Wrestlemania Fallout Thread 2006

Last night ended up being decent.

Disappointments: Tag Title match. No title change, no face turn for Carlito. The point?

No Bret. To hell with interfering in the Vince/Shawn match, it would have been such a great moment if he'd come out to wave goodbye when the HOFers were announced. And I don't even like Bret.

MITB2. Finlay, Lashley, and Matt Hardy were completely superfluous, and what was the point of Flair working an injury only to return to the match and do nothing? Benjy stole the show again and was robbed again, although I can understand wanting to run HHH-RVD at One Night Stand II.

OK:

Smackdown title match. Way too short, but at least Rey had his moment. Look for him to drop the title to Orton at the SD tapings. Er, maybe this should be filed under "disappointments" after all.

Pleasantly surprised:

HHH-Cena. Bleh match, but what a crowd.

Delivered:

Vince-Shawn. We got only acceptable conclusion to this feud: a righteous shitkicking.

Trish-Mickie. Nice match. The crowd rooting for Mickie was great, and she played off them perfectly.

Edge-Mick. Foley wasn't in the best of shape, but they promised carnage and came through with it. I think that win helped Edge -- I wasn't sure that it would.

So tell me why Edge couldn't attack Triple H after he pinned Cena? Oh yeah, closing shot has to be The Game being all intense and triumphant.

WM was fine, but the bar was a little quieter than expected (except for the crazy spots in MITB2 and Edge-Foley).

I was quite busy Sunday so I finally saw WM...
Gosh, I quite enjoyed Cena and the King of King's crazy costumed entrances. That shit was nuts. Cena's entrance was proceeded by a mini newsreel doc on prohobition era bootleggers. Spectacle is very neccessary.

Edge's shivering, trauma-shock selling at the close of his hardcore match with Foley was really remarkable. Although that very well may have been simply a legit reaction to going head first through a flaming table. I really loved this match because you could tell these guys really wanted to steal the show. In storyline context, even the feud was based around each guy really needing to put on a great match, Foley for Wrestlemania legacy, Edge to wipe away the "transitinal champ" taint.

Benoit-JBL and the threeway. Really, why even promote and have these matches on the card if they're going to be treated as unspecial on the show itself?

The Edge-Cena-HHH stuff is outstanding. The Backlash main event should have happened at Mania. OTOH, I think Chicago has helped other cities turn the corner in their like/dislike of Cena. The fans in every city are booing and cheering whoever they want and WWE is bringing it on by letting all three act like tweeners.

The Shawn/Vince divine intervention stuff is stupid (I guess it's the right time of year for it though -- a wall of fire?) but otherwise Backlash is looking really good.

For baseball and wrestling lovers (but it's mostly about wrestling):

http://progressiveboink.com/dugout/archive/dugout5-6-06.htm