Survivor Series - Or the art of how not to book a PPV (WARNING: PPV AND RAW SPOILERS)

Congratulations WWE. I think you may have managed to book a PPV which was actually worse than that ECW December attroctity from a couple of years back.

Not one match on the card, not one, was worth the price of the PPV, let alone whatever the poor sods who were at the live show paid for tickets. Rarely has a PPV so spectacularly failed to deliver on its promises. Match by match, lets break it down.

1. United States Championship. Daniel Bryan .v. Ted Dibiase. Why was this even on the PPV after just five days build? No-one in the audience gave a toss. It would have been far better to have these two going at it as part of a traditional Survivor Series match, to increase the tension between them before a showdown down the line. There's no excuse for only having one SS match and allowing stuff like this on the card. The match wasn't awful, though the timing was occasionally off, but it shouldn't have been there, the crowd barely cared, and neither did the wrestlers for most of it.

2. Sheamus .v. Morrison. Again, the same question, is this PPV worthy at the moment. No, of course it isn't. Again, this was another feud which could have been incorporated into a Survivor Series match, and then continued later. That's what SS matches used to be about - having the mini feuds within them. This was a throwaway TV match at best, and Morrison's "parkour" daft flippy bumps really get on my sodding nerves. Extremely mediocre.

3. Intercontinental Championship. Kaval .v. Ziggler. Timing was way off in parts of this match, hence Dolph getting smacked in the face quite a bit. I notice that happened when he wrestled Bryan as well. I like Dolph, but he needs to work on that. Unless there is a rematch on the horizon, why have Kaval lose? The tight pull wasn't done clearly enough for the crowd to notice it - to them, Kaval just jobbed. Badly badly executed.

4. Diva's title. Bout time Natalya won it, and that's all I intend to say about that.

5. Survivor Series match - This wasn't awful, but with the way various combinations of this match have been given away on weekly TV, it didn't feel special either. It was just sort of there, and both teams felt like they'd been thrown together out of convenience.

6. World Heavyweight Title. Kane .v. Edge. Awful, just awful. Slow, plodding, repetitive, never got out of first gear. Now, just a few hours after watching it, I can't remember a single thing about it except for the stupid finish. A draw because both men were on the canvas? FFS. If anything, Kane had an arm draped across Edge and thus he should have been declared the winner. And the bit with the wheelchair just made this previously unstoppable monster Kane look like a fecking idiot.

7. Nexus .v. Santino and Koslov. Another complete waste of time. If you wanted to get Nexus on the card, then there are five of them, so why not book a Survivor Series match for them versus a RAW/Smackdown combined team, or even a three way SS match as a novelty? This was the very definition of pointless.

8. WWE Title - Orton .v. Cena. Or at least it was until this match started. How can it be possible for the WWE to be so incompetent as to totally screw up this angle in the way they did? If you plan on keeping Cena babyface, then that's fine, I can see all the reasons for doing it. But for the love of God CREATE SOME FECKING TENSION IN THE MATCH!!! Have Cena tease he might be going heel, have some times when its a close call and he looks like he will screw Orton, sew some seeds of doubt in the crowd's mind. Have him miss things as a referee like Barrett cheating. Something, anything, to add some drama. What you absolutely do not do is have your previously whiter than white white meat babyface act completely like a fecking white meat babyface throughout the entire match and then have a lame ass two shoves signal the end of the match out of nowhere with not even a suggestion that he will do anything else!

then, even if you are some sort of moron and do book that, you'd have to be insane to then also not deliver the promised beat down of the heel, wouldn't you......... Well apparently not.

And then, what happened to the Miz? They might just have salvaged something had he cashed in and bashed Orton with the briefcase, but he never showed his face again.

Its like the WWE did it deliberately. Like they wanted to book the most awful blow off to the angle that they possibly could. No company could book a PPV than badly by accident!

I was going to watch it tonight, but I won't bother if it was seriously that bad.

I read the match by match results after rewatching the Old School Raw show.

I was utterly and absolutely floored by just how horrendous this pay-off was to what, in my opinion was a perfectly brilliant build-up. The Old School Raw show did everything perfectly, I thought and was built up perfectly. Including the wonderful Piper's Pit segment that added intrigue to how the Survivor Series main event was going to go. Maybe some of the others were rushed, but that's why I think they created a special night with an electric feeling for things like some of these announced match-ups to occur.

And then.... this.

This is how they pay-off such a far superior Raw beforehand.

As you say... complete and utter anti-climax of a main event with precisely zero interest or pay-off to all of the great build up they put forth. Again, why didn't they do ANYTHING with the Cena Orton match. They teased and built it up so highly that you thought all of these things might occuor and that the match would play out like one of the all time greats, and then....

Complete anti-climactic letdown, that was all kinds of generic and blah.

What a collassal fuckup, just when I was seriously considering watching it full time again. Shame on me for almost buying into it.

You want your Miz David, well you got it, WWE Champion Miz, the ONLY thing salvageable from Monday Night RAW

The last 30 minutes of Monday Night RAW were excellent last night, but that's part of what is so frustrating about the WWE. PPV Numbers are in the toilet, and so they give away the big angle and the title change on free television, instead of at the PPV, thus sending the message than anyone who buys their PPVs is a complete sucker because you can see all the good stuff on TV.

If they were going to do a Nexus attack on Orton, Cena costing Barrett, and then a Miz cahs in, why not put all that on the PPV show? For all the time they have spent mocking WCW, they seem determined to repeat their mistakes.

Personally, I think they should have had Barrett win the belt and used the chance they had to cement a main eventer who is over with the crowd. I think they have missed an opportunity there.

However, all that said, I am absolutely delighted to see Miz win the WWE Championship. He is easily, and by a light year, the WWE's superstar of the year for me. He's been nothing short of superb, and the best thing on RAW, for months upon months. He thoroughly deserves the title.

Four years ago, in your wildest dreams, you would never have imagined that he'd be in that position today. But he's worked his butt off to get there, and good luck to him.

However, the absolute best thing about his title win was the reaction of one little girl in the crowd

Holy Shyt on a shyt sandwich, she was about to go all Carrie on every single person in the arena lol

Expect that to go super viral in the coming weeks.

Preferably with millions of Youtube clips set to every dramatic musical sting one can think of.

Obviously not a Miz fan...

I think the WWE should include that in Miz's entrance video.

But its sort of what the whole deal is about, isn't it? Its about creating that sort of extreme reaction (good or bad) in the audience. Wrestling is a pantomime designed to elicit fan reaction, so when they are getting that sort of look out of a kid, the company is doing its job right.

Its why I love watching wrestling live. When you get the crowd really involved in something, there becomes a sort of collective momentum that carries the match. I remember an IPW:UK show where the culmination of a year long feud saw the perennial underdog whipping boy JC Thunder take on the company's top heel at the time, Andy Simmonz. Andy and his cronies had been beating JC senseless for months, but he kept coming back and battling to earn a title shot and Andy's belt. Every single person in that audience was praying for JC to finally put Simmonz in his place. Andy was HATED by that crowd, and everyone was on the edge of their seat for 30 minutes willing Thunder to win. You could literally feel it in the air and every move was cheered or booed in unison. It drove them both to deliver an incredible match.

When JC finally got the win, the euphoric outpouring of celebration was just incredible. Fans stormed the ring and it was a genuine celebration. All this despite it being a worked sport where both guys knew the outcome before it started. It was an incredible moment.

Similarly, being inside Madison Square Garden at Wrestlemania 20 and hearing 20,000 people mark out like crazy for the Undertaker's return, or getting so caught up in the main event that I nearly blacked out from cheering so loudly when Benoit won (and couldn't speak for two days afterwards). Its just a fantastic thing.

Speaking of....

The first major viral leap of the little girl's reaction has become the target of a video by TheSpoonyOne, on his Wrestle Wrestle! site.

http://wrestlewrestle.com/that-girls-got-the-devil-in-her/

Hilarious.

ha ha thats so funny....

that little girl is going to become an internet celebrity.

Im just waiting for her web redemption on Tosh.0

Y'know I am legitimately surprised she hasn't shown up on Talk Soup yet.

I guess the producers of it don't watch WWE as much as they should. Then again, they probably find it weird on a weekly basis and therefore a crowd reaction isn't as special as we think.

Then again, Vince McMahon has been utterly desperate for mainstream appeal for the longest time. I wonder how he'd feel about achieving it, not because of anything he did, but because of one little girl in the audience on one given day...... years and decades after doing everything he could from the XFL, to televised gay weddings, to Kane banging a dead chick.

Vince would start paying the little girl to sit in the audience very week and react to things lol.

xXAwesomeOneXx wrote:

Vince would start paying the little girl to sit in the audience very week and react to things lol.

Y'know... joke though that may be, I can see him doing that.

Going to her parents, giving them money and drawing up a contract, paying her big bucks, flying her out... giving her her own interview segment, the whole 9 yards.

If Vince McMahon thinks that'll get him on the news, late night talk shows, and set the media world talking about him and his program, he'll do it.