Welcome to the “I’m back since WWE basically took a vacation with booking shows, I did too” edition of The Wrestling List.
Smackdown opens up Friday night from Memphis with a women’s triple threat tag team match with Sasha Banks and Bayley vs. Lacey and Dana vs. Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross. Trash talking promos to open up the show with all the teams before we get to the match. Solid match here. Lacey nailed the woman’s right on Sasha and Dana nailed the senton to follow it for the pinball. Elias is in the ring doing a New Year’s song about what he hopes for in 2020. I laughed at his line of if Shane McMahon returns, please send him to Raw. LOL. I did also laugh at his line last week about how thankful that he was to be on Smackdown where he didn’t have to be on Raw with the wedding. Next is Dash Wilder taking on Chad Gable. Gable gets the win by tap out. Dawson runs in right after and they double team Gable. Then, enter the surprise. Sheamus makes his return and to the ring to go after The Revival. The Revival bails out getting away from Sheamus. Sheamus then kicks Gable to the mat. New Day opens up hour two. It will be Kofi taking on The Miz. Kofi gets the win. A frustrated Miz attacks Kofi after the match and Big E runs to break it up. The story of this is that The Fiend has completely distracted The Miz and pushed him over the edge. Odd that the crowd completely turned on The Miz after he attacked Kofi as the crowd was booing and chanting at him on the ramp. Miz yells back saying really, after everything I have done??? Hello Memphis, the story of this thing is that he has lost his mind cause of The Fiend. LOL. Maybe they turn Miz back heel. Cathy Kelley here as she interviews Daniel Bryan and Roman Reigns. They talk Royal Rumble about the future with the WWE championship. Bryan says he is winning the belt. Roman says he is winning the Rumble and then it will be them at Mania. Cathy then goes to talk to The Miz. Instead of The Miz opening the dressing room door, it is John Morrison making his official on TV return saying The Miz has nothing else to say. Corey Graves says well, we have heard rumblings of John Morrison returning to WWE. Yeah Corey, WWE officially announced it weeks ago. Maybe if you’d get your attention off of being a jerk and ripping on Mauro for no reason, you’d know that. LOL.Can you tell that I cam completely over that guy? LOL. Heavy Machinery member Otis taking on Drew Gulak. Otis with a quick win. Just not into Heavy Machinery. I wasn’t when they were in NXT either. Braun Strowman is next taking on Cesaro. Cesaro’s entrance looks like he is a warrior from the year 2300 with all the lights and effects. LOL. Very cool though. Strowman has to do battle with the distraction of Sami and Nakamura throughout. Strowman wins the match. After the match, Nakamura puts Strowman down with a kick. Main event time with Roman Reigns and Daniel Bryan against Corbin and Ziggler. The Fiend arrives as the match nears the end. Daniel Bryan goes after him on the floor but The Fiend gets the best of him laying him out with the claw. The lights go out and The Fiend is gone. Michael Cole: where did he go? He’s under the ring Michael Cole. LOL. Reigns comes over to check on Bryan but gets attacked by Corbin and Ziggler. They get the handcuffs out and the dog food ready to dump dog food on him again. Ugh, this cartoon silliness again. The Usos then make their return running out to save their cousin. They take out Corbin and Ziggler and get Roman back up on his feet as the show ends. Ehhh, show was it was.
On to Raw. I’ve been sick this week so I just watched last night instead of live typing thoughts as I watched. Just overall thoughts. Ehh, it is what it is. Brock getting announced as competing in the Royal Rumble while champion is an interesting twist. He will also be entering at number one. There just isn’t the buzz going into the Rumble like we had last year. There was momentum on a few stars last year especially Becky Lynch and it just feels like there isn’t momentum on anyone this year. So, WWE is going to have to really work at making what is arguably the second biggest event of the year into a big happening. It almost feels like that with there being so little momentum built with current stars that they may to rely on surprises from the past. The Rey and Andrade stuff was solid last night. Am I the only one that when Rey gets his mask pulled off that shrugs, it’s just the guy from the No Limit Soldiers. LOL. That is a 1999 WCW reference obviously. Big Show return last night was a surprise. He turns so many times that I was actually watching wondering if they were going to put him with Rollins and AOP. LOL. I expected Charlotte and Sarah Logan to be mostly a squash and it wasn’t. Instead, they had Sarah really stand up to her and even mock Charlotte. I thought that did good for Sarah going into the Rumble. Use that to build some momentum in her for the Rumble match in a few weeks. Whew, that Riott Squad has struggled since they broke it up for whatever insane reason. Sarah has hardly been on TV. Liv Morgan lost her uniqueness and now just kind of blends in with the rest of the women since they rebooted her character. Wish that when Ruby Riott gets back from injury that they will just put them all back together. Very underrated group and I say that as someone that wasn’t popping cheering for them as favorites. I say it as someone that just watched and saw their skill level and saw how unique and different that they were. I like that Aleister and Buddy seems to be continuing. They are just having awesome matches every time.
The next Steve Austin Broken Skull Sessions interview has been announced as the guest will be Kane. That will be a fun interview.
I didn’t watch the Lana and Lashley wedding. I boycotted Raw last week. I refused to even watch that show with it being built around that.
Did you catch security taking down someone in the ring last night after the AJ match. Whoops!!! They accidentally took down the actor that was playing the reverend that was set to marry Lashley and Lana. A guy in a suit got in the ring and you could see security jump on him. Somebody didn’t communicate somewhere to the security staff about him cause they took him down as he was just going to the ring for his segment. I’m actually surprised that doesn’t happen more often. I will watch these run ins through the crowd sometimes and wonder how the communication goes with security on when they know someone is coming. So, someone involved in the show got taken down last night.
The Miz will be the guest on tonight’s WWE Backstage on FS1.
AEW was the only show live this past Wednesday night as NXT aired taped matches and the awards winners. I didn’t even bother watching NXT since the show was going to be that. AEW had a significant bump up in ratings going up to 967,000 viewers which was up from the previous 683,000 viewers that they did two weeks before. NXT did 548,000 viewers. I noticed that AEW seemed to be acknowledging that they had messed up on the end of their previous show. That Dark Order close to the show for their last Dynamite show in 2019 was bad. It was universally ripped apart. There was also something that I didn’t even catch live when it happened cause I probably had my head down typing as I was watching. We had the moment with the one wrestler that was throwing what might be the worst punches ever as he was on top of Dustin Rhodes openly punching the mat instead of Dustin. That clip went viral fast. To say that AEW closed 2019 on a low note would be an understatement. As the show opened last week, you could tell that AEW had a feel of ok, we need to pick it up and get going again. They have to get momentum going in 2020. I like Darby Allin. I think that guy has star power on him. Fun gimmick. Good music. I don’t know how long his in ring career is going to be with his daredevil style but he’s fun to watch. Cody and Arn Anderson is an interesting pairing with a Rhodes and an Anderson. Arn is going to be Cody’s “coach”. AEW had the mess-up moment last week with the women’s title match. They had hyped the women’s title match with Statlander getting the title shot…..only for them to learn that she was booked somewhere else on New Year’s night. I don’t know how you let something like that happen. I kept waiting for them to say something about it on TV last week but they completely ignored it and just had the four way instead plugging the other match for this week. They did announce it on Twitter about Statlander but they completely said nothing about the match they pushed so heavy on TV. Just a hey, it’s a four way for the title. What happened to the other match? Hey, we have this four way for the title. LOL. Tazz was solid on commentary for the night taking Tony’s place as Tony had a previous job commitment for the night. Tazz is very underrated as an announcer. I like him and JR being reunited cause I think JR and Tazz is one of the most underrated commentary teams ever when they had their short run on Smackdown in the late 2000’s decade.
On this day back in 2002, Triple H made his long awaited return to WWE after being out for almost nine months due to the quad injury. If you have never seen it, pull it up on the WWE Network. January 7, 2002. You will hear one of the biggest roars ever in Madison Square Garden. Every time Triple H’s face popped up on screen, the building would go crazy. Even so much that when Raw came on the air, they ran that video that WWE had been using to build to his return set to U2’s Beautiful Day and they left the crowd mics up to where we could hear them on TV. There are multiple levels of crowd volume of his return out into the ring. The music pop, the walking out on the stage pop to where it starts to drowned the music even on tv, the pop for when he starts getting animated up on the ramp feeding off of it, the apron arms up pose, and then going to all four turnbuckles. He said on his DVD that was released back that year that he only intended on hitting one buckle but ended up feeding off of the crowd so much that he went to all four. I remember reading live reports the next day from people that were in the building saying that it was so loud in there that you couldn’t even hear his music at points. One thing to keep in mind is that this all happened as he had went down to injury as a heel. Madison Square Garden had so much respect for him that this was the monster reaction that he got. When you get that kind of reaction at MSG, that is quite the bow of respect. Here is a link to it if you want to see it again.
That is it for today. Just some recaps, news, and thoughts to start off 2020. Happy New Year!
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