Wrestling’s 4Rs: The Right, The Wrong and The Ridiculous of WWE Raw & NJPW

THE RIGHT:
The Authority Splinters: I don’t know about you guys, but I thought this was bloody exciting. The Authority sans Randy Orton (that detail will soon be important) sauntered smugly down to the ring to start the show and crowed about Seth Rollins’ Hell in a Cell victory the previous night. So far, so blah. However, the love-in was interrupted by Randy Orton, who was full of rage and piss and vinegar after being thwarted again by eternal nemesis John Cena inside the Cell. He suggested maybe he’d have had a better chance of victory had he not spent the past month and a bit fighting people on Rollins’ behalf, and then lunged at Mr. MITB, triggering a pull apart brawl! Triple H looked to have calmed everyone down, but Orton was like an uncaged animal, perhaps a snake of some kind, a Boa Constrictor or a Rattlesnake. Anyway, he was just too darn grumpy to be restrained, and dropped Seth with an RKO! As I alluded to earlier, the start of this segment was frustratingly average, but Randy Orton really, really brought his A-game to this, he was full of vengeful energy and I was totally convinced that this was a man who had just totally snapped. The fact that he brought up his real life anger management stint in 2007 added a refreshing sheen of realism to proceedings and made me think that this was an angle that actually mattered to Orton, if he was willing to reference such a tempestuous period of his life. I am very, very ready for a Randy Orton-Seth Rollins match.

Feed Him Bo-re (please don’t say that out loud else the pun stops working): Ooh, Ryback’s back! I think there’s plenty to like about The Big Guy. He’s got the squash match down to a fine art, has an impressive array of power moves in his arsenal, and has a real unhinged charisma about him that makes him seem that much more unpredictable and exciting. I don’t particularly want to see him main eventing PPVs or anything, I don’t think he’s got the depth for that, but he’s definitely got the potential to be a really fun part of the roster, I’m glad that he’s returned. I’m also glad he returned in dominant fashion, rolling back the hapless Bo Dallas with the crowd firmly on his side. This was a thoroughly enjoyable redebut for Ryback.

John Cena vs. Seth Rollins: This was smashing! You could nitpick about Rollins committing to selling the after effects of Hell in a Cell much more than Cena did, or perhaps Mercury and Noble interfering a little too frequently, but the good outweighed the bad to a considerable degree here. I thought Rollins looked right at home in this match, it didn’t look remotely weird to see him controlling Cena even with the weight difference between the two, he looked completely on Cena’s level. The near falls towards the end were great. Razor sharp and really, really exciting. Kane interfering to cause the finish was a bit of a disappointment, but I’ve seen more dissatisfying usages of that finish, and since having either man lose would have been counter productive I think an unclean ending was a necessary sacrifice. The big post match brawl felt a little bit forced but I like that they seem to be putting effort into a Survivor Series as a concept this year, I think Survivor Series matches are the bees knees and if I had my way we’d have a whole PPV full of them. And what a PPV it would be! Anyway, this was a really, really great match that you should absolutely get to watching.

puRgatoRy:
Goldust & Stardust vs. Big Show & Mark Henry: This was an uneven sort of match, with a few really nice moments and sequences scattered in the midst of a lot of lumbering and vaguely awkward action. Really though, the wrestling itself was just a means to an end- the match ended with Mark Henry turning emphatically on the Big Show, dropping him repeatedly with the World’s Strongest Slam. I think Henry’s beatdown was a little excessive, it went on for a long time and was too violent for what is surely just going to be a midcard feud. However, I am quietly positive about a Big Show/Henry feud- their work together in 2011 was far, far better than it had any right to be, and neither man has done anything as good since (apart from Henry’s brief feud with John Cena last year, that was a great rivalry.) I think there’s potential for some entertaining, heated power battles, and if the rivalry brings Henry any closer to reopening the Hall of Pain then it’ll be staying largely in the right in the future.

The Usos vs. The Miz & Damian Mizdow: WWE continues to handle the Miz and Damian Sandow’s relationship shockingly well. Putting them as a tag team is great news for a division that has no depth whatsoever, and the stronger the duo’s relationship is the greater the reaction will be when Sandow finally moves out of the Miz’s shadow. The match was OK, nothing particularly inspiring but perfectly solid, and Sandow’s copycat antics as usual at least made things feel a little different.

Dean Ambrose vs. Cesaro: I was disappointed we didn’t get an actual match here since it could have been a properly great one. I get what they were going for with Dean assaulting Cesaro with the microphone before the match but it didn’t really work and was actually kind of boring. It went on for ages and ages, and a microphone isn’t a particularly great weapon in a wrestling context, it’s small and you kind of have to jab your opponent with it at close range, which doesn’t usually look brilliant on camera. I did quite like Bray Wyatt’s promo though, it made more sense than his usual ramblings and it gives me hope that feuding with the red hot Ambrose could be reinvigorating for him, much like the rivalry with Daniel Bryan this year last year got him into such a strong position in the first place.

We Will Never Know Who Has Won the John Cena-Randy Orton feud: Randy Orton returned to the ring at the top of the first hour, which felt kind of weird because he’d been out at the beginning of the show and not really done anything of note, so it seems like they could have just integrated this promo into the opening one. He went on about John Cena and then John Cena came out and retaliated with some jokes and, y’know, it wasn’t actively bad, but we’ve really seen it all before, even all this talk about the idea of ‘legacy’ and ‘the class of 2002’ that was meant to put a belated new spin on things. Paul Heyman came out to remind them that whoever won this match would (bafflingly) get a title match with Brock Lesnar, and thus they wouldn’t be real winners at all, and while Heyman is more enjoyably idiosyncratic on the microphone than either Cena or Orton, he himself is struggling with repetition, since we kind of get the message that Brock Lesnar is an all conquering ass kicker by now, and while it never hurts to be reminded of that, it’s not going to save a promo. Randy Orton concluded the segment by RKOing both Cena and Heyman after Cena had declined to drop the Advocate with an Attitude Adjustment, and that I did like, I like the idea that Paul Heyman is such a slimy, seedy little guy that even super villains by Orton can’t tolerate him, it lays the groundwork for a potential face turn for the Viper, and will probably give Heyman something to reference in a couple of weeks when he’s trying to prove Cena doesn’t have it in him to beat Brock Lesnar. Again, not a bad segment, but a frustratingly normal one that I felt like I could have seen on any Raw in the past five years were it not for Heyman’s contribution.

Nikki Bella vs. Naomi: I’m pleased with Brie becoming Nikki’s personal assistant, it’s a relatively original storyline in the Divas division! What a world we live in. Plus, it might actually make people feel genuine sympathy towards Brie, though that’s a little more doubtful. The match itself wasn’t too bad at all. Color me moderately impressed by this whole thing.

The wRong:
AJ vs. Alicia Fox: This was OK but practically indistinguishable from last week’s match, aside from the change in victor. Repetition like this is yet another reason why it’s impossible to care about the Divas division. Afterwards Paige attacked Alicia, an action that will never be justified unless you count “HAHAHA SHE’S CRAZYYYYYYYYY” as justification. I came away from this feeling vaguely sad.

John Cena is a REBEL: John Cena won at Hell in a Cell and this displeased the Authority, so they took the advice of that famous old saying- “if you can’t beat John Cena, try and convince John Cena to join YOU by doing the same fucking promo everyone’s been doing for years about how Cena needs to EMBRACE THE HATE and JOIN THE DARKSIDE because THE FANS DON’T CARE ABOUT HIM.” Predictably, this wasn’t so great, although everyone involved tried their best to make such clichéd material somewhat intriguing, and it’s going to lead to a traditional Survivor Series match which I am wholly in favor of. There are too many issues with this angle though, the main one being that John Cena is so obviously not the outsider that he needs to be for this storyline- he isn’t just the face of WWE, he almost seems to embody everything good and bad about the company in the last decade. And of course, as I’ve said, the whole concept is samey and bland and tiresome. Hopefully this is very much just a placeholder for the next couple of weeks but I’m concerned it’ll drag on all the way through to the New Year before Cena can get the chance to fight Lesnar again.

Dolph Ziggler vs. Kane: This heated up a little bit towards the end, with a pretty good if far too long near fall stretch, but that doesn’t excuse the majority of the match which was painfully tedious. Kane seems so utterly lifeless as he goes about his business now, there’s just nothing left in the company for him anymore. And, listen, I’m not advocating feeding Ziggler to him exactly, but what kind of fearsome corporate monster can’t even beat Dolph Ziggler? Scrawny, inconsistent Dolph Ziggler? Dolph Ziggler who has recently been thwarted by the Miz? There’s so much wrong in this segment.

THE RIDICULOUS:
NOTHING

THE RAW MATCH OF THE YEAR LIST:
Hey! A change! John Cena vs. Seth Rollins was a tremendous piece of work and slots into the lower reaches of the ten

1. 3.03.14- The Shield vs. The Wyatt Family
2. 2.17.14- John Cena vs. Cesaro
3. 5.5.14- The Shield vs. The Wyatt Family
4. 2.03.14- Daniel Bryan vs. Randy Orton
5. 2.10.14- Sheamus & Christian vs. The Real Americans
6. 1.27.14- John Cena, Sheamus & Daniel Bryan vs. The Shield
7. 6.2.14- The Usos vs. The Wyatt Family
8. 27.10.14- John Cena vs. Seth Rollins
9. 8.18.14- Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins
10. 4.21.14- Sheamus vs. Bad News Barrett

Show Rating: 6.5

As a reminder, I will be going by the 411 scale…

0 – 0.9: Torture
1 – 1.9: Extremely Horrendous
2 – 2.9: Very Bad
3 – 3.9: Bad
4 – 4.9: Poor
5 – 5.9: Not So Good
6 – 6.9: Average
7 – 7.9: Good
8 – 8.9:Very Good
9 – 9.9: Amazing
10: Virtually Perfect