This is an observation I’ve noticed that cuts across promotions, for me that’s mainly WWE and AEW. In recent matches it seems some really basic rules were not being followed and gimmick matches that didn’t make sense, although the latter really only applies to one specific match.
Let’s start with the latter: Becky Lynch and Seth Rollins were put in a mixed tag team match against Andrade Cien Almas and Zelina Vega prior to Extreme Rules in an attempt to showcase how well the then Universal Champion and RAW Women’s Champion gel as a team. Unfortunately, the match had the added stipulation of being a tag team elimination match.
So let’s see….if a woman on one team gets eliminated, what does the other woman do? Just sit there and wait for the men to finish up? Oh wait, that’s what happened: Zelina got eliminated by Becky, so it ended up with Andrade being technically in a handicap match. But since only the men fight the men and women fight the women, Becky was just waiting for Seth to finish the match.
Unless they were expecting Becky to take on Andrade, which would have been unprecedented by WWE standards, the stipulations for that match by adding an elimination component was very strange. But what’s stranger is the seeming abandonment of one of the long standing rules in wrestling matches: the DQ rule.
During AEW’s Fight for the Fallen which concluded last weekend, the match between the Lucha Brothers and SCU with Christopher Daniels was an example of the rules seemingly thrown out the window. Normally, when someone outside of the competitors interjects themselves in a match, the result is a disqualification.
But during that match, Christopher Daniels interjected himself into the tag melee, which only resulted in Daniels being ejected by the referee. Unless AEW is doing something different when it comes to the rules for their matches, this seemed kinda strange but justified as I doubt anyone wanted a match between the Lucha Bros and SCU to end on a DQ.
However, for a company that is heavily enforcing time limits for matches, the fluidity of the rules surrounding outside interference seems contradictory to its fledging brand and image. But there was no explaining for the same thing happening in WWE.
This past Monday on RAW, we saw The Club (AJ Styles, Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson) taking on the Lucha House Party, when Ricochet suddenly popped up at ringside to attack Styles. Instead of leading to a disqualification, the match was somehow ‘restarted’.
How is it that for this entire company’s history when someone interferes in a match which means a disqualification, you suddenly flip on your head and just ‘restart’ a match instead? They could have continued the Ricochet / AJ Styles rivalry regardless of a DQ ending or not.
This ‘no wrestling during commercial breaks’ decree for WWE is really getting on my nerves.
An average professional doing the 9-5 grind who really loves wrestling across all platforms. Here's hoping wrestlers finally get some basic workers rights in 2021.
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