Wrestling's Biggest Letdown 2021

[Frankie Crisp]

[HarmonicGenerator]

If I cared a little bit about WWE any more, it could be any of those. As I’m invested in AEW, the explosion takes it.

[BomberPat]

The exploding ring was a huge letdown, and rationally, I can't see anything else taking this one.

However, I gave my vote to Becky Lynch's return. I stayed up to watch Summerslam with my partner and a friend, and I think it was the last WWE PPV I watched, certainly the last one I went out of my way to watch live. Part of that was the sense that, with Punk having just debuted in AEW, there was the prospect that WWE might go all out to try and combat them with a genuinely strong card and some real surprises.

Instead, it felt like an absolute point of no return for that company. Their "hit the panic button" booking was to resort to bringing back Brock Lesnar, again. I've never seen a show that felt more like a company was simultaneously trying to pull out all the stops yet somehow also doing the same old shit they've always done, it was completely indicative of a promotion that's stuck in its ways and utterly out of ideas. In the middle of all of that, Becky Lynch comes out, to salvage a situation where an anticipated match had to be taken off the card. People were still invested in Bianca Belair as a potential new major star, and Becky had been off TV for a long time and still had credibility as an attraction in her own right. It had potential to be a big moment, yet instead it was just sacrificing Belair's momentum because the real star had come home, and bringing that segment to a close in the one way that benefited nobody.

I can't think of a more blatant example of a wrestling promotion taking the last glimmers of audience goodwill left and shitting it away immediately. Like I said, a point of no return, and that's why I'd vote for that over anything else on the list. At least when AEW fuck up, you generally get the impression it was a genuine fuck up, whereas when WWE disappoint you, you know it's through doing exactly what they had planned all along. 

[Accident Prone]

I still believe that the AEW Dynamite following Punk's return halted so much momentum they had from new/lapsed fans who were jumping in to take a chance on AEW post-Punk Rampage. A dull show that highlighted almost all of AEW's flaws whilst keeping the light away from many of their positives. If any episode of Dynamite should've threw caution to the wind and gone all out (pardon the pun) with wild action from the get-go and been stuffed to the brim with feud recaps, teases for the future and an emphasis on just how large the company's scope is, THAT should've been it. I don't know who had TK's ear that week, but "We should carry on, business as usual" was shite advice.