The Official UKFF RAW thread (part 2)...

[Infinity Land]

Since HHH's old boy network is getting linked with jobs, except Bobby Fish 🤣

I'm going to guess Damo will be back.

[FUM]

Probably the first passable RAW of the Triple H era, I doubt him having COVID had much to do with that to be honest as he would still have been in charge to an extent.

I could do without seeing guys like Otis and Gable as extras holding Lashley back. Use actual extras, there is no need to use guys who have been a main part of your show over the last month and their character wouldn’t care less if Lashley and Lesnar were scrapping away.

I don’t and never have gotten Mustafa Ali to be honest outside when they had a Cruiserweight Championship. He doesn’t fit in elsewhere except a division that is only about putting a decent match on rather than having storylines.

I get what the goal is but I also hate the assumption that everyone knows the NXT people. I haven’t watched it in a good while so I didn’t have a clue who Cora Jade was and they realised the audience didn’t either as they clearly rushed to put a quick graphic up with her name.

Interested to see where the JBL/Corbin stuff goes. Never been a fan of Corbin outside as a bum but with JBL as a mouthpiece it might just work.

[BomberPat]

JBL at his best is a heel who was prepared to act scared, cowardly, or ridiculous to make a babyface look stronger - the JBL who lost in under a minute to Rey Mysterio, or the JBL who did everything in his power to make a star of John Cena, could make for a great manager in the Colonel Robert Parker model. Instead, last night we got the absolute worst of JBL, burying the entire roster to meekly put over a wrestler who's already been under contract for ten years as an up-and-coming future champion.

The "nobody today would have been a star in the Attitude Era" stuff was ridiculous. In the 90s, when short on star power, the WWF made those brilliant "New Generation" adverts to focus on how much better their current talent was than what came before. Now, they have wrestlers go on TV and talk about how nobody today is as good as the worst of twenty-five years ago. Even from the mouth of a delusional heel, it's not something that should be said out loud on TV even if the company fairly obviously believes it. 

That it was all in the service of talking down a guy who, dull and outstaying his welcome as he is, is a former World Champion, while the guy he's putting over as a star in any era hasn't ever held a significant title, makes it even worse. It's like instead of doing the New Generation ads, they'd had someone do a promo intended to put over Bob Holly say that Shawn Michaels wouldn't have lasted five minutes against Ivan Putski.

 

A lot of dross on this episode. The backstage segment with Miz, Saxton and Gargano might be one of the worst acted things I've ever seen, Gargano would be the smarmiest and least likeable babyface on any show that didn't have Matt Riddle on it, and I'm dreading whatever justification he's planning to reveal for Lumis stalking Miz. 

 

[FUM]

Not sure how I feel about the above post. It makes some good points but it’s just a classic heel tactic to say “you couldn’t hang with the guys I had to hang with” really and I didn’t think much deeper into it than that.

[poetofthedeed]

That crazy farmboy Brock Lesnar bumping like Spike Dudley for Lashley was beautiful though, He almost cleared the barricade taking that spear. 

[BomberPat]

21 minutes ago, FUM said:

Not sure how I feel about the above post. It makes some good points but it’s just a classic heel tactic to say “you couldn’t hang with the guys I had to hang with” really and I didn’t think much deeper into it than that.

It's the "don't call your opponent a piece of shit, because when you win, who cares that you beat a piece of shit?" principle. If Dolph Ziggler (and, by extension, most of the current roster) aren't stars and couldn't have made it in the past, why do we care about the guy who's taking 10-12 minutes to beat him?

[Vamp]

Yeah. Look at The Rock. He used to belittle everyone before beating them and never got over a lick. 

Sorry. I have a natural aversion to those kind of "profound wrestling truths." They make my skin crawl. 

[FUM]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

It's the "don't call your opponent a piece of shit, because when you win, who cares that you beat a piece of shit?" principle. If Dolph Ziggler (and, by extension, most of the current roster) aren't stars and couldn't have made it in the past, why do we care about the guy who's taking 10-12 minutes to beat him?

Wrestlings biggest boom period was everyone calling each other pieces of shit.

[BrodyGraham]

2 hours ago, FUM said:

Wrestlings biggest boom period was everyone calling each other pieces of shit.

Yeah, but it wasn't a case of 'Steve Austin couldn't lace up Hillbilly Jim's boots' was it?

WWE has had this problem for years, you'd hope that it went out the door with Vince, but maybe not.

[The Gaffer]

After probably the best Smackdown of the past few months, this was the worst Raw. 

American Alpha, Gargano, Miz, Corbin, The OC...just about the entire show felt like Triple H fucked off the creative meeting for the evening and took the gang to Wendy's to let them all know how good they were doing, and they could just mix it up any way they wanted tonight. 

A three hour show bursting at the seams with guys who range from forgettable to outright annoying, without any sort of star anchor pulling them along. 

Weren't they making Rollins the guy again, for Raw? I can't even remember what he was doing on this show. I think he was doing commentary during an Austin Theory match. 

Shite. Watch Smackdown if you haven't though. It was brilliant. 

 

[BomberPat]

The shows have been better structured under Triple H, but I'm not seeing the vast improvements that people are claiming, and it's largely because of the amount of dross. There was nothing on this show half as bad as the Miz/Saxton/Gargano segment from last week, but having Gargano and Miz all over the show certainly isn't helping - I once saw Gargano as the best underdog white-meat babyface in WWE since Daniel Bryan, and now he's a horrendous smarmy Dad joker playing Just Joe to The Miz. Horrendous stuff. The only person less likeable than him on the show is Matt Riddle, who's being pushed to the moon. There's just so little worth watching.

Then Triple H's booking, praised in most quarters, is starting to wear very thin - it's very obvious that he doesn't have much to fall back on beyond "bring back released wrestler" or, for wrestlers who haven't been released, "give wrestler back an old gimmick without explanation". It's basically "remember 2016, when you liked this guy?" over and over again. People make fun of Tony Khan being a message board poster doing his fantasy booking, but Triple H keeps doing, "and then Eugene denounces his gimmick and becomes serious wrestler Nick Dinsmore" over and over again.

This week it's the turn of Nikki Cross, and I've seen people on Twitter celebrating that "yay, crazy Nikki Cross is back!", as if that's a truer version of Nikki Cross, and not just as much (if not more) of a WWE-created gimmick for her as Nikki A.S.H. was, only now there's no justification or explanation as to why she's back to this gimmick other than Triple H prefers it to her other one. Good booking would be to write your way out of the bad booking of the last few years and turn it into something good, not just pretending it never happened, and going "Remember NXT?"

[Matthew]

4 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

This week it's the turn of Nikki Cross, and I've seen people on Twitter celebrating that "yay, crazy Nikki Cross is back!", as if that's a truer version of Nikki Cross, and not just as much (if not more) of a WWE-created gimmick for her as Nikki A.S.H. was

Wasn’t it widely reported, that Nikki herself came up with that gimmick?

[The Gaffer]

Doesn't the core audience demand true to life gimmicks nowadays? I know they shouldn't be a total stand in for writing compelling long term angles, but I think it's too early to judge his reign on the latter. After all if SummerSlam was still etched in stone from the Vince days, we've not even made it to the next major PPV yet. During a period of TV they traditionally backseat anyway. 

Bringing the gang back as you remember them, having a bit more fluidity between backstage and front-of-house segments and letting the world know Michael Cole is a human being who enjoys other TV shows are probably the exact things he should have nailed right out of the gate, and he has for the most part.

Raw's still a mess but Smackers is belting, and I'm still excited to see where we go from here. Survivor Series - WrestleMania will be the big test. 

Not that I doubt people are going to be giving it the big'un a bit too much over on Reddit with the Papa H stuff. All I needed was a suite of minor improvements, the promise of more, and Vince at least getting a bit of a dressing down for my morally dubious, WWE addicted soul to come back into the fold. 

I'll add to the Khan comparison and state that much like AEW, no Triple H doesn't make wrestling a veritable utopia. But is it moving in the right direction? Definitely. 

Edited October 25, 2022 by Gay as FOOK

[BomberPat]

25 minutes ago, Matthew said:

Wasn’t it widely reported, that Nikki herself came up with that gimmick?

Nikki ASH, yeah, to a point. Definitely more so than "crazy Nikki Cross" that people who first saw her in NXT see as her default character. I suppose there's a question of how much of that character was created to appeal to Vince McMahon's tastes, but that's difficult to know. 

2 minutes ago, Gay as FOOK said:

Doesn't the core audience demand true to life gimmicks nowadays? I know they shouldn't be a total stand in for writing compelling long term angles, but I think it's too early to judge his reign on the latter. After all if SummerSlam was still etched in stone from the Vince days, we've not even made it to the next major PPV yet. During a period of TV they traditionally backseat anyway. 

Bringing the gang back as you remember them, having a bit more fluidity between backstage and front-of-house segments and letting the world know Michael Cole is a human being who enjoys other TV shows are probably the exact things he should have nailed right out of the gate, and he has for the most part.

Raw's still a mess but Smackers is belting, and I'm still excited to see where we go from here. Survivor Series - WrestleMania will be the big test. 

I don't know how true the idea of the audience demanding "true to life" gimmicks is; it's a difficult bit of received wisdom to square with Bray Wyatt feuding with a spooky cowboy version of himself being the most heavily promoted aspect of the show. I think what people want is consistency and solid performances, and I wonder how people who were enjoying the product as was (there seem to be some!) feel about people's gimmicks being changed without explanation, returns and call-ups seemingly every week, and a big assumption of knowledge; I don't know the breakdown of how much of the RAW audience watch NXT, but I imagine there's a large part of the audience that don't understand what the connection between Johnny Gargano and Dexter Lumis is, or why they're supposed to care about Candace LeRae, for example.

A lot of what Triple H has done has been great - the shows are better structured, most wrestlers and commentators feel more like human beings than they have in years, and a lot of the general production and window dressing of the show is a lot better than it used to be, and generally makes it more watchable. But I think his actual booking leaves a lot to be desired, and falls back on the same "remember when you liked this guy?" returns and gimmick changes over and over again, but with people whose success was largely on smaller shows, so runs the risk of appealing more to a niche than the broader audience. He's doing a lot of what WWE fans criticised AEW for - bringing in recent releases for an easy pop, and assuming knowledge of the audience. As someone was roundly mocked for asking about AEW, but I think might be a valid question of Triple H's WWE, "what do they do when they run out of pops?". It'll be interesting to see if he's capable of actually building a new star on the level of a Reigns or a Cena, because NXT's track record hasn't been great in that respect.

The Rumble-to-Wrestlemania span will be the real test. Even at his worst, Vince was still able to make Wrestlemania feel big, and it'll be interesting to see if Triple H is capable of pulling off that sort of major event.

[FUM]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

It'll be interesting to see if he's capable of actually building a new star on the level of a Reigns or a Cena, because NXT's track record hasn't been great in that respect.

I have to say I disagree with this aspect of your comments as a reference to Triple H’s booking. He created many who people thought would go on to be huge stars that then failed miserably on the main roster under a different booker so I’m not sure them not becoming huge stars can be pinned at Trips door. It’s fair enough to say nobody has really graduated from NXT to huge star but I don’t think it’s fair to say many weren’t primed to. I’m not going to say convincingly that booking is what messed these guys up because they probably just weren’t as good as they’d been made to look in NXT but hypothetically could they have done better had Trips had the entire WWE book then?

Under NXT booking guys like Enzo Amore and Jonny Gargano were being talked about as the next huge stars.