Summerslam thoughts.

OK, so, Summerslam.

Overall, I thought it was a pretty disappointing show. Whilst nothing was bad or offensive, I don't think anything on the card rose above average or is particularly memorable.

Antonio Cesaro going over Santino for the US title is a good move. The belt deserve more than some comedy involving Aksana distracting the Cobra, and Cesaro hits his package driver for the win. Cesaro is a decent wrestler. Now they just need to book him into some decent mid-card matches to make the title seem valuable again. He also needs to dump the girl and just concentrate on wrestling. The former Claudio Castignoli doesn't need her.

Ziggles .v. Jericho. Good contest and good back and forth. May have been the best of the night. Showed them both off well. Jericho eventually gets the win with the proper version of the Walls of Jericho. I guess that makes sense, as there's nowhere for Jericho to go if he loses, but I do think they need now to play Ziggler very carefully. Unless they are playing the long game with his title shot, or unless they will hotshot the title switch in the next couple of weeks, they need to ensure he's not lost in the shuffle.

Daniel Bryan .v. Kane was probably as decent a match as you will get out of Kane these days, though that might not be saying much. They played that Bryan had never beaten him, and that it was a surprise lucky move than allowed Bryan to roll him up for the pin, but I'm not sure it was needed given how over Bryan is. Kane smashes stuff up backstage after the contest, and throws Josh Matthews into some metal pipes...as you do.

The Miz .v. Rey Mysterio (dressed in dodgy Batman suit) for the IC title. This was actually a decent contest, with Miz showing the new more aggressive attitude that the WWE seem to be selling him on. Mysterio's offence is still limited though, and I am not even slightly interested in watching him. So I was very pleased when Miz escaped the 619 and hit the skull crushing finale to retain the belt. Clearly the WWE want to send Rey a message after his drug suspension. But again, this was a match which could have been on RAW TBH.

Kofi and Truth .v. the Prime Time Players was a non-event for me. Titus is still as green as Kermit's bum and it shows. Truth dances around too much when he should be on offence, and I'm just not interested in seeing any of them work. The match would only have made sense if the Players had won the belts.......so of course they jobbed clean to the champions.

Sheamus .v. Alberto was another match that was perfectly decent, if not spectacular. But the ending ruined it really. These two work pretty decent stiff matches, but as we have said before, they have done very little to really get Sheamus over as champion or make him stand out. Keeping in mind that he won the title in 18 seconds by surprise attacking the champion, he needs clean decisive victories to cement him. He didn't get one. Instead, Ricardo distracts the referee and tosses Alberto a shoe. It misses him and Sheamus catches it, nailing Alberto in the head and getting the pin. But to add insult to injury, Alberto had his feet on the ropes! It really doesn't make your face champion look good to have to use those tactics to get a cheap win.

Penultimate match was the WWE title match. CM Punk appears in Bret Hart tribute trunks in pink and black. Big Show dominates the match until Punk and Cena double team him down. Usual three man match dynamics take over at this point. Two people brawl, one rests and makes the save on the pin, rinse, repeat. It was all pretty fine. Maybe a little plodding, but it was working, until eventually Punk downs Show and slaps on a variation submission that's half Hells Gate half Anaconda Vice. At the same Cena grabs Show's head and applies his chinlock. Big Show taps and both of them claim the win. But AJ comes down and restarts the match. Cena manages to nail the Attitude Adjustment on Show, but Punk bundles him out and gets the sneaky pin. That all works for Punk's tweener character I suppose, so fair enough.

And then the main event. Really expected this to be a violent brutal rip-snorter. And it wasn't. Some punches and shots were thrown (HHH marked up one of Lesnar's eyes) but overall it was a pretty mediocre affair. There was just no real intensity when you consider the build. The story of the match was Brock trying to get the Kimura lock on HHH and Trips trying to fight him off. But Brock working an arm is not what the crowd wanted to see. They wanted to see some brutal beat downs and the two of them smashing the furniture up. It just didn't live up to the billing at all. Also, for me, Brock sold HHH's offence far too much. I said before that they need Lesnar to look like a monster to get any payday out of his final match at Mania next year. Here, he didn't. I can sort of see why they might do it - they don't want WWE guys to look inferior to UFC guys, but for me HHH wasn't going mental enough for Brock to get beaten down the way he was. In the end, they trade finishers before HHH eventually hits a second pedigree. Brock essentially no-sells it by instantly turning the pin attempt into the Kimura lock, and HHH eventually taps out.

We then get 10 minutes of HHH in the ring apologising to the crowd, making it seem very much like this will be his last match. If HHH took a bullet for the team, fine, but Brock should have been allowed to kill him.

I find that weird. Hearing that Brock/HHH was not very good.

I had been listening to a radio show at the time, do their own play-by-play.

Now, normally the guys that I was listening to, on this show, are the typical "bored and jaded with the product, WWE is barely decent anymore, I feel like i'm outgrowing their stuff, this isn't what I enjoy watching anymore and I just hardly care, sometimes I wonder why we even cover this anymore" kind of guys.

And.... they were absolutely blown away by the main event, suddenly acting like it was one of the better matches they'd seen in the last 10 years, saying that Triple H was battered and nearly decimated by struggling with everything in him, and a monstrous, street fighting epic, where he barely survived Lesnar, and that it was absolutely one of the best 5-star "Shawn and Taker" level matches that they've seen in a long time, and were praising it endlessly as their show went off. They were praising the storytelling, the brutality of it, the sheer level of commitment of Lesnar and HHH, like it was the second coming of Jesus.

So it's weird, the reaction I heard on a radio show live calling the match as it played, seemed to turn two incredibly long time, old-school wrestling nerd guys, who seem to hate on the product whenever they can lately into hyper super-fans again.

I didn't see it myself, but i'm just surprised by witnessing two entirely poles-apart opinions from different people about the same thing in less than a day.

It's not that i'm discounting either you over them or them over you, one way or the other... I'd think that now i'd DEFINITELY have to see this for myself to be sure... I just think it's so weird to see two opinions in such a short time like night and day.

In other words, It's kind of like that "Dark Knight Rises Sucks/Dark Knight Rises Is The Best Of The Three Movies" argument that's been really dividing people lately.

For my money it was nowhere near Shawn/Taker either as a fight or an entertainment spectacle. It wasn't even HHH's best match this year, or Brock's for that matter. Brock may have been trrying to work more of a WWE friendly style, but in doing so it killed the intensity he had in his match with Cena.

Let me give you the most glaring example. In the middle of the match, this intense, personal, grudge-laiden, no rules, fight to the death match, Brock Lesnar went for a roll-up on HHH.

Let me say that again. Brock Lesnar went for a roll-up on HHH.

That tells you all that was wrong with the match.

Incidentally, I am not alone in my view. Every review on the UKFF so far has slated the main event.

Hmm.

Well, personally speaking, I had most of my interest (for what it was) on the title match with Cena/Punk/show.

I was happy as a pig in shit to hear that Punk won.

Especially seeing as he finally gained back his edge again. I was starting to get sick of Punk's role as a pandering, John Cena-lite who wasn't outspoken anymore.

And then he GTS'd the Rock, and, without turning fully heel, gained back all the respect from me again, and made me mark out for him again.

So, I was begging and hoping that he wasn't going to lose the title, after Punk is finally relevant, again. Especially as he JUST got done in a WWE '13 press conference talking about how "it only makes sense that i'm the champion, the top guy AND on the cover of the game."

It immediately made me realize that if he lost that title the same night that he delivered these words, that it devalues him quite a bit, if this game with him and his symbol plastered all over it, doesn't ship with him as the champ.

Half because I was a Punk Mark that was getting sick of him, and suddenly am a Punk Mark again, and half realizing that their marketing actually stands to take a hit if their cover athlete suddenly loses the big one.

I also LOVE that not only did Cena not go over, but he finally wasn't even the last match of the night. But he was the second to last match, and that Punk retained, not him.

I think WWE is finally realizing that they can sell Cena shirts whether he wins or loses, and whether he's the main event or not. But that Punk is still valued to enough of a degree to keep his momentum that he's obviously working hard to keep.

Or maybe it was just Punk's turn after he lost at the last two Summerslams...

And DKR...awesome...see arguement ended!

A friend of mine made an interesting observation on Facebook. When HHH was the champion, he demanded and argued that the WWE title match always had to go on last. Regardless of what it was up against it was the title match and had to go last.

He argued this even when it meant the title match had to follow Rock .v. Hogan at Mania 18. Clearly that was the main event of that show, and the title match suffered as a result. But HHH didn't care- he was on last.

Now ten years later, he isn't the champ, and yet his non-title match with Lesnar has to go on last....

Well to be fair on that, I was also listening to some guys 3 days before SummerSlam (the same from the ratio show in fact) talk about how, after that match was built up more strongly than every other match on the card, there's no way it couldn't go last, so they hoped and predicted that it would. And when the PPV aired, it did.

Mr Shand...how you, of all people can talk about the title match going last...