Some quick thoughts on NXT TAKEOVER:
1) I didn’t think I could love the Vaudevillains more, but now I do. They have clearly leveled up their in-ring work, and I rather like how they play as faces, I wasn’t expecting that. The Blue Pants bit was also a nice touch, I like her more than I should. 🙂
2) The final main event of Finn Balor vs. Kevin Owens was very good. It was a solid ladder match, with some good back and forth action, and a nice exciting finish. But it wasn’t great. It lacked a certain intangible factor, a certain level of storytelling. I enjoyed the hell out of it, but this is not a match that we’ll be talking about again years from now.
3) On the other hand, the other main event of Bayley vs. Sasha Banks was AWESOME. There was a story being told, the in-ring action was damn good, we got invested in Bayley’s struggle, and the payoff was magnificent, with an absolutely brutal finishing sequence and a heartwarming post-match celebration. My only quibble is that Bayley sometimes forgot to sell the “broken hand”, which did stretch the suspension of disbelief a bit, and that I worry that Sasha wasn’t made to look strong enough here. But that’s hairsplitting.
As has been said, SummerSlam has a tough act to follow.
I can’t plus this enough
There is no loving Blue Pants too much.
Baylee and Banks owned this show. I honestly haven’t seen that kind of story build-up and payoff in a long, long time. Kudos to all involved.
It reminded me of the Zayn/Cesaro match from awhile back — the tough veteran who doesn’t respect the nice/innocent kid, but the nice/innocent kid digs deep and finds the will to rise to a higher level. Now in that Zayn/Cesaro match, Zayn lost the match, but won the moral victory of making Cesaro acknowledge him as a real contender for the first time. Bayley went one step further and won both the moral victory and the literal victory.
In Baylee’s favor, they had already booked her losing title matches like 3 times after winning big #1 contender matches. For Zayn, those were simply build-up matches, but this match was the big payoff in Baylee’s story, and even after years of seeing those kinds of stories done, this one was pulled off so well, I marked out for it anyway. Plus, I am a sucker for the Belly-to-Belly Suplex being pushed as a dangerous finisher again.
Plus, Baylee only selling 75% of an injury is 100% more than almost anybody else does.
I thought the card was perfectly put together. Every match was different, had a different purpose and they were all good in relation to what they were doing, if that makes sense.
Look at it this way – all the babyface’s won, which is huge “typical WWE booking for the big show” thing, but in context of each match each victory made sense*. I didn’t even notice until someone pointed it out on twitter after the show.
*except maybe Liger, but he’s goddam Liger so I can’t really complain. Hope this is a way to launch a new arc for Tyler Breeze tho. Dude deserves to be headlining these shows by now.
I do like Breeze a lot. If anything, I thought he contributed more to that match than Liger did. I love me some Jushin Thunder Liger, but he looked off his game and sloppy — especially that last Liger Bomb. Granted, he’s fifty years old, but it still seemed off.
I cannot wait to see more of Apollo Crews. It’s so rare to see someone combine power moves with high-flying — the last one I can think of that really pulled that off was Bam Bam Bigelow.
About Nathan’s observation that all the babyfaces won: I definitely noticed that as I was watching the show, so by the time we got to the women’s championship match, I figured either Banks or Owens had to be winning, if not both of them.
B-Stroud writes frequently that pro wrestling is at its best when it genuinely surprises us; I wonder if the first four matches were intentionally booked to seed some doubt about what otherwise looked like a lock to be Bayley’s night.