Well, it took them four shows, but WWE finally managed to get a women’s match booked at a Saudi Arabia show. And I’ll get this out of the way; Nattie vs. Lacey Evans was fairly ho-hum and unexciting as a match in and of itself, but at the very least, you’ve got that female foot in the door of the gloriously progressive kingdom of Saudi Arabia and that deserves some kind of credit if nothing else.
As for the rest of the show… holy fuck… and there’s also the one with Fiend Vs. Goldberg, which would turn out to be the last WWE PPV event before the world went to shit with COVID… but that’s next week. Let’s get this fucking thing out of the way.
WWE Champion Brock Lesnar defeated Cain Velasquez via submission in a less than three minute match that saw Cain do a couple moves before Brock caught him in a kimura for the submission win. To provide some additional context, this show took place about a month after Brock Lesnar ended Kofi Kingston’s WWE Championship reign in seconds flat so that they can build towards a Brock vs. Cain match in Saudi Arabia… and THIS is the match they gave you. People bitch about Kofi’s reign ending the way it did, but Kofi losing the belt in seconds is nothing. If anything, it should have opened the door to potentially intriguing story ideas that built upon that loss, similar to how Daniel Bryan Danielson’s loss to Sheamus in seconds flat at Wrestlemania ended up giving him a bit of a career and popularity boost afterwards that would lead to his eventual (short-lived) WWE title run years later.
That didn’t happen with Kofi. After losing the title, Kofi was back to doing the New Day thing and touting the power of positivity. It was almost as if the spring and summer months of Kofimania never happened. Kofi never evolved and grew from that loss. He went back to square one and was none the better for it. Meanwhile, on the flip side of the coin, the much hyped Brock vs. Cain match that Kofimania was sacrificed for turned out to be a total squash that made people wonder why they even bothered with the match in the first place. And Cain would be gone from WWE not long after.
So yeah, don’t be upset that Kofi lost the WWE title in seconds to Brock Lesnar. Be upset by the fact that the loss meant nothing in the long run and all that hype was a waste of everyone’s time… anyway, next up…
The Good Brothers win some tag-team gauntlet match thing to be declared THE BEST TAG TEAM IN THE WORLD or something… they’d be gone from WWE the following year, so that was a waste of time.
Local home country boy Mansoor (before he was a Maximum Male Model or whatever they’re called these days) defeated Cesaro in a pretty good showcase for the young lad. Sure, you could make the argument that he was there with Cesaro/Claudio, who is always at the top of his game even when he isn’t at the top of his game (I’m sure that makes sense somewhere), but that’s be a disservice of Mansoor, who got to show off what he was capable of and turned out to be a fine talent himself. Hey, for what this was, this was a damned fine match and I was entertained by it. I’d be shocked, but of course, you’re going to make the hometown guy look good. Why would you do something stupid like the opposite?
Oh wait…
Lineal Boxing Champion Of The World Or Something Or Other TYSON FURY (he’s a boxer, see) defeated Braun Strowman via countout. This is clearly a spectacle, but I’d be lying if I said this was boring. Tyson Fury was lively out there and looked good for what little he did and Braun was the perfect meat bag to put in front of the Lineal Boxing Universal… something or other. They should do more with Fury if he’s up to it. I’d take him over Logan Paul any day of the week.
United States champion AJ Styles defeated Humberto to retain the title. Humberto won a battle royal in the pre-show so that he can get a title shot and do the job to AJ. It’s a perfectly acceptable, but largely uneventful house show match. Nothing special with this one.
Nattie defeated Lacey Evans via submission in the first ever WWE women’s match in the gloriously benevolent and progressive kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was a match with both women wearing plain black body suits to cover most of their body and plain t-shirts with some semblance of design so that you could distinguish one blonde girl from the other blonde girl. Again, nothing special, but you’ve got something for WWE to make into a bigger deal than it actually is, so… yeah, whatever.
Team Hogan (Roman Reigns, Ali, Shorty G, Rusev & Ricochet) defeated Team Flair (Bobby Lashley, Shinsuke Nakamura, Randy Orton, Drew McIntyre & King Corbin) in a multi-man tag match in which ten WWE Superstars on the current roster are fighting on behalf of two WWE old-timers who would rather be wrestling in a match than being the pointmen in a largely forgettable tag match that will be forgotten about not soon afterwards. I do appreciate that Team Hogan has at least one black man on his team in an effort to try and erase Hogan’s racist comments that got him blackballed from WWE in the first place… I mean, they failed, but goddammit, they at least tried or something.
I really don’t care, either way.
And in the main event, The Fiend Bray Wyatt defeated Red Belt Champion Seth Rollins in a boring match under red lights to win the title and put Seth out of his misery and on a path of no return that would lead him to a billion gimmick changes and an even worse fashion sense. Yes, I’m sure people were happy to see Bray Wyatt get another title run – even if it is with the silly toy belt – but the match still fucking sucked. The red lighting still looked like shit, it was hard to see anything, and it took too goddamned long to get to the end result that people felt should have happened a month ago. (I’m not one of those people, but whatever…)
Yeah, so I’d say that this was a better show than what came before by virtue of the great Mansoor/Cesaro match, which probably deserved to be on a better show than where it ended up on. I want to say that we’re at least moving upwards in quality with these Blood Money shows, but my hopes aren’t particularly high here.
dtm666 