In case you missed the State Of The Blog, I’ll be breaking the moratorium on the WWE Blood Money shows from Saudi Arabia next year. For those wondering why I refer to those shows as such… well, look up the details regarding .
Up until this point, the only Saudi show that I saw was the first one and I thought it was a largely house show-ish affair. Mind you, I had no real intention of watching the show (mostly due to lack of interest and less due to any moralistic reasoning), but I had bed-ridden and it was on, so I ended up watching it and never bothered with the rest. The murder was what prompted the Blood Money label (and for all intents and purposes, that moniker is sticking whether anyone likes it or not), but lack of interest (as well as word of mouth regarding the subpar quality of these shows) was what kept me from watching these shows… and given the years these early shows took place and how horrid a lot of the proper shows were, skipping these early showings didn’t require much effort on my part.
However, with recent Saudi shows actually being treated like proper PPVs or PLES and not glorified house shows, it goes without saying that sooner or later, I may give these Saudi shows the time of day. Not fully embracing the shows, but mostly case by case, like any of the shows. With that in mind, it’s only fitting that I open that particular Pandora’s Box a little early by diving into WWE’s second Saudi show, the inaugural Crown Jewel 2018 event.
World Cup Of Wrestling Tournament
Oh shit… I forgot this was the show that featured the “World Cup” of Wrestling tournament. I guess we may as well get these out of the way before we cover the non-tourney matches.
First Round Match: Rey Mysterio defeated Randy Orton via rollup to advance to the semifinals. Abnormally short match, but at least it made sense for Rey to win with a fluke roll-up.
First Round Match: The Miz defeated Jeff Hardy in a rather short yet dull match to advance to the semifinals.
First Round Match: Seth Rollins defeated Bobby Lashley in another short, dull match to advance to the semifinals.
First Round Match: Dolph Ziggler defeated Kurt Angle in yet another short, dull match to advance to the semifinals. Sadly, Angle has seen better days and Dolph tried his damndest here.
Semifinal Match: The Miz defeated Rey Mysterio to advance to the finals.
Semifinal Match: Dolph Ziggler defeated Seth Rollins with outside interference from Drew McIntyre to advance to the finals. Again, short, kind of dull, and honestly, not a strong showing for either man. On the bright side, this wasn’t an Iron Man match that the crowd was largely bored with, so that’s something in their favor.
Before we dive into the finals of this thing, let’s get the non-tourney matches out of the way.
Tag-Team Champions The Bar (Sheamus and Cesaro) defeated The New Day (Big E and Kofi Kingston) to retain the titles. New Day comes out on a magic carpet gimmick throwing pancakes to the audience. I would like to point out that both members of the New Day will eventually be WWE Champion. Anyway, this was a perfectly acceptable tag team match, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise considering you’ve got two perfectly capable tag-teams who know each other well enough to put on a compelling match. I’d like to think that they’ve had better matches than this elsewhere.
WWE Champion AJ Styles defeated Samoa Joe to retain the title. Fairly decent ten-minute match that I wish had gone on a little longer, but they did enough that this ended up being the best match of the night. Still, I’m sure you can find better AJ/Joe matches in the ol’ TNA archives.
So… Roman Reigns finally defeated Brock Lesnar to win the prestigious WWE Universal Red Toy Belt at Summerslam and we were all set for that long-awaited Roman run… except Roman had to vacate the belt due to his real-life leukemia, which was all it took to get people to stop booing him. So now we have Braun Strowman (2018 MiTB winner) facing off against the former champion, Brock Lesnar, to compete for the vacant belt. One would assume that the logical thing to do is to have Braun go over big, win the belt, and give him the run that you would have given Roman while Brock fucked off at his farm until the next big payday.
Well… it’s 2018 and we don’t do things logically.
Brock Lesnar defeated Braun Strowman in a little over three minutes to regain the vacant Red Belt and go off on another sabbatical while also killing off whatever credibility Strowman had as a monster. The really sad thing is that Strowman was the kind of guy that WWE management liked; big, larger-than-life strongman. With the right kind of booking, Strowman could’ve been a major force and for a time, he was that… and then this happened and whatever aura he had before was pretty much killed off. And his booking afterwards never got better, as he’d be treated as a bit of a joke and portrayed as a bit of a fool before he was eventually let go.
Nowadays, Braun Strowman is having a much better run than he did the first time around, but all that meant is you wish he had this run years ago when he was much younger and durable. A bit of irony that WWE is often seen as the land of giants, and yet when given actual giants, they have no fucking clue on what to do with them.
After this, we have the finals for the World Cup Of Wrestling tournament between The Miz and Dolph Ziggler. Apparently, if Miz doesn’t win the tournament, he’ll be fired… given that Miz is still with WWE today, that clearly hasn’t happened. So you figure that Miz is going to win the tournament and he’ll be the best in the world… just to piss off all the purist wrestling fans. However, as the match is taking place, Miz took a…………dive and hurt his knee. The ref checks on Miz and decides he can’t compete due to injury, which makes Miz made because he claims to never get injured. For those needing context, Miz and Daniel Bryan Danielson had a feud previously where Bryan accused Miz of wrestling a “safe” style while Miz accused Bryan of wrestling wrecklessly and constantly getting injured… considering how often Bryan has been on the shelf in recent years, it’s hard to argue that point. Also, what, exactly, is a “safe” style in wrestling?
So the ref is about to declare Dolph the winner when Shane McMahon comes out and decides that HE is going to take Miz’s place in the match… which, technically speaking, means that Miz isn’t going to win the tournament and as such, he should be fired… again, given that Miz is still in WWE today, that clearly hasn’t happened.
And so in the tournament finals, SHANE MCMAHON defeated Dolph Ziggler to win the tournament, to win the World Cup Of Wrestling, and to earn the right to call himself THE BEST IN THE WORLD.
So, to recap this, we’ve had this day-long tournament of short, underwhelming matches with eight WWE Superstars – presumably four from each of the two major brands, so we can have some of that brand supremacy bullshit that was a thing at the time – presumably built up over several weeks of television… only to have the whole thing won by SHANE MCMAHON. Who, mind you, was the general manager of Smackdown at the time… and was also not part of the tournament.
You know… I’ve come to realize that more than the actual, real-world controversies surrounding this show, more than the moral controversies and hypocrisies, more than anything of the sort, the reason I skipped out on this show all the years was mostly because I knew I would hate this. It’s been six years since this show took place and this show somehow managed to piss me off so much. There are seldom few eras of WWE that I’d go back and rewatch that genuinely irritate and anger me as much as this did. 2003 WWE came fairly close, but we got some good stuff out of this. I can’t say that much for this and what makes this sadder is that it’s not even the worst of it. If anything, it gets worse before it eventually gets better.
And we haven’t even touched the main event of this shitshow.
D-Generation X (McSon-In-Law and a bald Shawn Michaels) defeated The Brothers Of Destruction (Undertaker and Kane) in a long, plodding pile of shit match. Some would argue a lot of this was due to injuries suffered; I’d counter-argue that they shouldn’t have had the match in the first place. Have a bad match due to injury every so often? Fine, I can accept that, but when that becomes a regular fucking occurrence and they still keep having this matches, that’s when any and all sympathy goes out the window. I’m certainly not going to be sympathetic to another match after two of the men featured have already had TWO matches previously that were dubbed “end of an era” or some bullshit like that. It’s not. This was slow, plodding, laying around like limp dicks, trading finishers that somehow look worse than [REDACTED] taking a Stone Cold Stunner, quite a bit of talking… apparently, there was a point where Kane’s mask and wig fell off, but I guess that was deleted from the replay. If only they deleted this whole match from the replay… hell, DELETE THIS WHOLE SHOW!
This is the match that Shawn Michaels came out of retirement for.
This match.
I haven’t seen Ric Flair’s Last Match… and I don’t particularly want to… not after having watched this… but I will say this much; when the best worker in the match is the guy who was largely retired for eight years and is STILL a shadow of his former self, that’s a pretty sad state of affairs.
This was fucking horrible.
This may even be worse than Bushwhackers vs. Sheik/Volkoff at Heroes Of Wrestling. At least that match was SHORT.
Fuck this show.
Hopefully, the other Saudi shows are way the fuck better than this.
I’m hoping a fool’s hope, aren’t I?
dtm666 