The reviews I’ve been seeing have been tearing it apart, but I thought it was one of the better ones. Last year I didn’t care for Undertaker and HHH, but I thought they stole the show this year. I always like a good hardcore match, and this one brought it. There was even blood. The Undertaker’s back looked like hamburger meat by the time that chair was mangled.
Punk and Jericho put on a good match that involved a lot of pure wrestling. I would like Jericho to go back to his old style from the late 90’s. I’m a fan of flips and lots of high flying moves. I may just be remembering through nostalgia, but he seemed to do it more back then. I also prefer long tights and long hair over the current trend of everyone dressing and looking exactly the same.
I also enjoyed the Team match and Orton and Kane. I didn’t expect much from Rock and Cena, as I’ve never cared for either, but it wasn’t bad. It was better than the highly overrated Rock and Hogan match 10 years ago. The Divas match wasn’t even that bad.
There were things I didn’t care for though. I expected Daniel Bryan and Sheamus to set the tone of the show. From the reviews I’m reading, this match did set the tone for a lot of people and they never did recover from it. While I didn’t let this match ruin the whole night for me, I did expect a hot opener that might last 15-20 minutes. I definitely didn’t expect an 18 second squash. I guess he can now berate AJ tomorrow, but I don’t like WM to start storylines, I like it to finish them.
The next thing that I didn’t like was Brodus Clay. The first time I saw him, I thought he was funny. It got old watching him dance and squash people really fast though. When I heard his music, I thought it was dumb that he was going to get a squash match at WM before the main event. Wrong, what happened was even worse.
I thought there were a lot of production errors for this to be Wrestlemania. I don’t usually notice them on other PPVs, but there were problems with camera feeds and the pryo.
The only problem pretty much everybody had with WM was the first match. (There had been rumors that the early matches would end quickly to give a lot of time to HHH/Untertaker, Punk/Jericho, and Rock/Cena. I was a little surprised the 10-man tag match wasn’t an elimination match, considering how important it was in terms of storyline.)
Most of the other complaints are not so much about the matches but the results. For example, it makes no sense to have Maria Menounos pin Beth Phoenix (who is considered the best “active” female WWE wrestler until Kharma returns), and a number of people (myself included) thought Rock would lose to Cena as a way of “passing the torch” and “officially signifying this as the Cena Era.” (There were a few complaints that The Rock got tired in his match surprisingly quickly.) Some people see the result as the start of Cena becoming a “bad guy” in the near future.
Another complaint being made: Brock Lesnar was there (or at least in Miami), so some people expected him to be involved somehow. He’ll probably show up on Raw the next night; one possibility is, they’ve penciled in “Rock vs. Brock” for next year’s WrestleMania.
A lot of it was lame. Pretty much what I expected though. They ruined the Sheamus/Bryan match by cutting it down to a blink of an eye, but somehow they found time for dancing fat ass grannies. The end of Rock/Cena was really lame. Rocky used to be a better wrestler than Cena will ever be, but we didn’t see it there last night. There wasn’t much art in any of the matches, but that’s modern wrestling, no reason to expect it would have been different last night. Year by year the grandest stage of them all approaches utter mediocrity.
I think it was the best Mania in years. The Sheamus/Bryan squash has backfired, Sheamus is getting boos and Bryan is getting cheered even louder now. Punk/Jericho and Taker/HHH were both great and Rock/Cena was okay, about as good as I figured. Overall a really good show.
I agree that it was one of the best in years. Internet wrestling fans are notorious complainers about pretty much everything, so the fact that I mostly see praise for this show says something. The three ‘main events’ all delivered I think. Of course it’s hard to not shine after last year’s show, which was truly one of the worst.
I did like the Brodus Clay segment right before the main event. In a night full of overly dramatic proclamations such as ‘end of an era’ it was nice to have it before the most hyped match in a industry built on hype. It was a reminder that wrestling is and always was ridiculous. There was some poetry in that for me.
Not sure why they called Taker/HHH the end of an era. Their feud might be over, but they all three will still be around after this. HBK will probably ref a few more matches and show his face once a year at least. Taker probably has at least one or two Manias left, and HHH just signed a four year deal guaranteeing he will at least still compete until 2016. Besides, there were other Attitude Era stars there. I guess it was just a nice tagline.
I don’t even consider HHH part of the same era as HBK and Taker. He came in several years after both of them were already established main eventers. I’d put HHH in the same era as Kane, The Big Show, Mark Henry, and several others who are still around.
They place those 3 guys and Rock all in the same timeframe. Rock and HHH are in the same era but Taker and HBK belong to the stars of the lean years, such as Bret, Razor Ramon and Diesel.