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The CMLL angle was amateur at best

Toni Storm was / is great, but that angle ain't going anywhere

Young Bucks are awful actors

Sting is great

Not feeling any love for Page / Swerve round 300. Especially after it took a year seemingly for Page to beat a jobber. 

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Weekly wrestling TV is often inconsistent. Some episodes have more taking points and highlights than others. Episodes vary in quality. Discussion forum topics sometimes go off on tangents.
 

Collision on Saturday and the first two Dynamites of the year were pretty well received on here. The  Continental Classic was also largely well received.
 

Ooh the handful of people who discuss AEW on this tiny forum are a day late posting their thoughts, ooh they’re talking about other wrestling related stuff in the topic, HMMMM NOT LOOKING GOOD LADS.
 

Not going to argue with anyone if you’re  not enjoying the product of course, but can we please keep the deeply tedious reactionary doom posting on Facebook and Twitter?  I discuss wrestling on here specifically to avoid all of that shit. 
 

 

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12 hours ago, Loki said:

But it never worked for Smackdown and Raw.  I can't think of a single brand-created matchup I ever wanted that didn't happen within 6 months.

The only one that immediately springs to mind is HBK vs Kurt Angle, where Shawn returned to wrestling at SummerSlam 2002 and they didn't have him wrestle Kurt until Mania 21.

11 hours ago, Daddymagic said:

The fact that the last 3 pages seems to be arguing about a WWE angle from 20 years ago seems fit for a promotion that has not just lost its way but but no longer has access to Google maps.

Sorry about that, it's very off brand. Next time I'll try and make it 30 years.

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1 hour ago, Merzbow said:

Sorry for the Meltzer post but you can see Dave just give up, his brain glossing over as Bryan tries to keep talking about the rankings.

 

Just a question, can anyone here make it through that whole clip without fast fowarding it? 12 minutes of them just listing people and Big Dave repeating the same thing over and over again. Even the most die hard AEW fan surely cant listen to this nonsense the whole way through.

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4 minutes ago, Dai said:

Just a question, can anyone here make it through that whole clip without fast fowarding it? 12 minutes of them just listing people and Big Dave repeating the same thing over and over again. Even the most die hard AEW fan surely cant listen to this nonsense the whole way through.

Bryan Alvarez might have the most unlikeable persona in all of wrestling.  Every time I hear that post-ironic drawl or see that eminently punchable face I end up turning the video off within minutes.

I still have no idea who he is, where he came from, and why he appears to be the face of Dave Meltzer's work nowadays.  Melz, for all his many faults, remains essentially the only serious wrestling journalist and even he doesn't conform to anything like journalistic standards.  Everyone else is just clinging to his arsehairs.

This video looks like someone interviewing their nan for lulz.

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14 hours ago, Loki said:

But it never worked for Smackdown and Raw.  I can't think of a single brand-created matchup I ever wanted that didn't happen within 6 months. 

I’d suggest Angle/Michaels, Cena/Batista, Cena/Orton, Cena/Michaels, Cena/Triple H, Cena/Punk and Punk/Mysterio for starters - but WWE certainly didn’t utilise the split to the best of its potential.

14 hours ago, Loki said:

You're right that the era gave rise to some big stars, but they would have been stars anyway - Batista, Orton, Cena, Lesnar were the cream regardless of circumstances. 

Lesnar was always going to succeed, and likely Orton too. Batista and Cena - the two biggest stars - weren’t a guarantee. That’s not to say they wouldn’t have succeeded; but the company wouldn’t have been as compelled to try. Outside of that, wrestlers like Edge, Rey Mysterio, Mark Henry and others had successful runs on top that I just can’t imagine happened had the rosters been unified. 

I think I’ve been able to justify my opinion with pretty fair examples, but I think those against a split have been able to do the same. It’s subjective at the end of the day - whether you like them or not, I think there are advantages to roster splits that are hard to dispute; but the same can be said about a unified roster.

11 hours ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

Mox beat down by CMLL

Toni Storm building up her story with Virtuosa

Young Bucks decent into heeldom 

Sting/Darby challenging the tag champs

Swerve and Page

huh?

I can see why he might think that, based on the fact a lot of this was buried - the start of the show, for me at least, was so repetitious and predictable that it left me less receptive to some of the better stuff later on. The CMLL stuff is pretty hard to care about either way, but I like what The Bucks are doing, and it’s hard not to enjoy Toni Storm. I think the show suffered from how it was laid out, alongside predictable and similar matches that made it feel a bit less exciting. 

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2 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

Angle/Michaels, Cena/Batista, Cena/Orton, Cena/Michaels, Cena/Triple H, Cena/Punk and Punk/Mysterio

I think maybe I was slightly zoned out during this era and as you say, if this stuff resonated with you then it did its job.

Hand on heart though, without looking it up could you say on which brand each of those wrestlers was performing when they had their dream matches?

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2 minutes ago, Loki said:

Hand on heart though, without looking it up could you say on which brand each of those wrestlers was performing when they had their dream matches?

I think so, yes. But I have a weirdly decent memory for these things - like I say, I only started watching in 2002, through Smackdown on Sky One. So from 2003-2006 (pre-uni for me), I have remember who was where when. You know how there’s tribalism between WWE and AEW these days? Well, I was probably guilty of that with Smackdown! That was my show, so if a wrestler moved there (until Sky One stopped airing it), I could see them. But Smackdown always felt like the fun underdog, so I always favoured it subconsciously - even extending up to this most recent split. I remember being stupidly excited for the 2008 draft, when Triple H and Jeff Hardy were among those to move to Smackdown, and you had The Brian Kendrick, R-Truth and even Vladimir bloody Kozlov among the emerging talent on that show. It was a lot of fun. 

To answer your question (someone else can mark my answers here if they want…), as far as where each wrestler was when these matches first took place:

Angle/Michaels - Angle SD / Michaels Raw

Cena/Batista, Cena/Orton, Cena/Michaels, Cena/Triple H, Cena/Punk - all Raw

Punk/Mysterio - both Smackdown

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10 minutes ago, Loki said:

Hand on heart though, without looking it up could you say on which brand each of those wrestlers was performing when they had their dream matches?

in fairness, for most of them I probably could - Shawn and Triple H were always RAW guys, while Rey and Angle always felt like Smackdown guys. Everything else is a bit up in the air, though.

I don't think AEW need a brand split, but a bit more concerted effort towards each show having a separate identity - Collision has always felt a bit more old-school, while Rampage is a bit more of a "throw-shit-at-the-wall" show, and Dynamite is the flagship show for story progression and bigger matches. I think that could be more pronounced - with FTR being on Collision mostly, and having a number of high profile tag matches there, I wouldn't object to Collision becoming more focused on tag wrestling, while Rampage is the show that's a bit more open-door; the indie guys and guest stars, the lucha showcases, that sort of thing. 

At the height of WWE's brand split, it was the sense of each brand having different identities that made it work far more than the separating of individual stars - in the "Smackdown Six" era, Smackdown was generally seen as the workrate brand and RAW the "sports entertainment" brand, even though Smackdown also had the Hogan/McMahon feud going on. RAW had the Hardcore Title and Smackdown had the Cruiserweight Title, and if WWE had been better at booking specialist divisions, that could have stood as a mark of separation between the two shows for a lot longer than it did. If AEW could cut down on the number of title belts, and do more to differentiate the titles they do have, that would go a long way to fixing some of their problems.

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I think 'focus' is a very strong thing that AEW do well when they do it, and when they lose it it all goes a bit to shit really.

And that's to be expected with the size of their roster and the number of shows etc. But with that many wrestlers at their disposal, it should be possible to book three shows consistently and solidly. Yet it rarely feels like that.

Don't get me wrong - I'm sure it's difficult but they need to find ways of doing it. The talent is there from those in the ring to everyone backstage. It's an incredible company all things considered, and probably why it can be so damn frustrating when things aren't as good as we expect.

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