Realized too late that I meant to type “it did not disappoint” here.
I’d put this one below Takeover (1: The One that Came First) overall, but holy shit, dat main event, and, to a lesser extent, dat women’s title match. That said, I don’t think you can turn Adrian heel with his moveset–those moves are always gonna get face pops. I think they’re just setting up what amounts to a face vs. face feud between Sami and Adrian.
Enzo and Big Cass are something magic. Fair play to Big Cass for wearing the 9/11 patch; IIRC, those guys are NY/NJ guys, who originally met on the basketball courts outside the W. 4th St. station in the Village. They also got some excellent new music.
ETA: Oh, by the way–the fallout show tonight is a bit of a disappointment after the fallout show from Takeover One.
He definitely got lots of heat for screwing Sami out of the win. I’d say it all depends on how they script his promo for next week - they could easily have him start acting jerkish and egotistical, and talk about how he saw his title slipping away and did what he had to do because Sami doesn’t have what it takes to be champion.
I may be guilty of “main roster thinking”, which is also traditional wrasslin’ thinking. If you’re working heel, you don’t normally want to do anything that’s going to get a pop out of the crowd–e.g., high flying moves or Cesaro’s giant swing.
But NXT’s a different world. The crowd’s pretty much the same taping to taping, I suspect, and I could see them respecting storyline continuity so far as who’s supposed to be a face and who’s supposed to be a heel regardless of moves. We’ll see next week (along with Kenta’s in ring debut!).
I screwed up and missed the show, but it seems they could easily have a non-heel answer for why Adrian Neville did that.
He challenged all three. He didn’t want any excuses for losing the title. So maybe some people think he shouldn’t have done it, but the only way this match was going to end was with someone beating him, or him retaining his title.
I like these mini-PPVs that NXT is doing, it has a main-event type feel, without making me spend extra money.
I’m happy that the Lucha Dragons won. I miss the high flyers from the WCW days and I think that Kalisto has A LOT of potential in him, plus having Sin Cara there as the wily vet also works well. It’ll be interesting to see how long they keep the titles before they get called up, given that Sin Cara is used to the big stage. Then again, the tag-team division actually seems STRONG now in the WWE so…who knows?
The two squash matches I can’t speak to because I had to do stupid homework and didn’t pay much attention to people I didn’t already like.
My poor poor Bayley! She took a beating from Charlotte and kept on going. This was a good way of making her strong in a loss, plus I think with the rumors that AJ is leaving soon they are going to call Charlotte up. Which is fine because Bayley still needs a little bit of work before she makes it to the big leagues. I’m still madly in love with her though.
I don’t like fatal 4 ways actually because there is too much going on to pay attention to. And I know that, in the way wrestling works, nothing is happening until the end anyway, so I just kinda tune everything out. Each person feuds with the other, there are small partnerships, sudden attacks, blah blah blah. I wouldn’t call the ending a Neville heel turn, I would say it’s more like the beginning of a Neville/Zayn rivalry for the championship (the way it should be). No offense to Breeze, but he just does nothing for me, and Tyson Kidd should be on the main roster.
Overall a good show! Now I can’t wait for Takeover 3: Take it to the bank!
I’m with you, STC. Fatal 4 Ways and Triple Threats have too much resting. One guy gets knocked out of the ring, and he just can’t possibly get back in the act for another 5-10 minutes. At least be like Miz and be obvious that you’re just resting and plan to exploit the next opportunity that comes up. That being said, the 4-man powerbomb-double superplex move looked awesome.
Interesting with Neville doing the heelish. Neville doesn’t really try to spark the crowd in his promos anyway, so it’s not like he’s firmly established as a face. His feud with Sami should be epic, and they’re allowing for both contestants to draw from the Dark Side. It’s not going to be just spot vs spot. There’s going to be some dirty tricks played by both sides.
Respect for Bull went up a notch when he did those off-the-rope headbutts. I guess nobody’s going to mind by now if anybody pulls from Chris Benoit’s playbook. Maybe he’ll feud with Baron Corbin. That should work.
Charlotte is displaying class and not just acting like she’s the only game in town. That’s the way her dad was. He always showed respect for his opponents no matter how much he cheated.
I wonder if Ascension is staying around a little longer to feud with Kenta? Adam Rose and Sin Cara have been straddling the fence between NXT and the main roster, so maybe Ascension will too.
This is interesting. HHH considers NXT a 3rd brand alongside RAW and Smackdown, not a developmental outlet. He plans to have NXT do more touring nationwide. Makes sense to me. I don’t think Neville, Zayn, Breeze, Charlotte, the Ascension, and Enzo & Big Cass would benefit from moving to the main roster, really. Tyson Kidd and Sin Cara’s careers benefited from stepping down to NXT, and main roster jobbers like Justin Gabriel get to perform for more than 2 minutes.
They’ve already added Kenta, Devitt & Steen for indie cred. I’d like to see a reunification of the Motor City Machine Guns in NXT. Those guys put on fantastic tag matches before TNA pissed their careers away. Truth Martini from RoH could be the next Paul Heyman. Adam Cole (no relation to Michael) could be the next CM Punk (minus the tattoos).
How much better is NXT than Raw! It feels like if ECW would have had money back in the 90s, minus the violence.
This is 99.99 percent because RAW is 3 hours long and NXT is a slim and cool 2.
Maybe it’s because I’m older and more jaded (and better at spotting the basic tropes and spots that go into a wrestling show), but I seem to recall WCW being able to book a 3-hour episode of Nitro and keep it action-packed and suspenseful from the beginning up to the climax. I think it all comes down to how well any given episode is written.
Yep, NXT is basically turning into the world’s best-funded indie promotion. That’s fine with me–I’m already in a situation where, while I want these guys to do well, I dread them getting moved up to the main roster. Move Tyler Breeze up to the main roster and he probably turns into Fandango. Move Enzo up to the main roster and he probably turns into Santino. Put Sami Zayn on the main roster and Vince and Kevin Dunn will probably realize that he’s Muslim and turn him into a terrorist. Adrian Neville probably winds up like Kofi Kingston–while he’s not black, he’s got big ears and an accent, so it’s probably almost as bad.
And the women–while it’s a promotion in terms of money and exposure to be on the main roster, it’s a huge step backwards in terms of the work you get to do.
It’s sorta funny–when I got back into wrestling early this year, I was so excited and positive about it. Everything looked great–D-Bry, Cesaro, the Wyatts, the Shield, Barrett. Now Bryan and Barrett are injured (and for reasons completely opaque to me, Barrett is in some sort of black hole) and Cesaro and the Wyatts have been booked into irrelevance. Dean and Seth are pretty much the only real success stories (especially Dean). Reigns is still a work in progress–his booking’s been a little too super-Cena, and he needs to build up his move-set, but there’s no denying he’s got that look and charisma, and his Moves of Doom are suitably bad-ass. Fingers crossed they don’t mess up his build.
Ah well. I guess I’ve just turned into a grumpy internet smark.
Turns out HHH has even bigger plans for NXT than ECW–he wants it to be the next WCW (without the whole bit where WCW crashed and burned). Fingers crossed he’s got enough power to keep you-know-who away from it while he’s building it.
Well, he hasn’t noticed that Rusev is Muslim.
Yet.
(Also, are we sure Zayn is Muslim? I know he’s of Syrian descent and speaks Arabic, but I assumed he came from an Arabic Christian background.)
:eek: You mean he’s a sleeper cell terrorist? /gasp :eek:
Or put him in a tag team with Barrett called “The Ugly Blokes” with a stereotypical British brawling hooligan gimmick.
Adrian Neville is actually a high flyer, unlike Kofi. If bugs the hell out of me that he gets grouped into the people that do moonsaults and shooting star presses and all of those moves, when he never gets upside down. He’ll jump REALLY high, then do a punch. He’ll jump REALLY high, then do a cross body. The whole time, the announcers are keep talking about how big of a high flyer he is. Wrong.
I love me some Kofi, and he eternally has my respect because he will be put in any/every ladder match and do wonderfully. There are superstars I’ve never seen to a ladder match since that shit hurts for real and Kofi, while not even being a top-billed star, does them all the time and without fear
ETA: Also now only 4 days away from my NXT house show!! I’ll report back with all the deets when it comes
Does one have to spin to be a high flyer?
No, but they seem to bill him as THE high flyer in the company, when there’s a whole locker room full of people that do way riskier and flashier moves as part of their normal routine. I went from seeing Macho Man and Snuka jumping, to HBK doing moonsaults to the outside and jumping from tall ladders, to Jeff Hardy jumping off of anything he could jump from, but Kofi is THE high flyer because he does a punch from the top rope? I don’t think so.