a shot at the Cruiserweight belt?

I love what Neville's doing at the moment, love Kendrick, love Tozawa, I'm a big fan of Drew Gulak, Rich Swann is great...to take an hour long show with that line-up of talent and make me think, "not sure I can be bothered this week" takes some fucking effort, but they manage it.

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4 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

But then Jack Gallagher entered the Royal Rumble - what would have happened if he had won? Would he have just got a shot at the Cruiserweight belt?

There was no logical explanation for him entering (which is probably why he was a 'surprise' entrant) and of course they were never going to explain it either. They just wanted to throw him in there for the Mary Poppins spot basically, didn't they?

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I wouldn't be against them just going against the guys who are above 205lbs just every now and again. Having a Cruiserweight title for them to go after is fine, but even back in the Monday Night era you'd still have Cruiserweights against heavyweights on occasion. Hell, the majority of Rey Mysterio's career has been based around David vs. Goliath style booking.

It would just break the cycle of the same guys facing eachother over & over. I know next week has Kendrick (and his shit flag) v Tozawa in a street fight, but they've faced eachother so many times now I couldn't care less. Rich Swann and his crooked yellow teeth arn't interesting at all. If you skip past the undercard matches you've already seen countless times, you can blast through 205 Live in 10 minutes if you just skip to whatever the main event is, and even you've probably already seen that too

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Yep. It's hardly a new thing, it just infuriates me that WWE have a team of writers, and some of the best wrestling minds in the world under contract, yet apparently no one's sitting there at booking meetings saying, "Hang on, but does that make sense?". Not one line of commentary or two minute backstage skit to explain it.

I think the Cruiserweight division is the biggest example of that problem right now, and it just frustrates me.

 

Sod the Mary Poppins spot, too. Even though he's just a Steven Regal comedy Englishman, Jack Gallagher's a great character and a great performer, with a lot to offer. Reducing that to "bloke with umbrella" is the worst.

 

Quote

I wouldn't be against them just going against the guys who are above 205lbs just every now and again. Having a Cruiserweight title for them to go after is fine, but even back in the Monday Night era you'd still have Cruiserweights against heavyweights on occasion. Hell, the majority of Rey Mysterio's career has been based around David vs. Goliath style booking.

Absolutely this. Keep the Cruiserweight Title around if need be - it's giving guys who would otherwise be lost in the shuffle something to do - but don't keep the division so utterly separate. Or if you're going to keep it completely separate, bolster the roster up a little, and actually justify why the separation is in force.

David vs. Goliath booking is one of the reasons I don't like weight divisions in WWE - the fact that there are no divisions should, in the age of UFC, be a selling point for WWE. In UFC, you only see people fight within their weight division, in WWE you can see the big guys fight the little guys. The Vince McMahon of the mid-'90s would be hammering that down our throats as a selling point.

Beyond that, it just opens up more avenues of storytelling and different ways to approach a match - David vs. Goliath is the easiest, most obvious bit of in-ring psychology going, and you rob that from yourselves when the biggest guy on the roster is only 10lbs heavier than the smallest.

Edited by BomberPat
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People used to whinge that cruiserweights would lose to heavyweights all the time back in the day.

The moment someone like Rich Swann loses to someone like Jinder Mahal there'd be outrage.  You can never please everyone.  Have them mix it up with the heavyweights, people complain.  Have them only face each other and give them their own show, people complain.  Not that 205 Live couldn't be much much better, it could.  The complaints about the small roster would change to complaints about too many people on the show not being used "correctly" if the roster was bigger.

More could be done about explaining why the cruiserweights "choose" to be on 205 Live instead of Raw or Smackdown, but the same logical gap could be explained why anyone would chose to be on NXT.  Because at one stage you'll have people have to wait until they are drafted, and other stages they lose a Loser Leaves NXT match, and then just say "no problem I'll go to Raw instead".

Edited by The Dart
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4 minutes ago, The Dart said:

People used to whinge that cruiserweights would lose to heavyweights all the time back in the day.

The moment someone like Rich Swann loses to someone like Jinder Mahal there'd be outrage.  You can never please everyone.  Have them mix it up with the heavyweights, people complain.  Have them only face each other and give them their own show, people complain.  Not that 205 Live couldn't be much much better, it could.  The complaints about the small roster would change to complaints about too many people on the show not being used "correctly" if the roster was bigger.

More could be done about explaining why the cruiserweights "choose" to be on 205 Live instead of Raw or Smackdown, but the same logical gap could be explained why anyone would chose to be on NXT.  Because at one stage you'll have people have to wait until they are drafted, and other stages they lose a Loser Leaves NXT match, and then just say "no problem I'll go to Raw instead".

I agree that you can't please everyone - but, again, my choice would have been not to have a Cruiserweight division at all. The concept is redundant when people below the upper limit for that division are holding "Heavyweight" belts.

My problem with in practice is the logic behind it, and why people would have chosen to be in that division - if indeed it was a choice. All it takes is a line or two of commentary to explain how the Cruiserweight division actually works.

 

I don't think NXT is a good comparison - it's established that it's where the "Future" stars of WWE come from, and if anyone more established shows up they invariably cut a promo about how they came to NXT because it's got all the buzz about it, or they wanted to be NXT Champion, or whatever. Drew McIntyre explicitly said that he could have signed anywhere else, but chose to be there.

As for the Loser Leaves Town matches, well, they've lost a match that means they're leaving NXT. That makes them a free agent, and thus able to be hired by RAW or Smackdown.

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1. Ditch the purple ropes.

2. Have some crossing over, even if it's in vignettes. They've referenced Tozawa and Crews being best friends before. Use that. Shit, put them in a damn tag team. 

3. Let them work their style. There's the constant rumour of Ricochet coming in. He'd be a star, if they let him be Ricochet. If not he's just some guy not working New Japan anymore which is a waste for everyone involved.

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