WrestleMania is now only a week away and the build-up so far has been…I don’t know…adequate, I guess.
At this point I think we’ve all bought the Network, so it’s not a matter of whether it’s worth our money. At the end of the day, they’ve done a fine enough job of making WrestleMania an interesting event. There will probably be some great matches, interesting cameos, and most importantly, Warrior. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the card announced thus far.
The main-event, of course, will be the triple-threat match for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was going to be Batista vs Randy Orton in a singles match for the title, but as luck would have it, Batista returned as a babyface and won the Royal Rumble. Crowds across the United States hated that, and proceeded to boo Batista out of the building. So now he’s a weird tweener-type who doesn’t care for the Authority, but at the same time, doesn’t like Bryan either and resents the fans for liking him. So just when this had started to evolve, you kind of had to change it.
Heel against kinda-heel closing out the show just wasn’t going to work. You need a face in there who people want to see win, and with Punk gone, the only other solution was Daniel Bryan, and that’s where the triple-threat match comes into play.
You have Bryan going against Triple H, and the winner of that match will be added to the main-event. After Punk bailed on a Triple H program, Bryan was slid in because it made the most sense – after all, it was Triple H who cost him the title at SummerSlam and basically has been trying to thwart him via outside forces ever since. It’s a natural program to go to.
This isn’t the match WWE wanted, but somehow, they’ve kind of lucked into it and they can kind of show that it’s been building for the last eight months or so, even though this was never the original plan.
I see Bryan winning his singles match, and then the title. I don’t know of any other logical conclusion, except if they want to piss off people again, which has been the common theme of WWE PPV finishes of late. It’s good to keep the babyface chasing the heel, but eventually the babyface actually needs to, you know, win in order for people to care about it.
I don’t think WWE are going to do that again, especially at WrestleMania, but their thought process is different than mine and the vast majority of people’s.
There’s also John Cena and Bray Wyatt, which should be alright.
Wyatt’s promos are OK. His delivery is great, but sometimes he ventures into nonsensical Warrior territory where he skirts around being straightforward and would rather just mumble on or quote old rock songs.
The build to this has been OK, but the mirror angle from last week was dumb. I understand it was to show John Cena is getting psyched out by Wyatt, and they need to continue doing that going in to the go-home show on Monday, but jeez, it reminded me of those Warrior/Hogan skits from 1998.
You know, where he looked into the mirror, and everyone but Eric Bischoff could see Warrior in the mirror, and other dumb stuff like that. The one thing WWE don’t need to be doing right now is ripping off shitty WCW angles from 1998 for this match.
There’s also the Undertaker/Lesnar storyline.
The more I’ve seen of this angle, the more I’ve thought that, at this point, it’s pretty much just the match and everything else is just filling time. That’s the best description of Paul Heyman’s promos leading to this match. Just the same old, same old about how Lesnar will beat the streak and blah, blah, blah.
I wish they would have played up their confrontation a few years ago at that UFC event, but the chances of that happening were probably nil to begin with. It would’ve been a lot more realistic than the tired “look in the casket, nobody’s there, then suddenly…OH MY GOD UNDERTAKER WAS IN THE CASKET” deal which has been done plenty of times already.
The Andre the Giant Battle Royal has been heavily hyped, which is probably because everyone else on the roster who isn’t in a match is in this battle royal.
Stars like Christian, Dolph Ziggler, Sheamus, Miz and the Big Show are in it, and the winner will get a trophy that will probably be destroyed after the match, because who keeps a trophy in pro wrestling?
The announcers have been pushing that Big Show might win it, but that’s kind of a waste. Put it on someone you have an interest in pushing. Not that it matters because the WWE mentality is to push someone hard, then lose interest and forget about them. Actually, most of the battle royal competitors fall under that category. Funny how things work out that way!
Kane and the New Age Outlaws vs The Shield is another match on the card.
This one is just weird. Since late 2013, they’ve slowly been building a turn between The Shield, with Reigns emerging as the babyface. Then all of a sudden a few weeks ago, they confront one another on SmackDown and all become friends again. Now they’re feuding with Kane because they didn’t want to listen to him.
That completely annoyed me. Here I am like an idiot trying to invest in their storyline that they’ve been teasing, only for them to drop it cold turkey. Typical WWE storytelling. The match is fine, the Shield as babyfaces are fine. I’m just going to try to learn better than to invest in WWE storytelling and just look forward to the match.
A fatal-4-way tag-team match is also set to take place, pitting the champions The Usos against Rybaxel, Los Matadores and the Real Americans.
Hey look! There’s another team that was heading for a break-up and lo-and-behold, it’s been completely dropped completely. The other two teams are kind of jobbers, so it doesn’t make much sense for them to win. I’d say the Usos retain. They’re pretty great and probably should have had this run with the titles a few months ago. They’ll make this a fun match.
There’s a multi-woman match featuring a bunch of women who have matches with other women every week on Raw, but this time they’ll all have a match with each other that will probably last less than ten minutes with a stipulation that probably won’t be thought of until the day of the show.
I think it goes without saying that this division is completely uninteresting. Nothing of any note ever seems to happen. It’s just women in one-minute tag matches every week on Raw. It’s kind of funny because you have this reality show on E, which you’d think would make most of the “stars” on that show actual stars, but because of WWE’s parity booking, there really isn’t a midcard anymore.
There are the top stars, then everyone else who loses to each other and it doesn’t mean anything. The Divas division is a great example of that.
It seems like I’ve covered all the WrestleMania matches! All that’s left now is to watch Raw in a couple of days, which will lead in to WrestleMania itself. I’ll be covering WrestleMania here with a report soon after the show ends, so be sure to stick around here on SLTD to get my exclusive thoughts on that!
Until next week…
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