WWE Friday Night Smackdown July Thread - 7/31/20 feat. Mrs. Metalik's Baby Boy Quest for Blue Gold
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Missed the opening stuff but this Matt Riddle vs. John Morrison match looks pretty good so far.
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:lol: at Riddle needing a surprise roll up in order to beat Morrison.
Match itself was very good from what I saw but that ending was a bit anti-climatic. |
Can cross Styles name off the list of people who probably tested positive for coronavirus since he showed up afterwards to beat up Riddle.
Meanwhile Bryan showing up via Zoom interview might mean he was the person who got pulled as a precaution from the Blue brand for tonight and last week's shows. Also WWE shamelessly piped in crowd chants for this Gulak vs. Styles match since the actual crowd is barely reacting despite it sounding very lively on tv. |
Bryan had a much better slow style and grapple match against Gulak a few weeks ago than Styles had tonight against him.
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That Bayley and Sasha segment somehow managed to be both pretty good and terrible at the same time ... well mostly terrible to be honest.
Pretty good in terms of Bayley's mocking impersonation of Taker and terrible for everything else. |
Show started off very well but its been dragging along ever since around mid-way into the Styles vs. Gulak match.
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WWE really needs to go back to the drawing board with these pipped in chants for their empty arena shows. At least when they had actual crowds around, it was easier to fake it and not have it look as blatant and jarring as tonight.
Also Kofi vs. Shinsuke ended up being pretty disappointing in terms of quality. Next week's show looks like it might be just as meh as tonight since its mostly repeats of what happened tonight but with little tweaks done. |
Sheamus getting the live via big screen treatment for this Jeff Hardy toast segment is pretty interesting since his name was among those rumored to have tested positive.
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I guarantee you SmackDown had the best actual wrestling match of the week on it.
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Sheamus and Jeff Hardy segment at the end was pretty bad.
Show itself was decent at best but also pretty skippable. Only really interesting thing to happen was the Riddle vs. Morrison match. Quote:
NJPW alone had back-to-back days with much better Match of the Week contenders. |
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That still would be very debatable considering this past week's AEW and NXT shows.
Based on what I saw, I'd say no for the Riddle vs. Morrison match. |
Sounds like SmackDown had three really good matches.
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And yet it still feels so “meh”.
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That’s modern wrestling.
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Morrison/Bro was 4 stars
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Seems WWE is using the same tactic of "replaying an old match to eat up time" for this week's show. On the bright side, Bray vs. Braun at MitB 2020 was only around 11 minutes long unlike some of the other lengthy past matches WWE has aired in recent months to eat up time. Quote:
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Miz TV segment with Jeff Hardy was decent I guess.
Also seems Extreme Rules could be getting 3 cinematic matches depending on how WWE handles that newly announced Bar Fight match between Hardy and Sheamus. |
I think I'm going to skip it!
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I can't wait for New Day vs. Nakamura & Cesaro to be "only decent I guess" versus a white noise clusterfuck on AEW that apparently "matters."
Cinematic matches are shit. The idea of Extreme Rules is shit. The photo above makes The New Day vs. Nakamura & Cesaro look like AEW-style parody. But the match itself will no doubt be excellent and underrated by people because it happened in the wrong promotion. |
Do you have a sudden problem with my personal reactions to matches since that what these recent unprovoked digs by you have sounded like.
Since I'm watching NJPW's Lion's Break show right after SD, might as well as for your permission to post about matches there and not have fun watching if its a good show since it might upset you because its not in the "wrong promotion." |
That might have been one of the ugliest roll ups I've ever seen to end a match.
More so on Miz botching the ending sequence and less on Hardy just stumbling backwards into the spot. |
:| Women's karaoke segment announced for later tonight.
Might be worth some laughs though. |
Much rather have WWE's old way of going to commercial breaks mid-match than what they've been doing recently, especially with what happened for the Women's tag match.
This match has count outs but somehow Sasha and Bayley randomly taking a break to complain to the announcers at the commentary table, Nikki deciding to randomly dance with Bayley's belt on the outside, and Sasha and Bayley both getting baseball slided by Alexa didn't even register a 1 count by the ref. The match then went to commercial with Nikki still on the outside and the ref doing nothing. Like a good 30 seconds or so passed during that whole sequence with even the ref giving up on saying stuff mid-way. Shit's just way too convoluted just to go to a simple commercial break. |
Worst part was the women's tag match was actually pretty good up until that point but only came back somewhat decent from the break and ended in a sudden flat/weak finish.
Lost count on how many times they've done a similar finish for Sasha & Bayley matches these days. |
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Was trying to figure what was it about this Bray vs. Braun match I soured on and then realized it was because it both happened during the low point of the MitB show and that ending being flat as hell because it just didn't work without a crowd around to feed off of that drama heavy sequence.
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This whole WWE "bias" issue is also the results of the attrition of watching countless years of WWE's downward spiral in quality and sticking to the same stale format for booking and shows throughout the years. If anything, expanding my viewing habits over the years to include other promotions like NJPW and Lucha Underground just made me realize how much better WWE could be if they actually bothered to give a shit to improve for the long haul and not just use NXT as Triple H's personal toy to squash any competition like ROH and AEW. |
Noid’s turned into the very poster he spent years despising. Going after one of the best, most consistent posters here. What a fuckhead.
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I will admit that sometimes I do feel like I might be too harsh on WWE programming but since barely anyone posts in SD threads these days during shows, its pretty much just myself watching shows most of the time. Lot easier to get quickly bored and not find that much real enjoyment without others around to have some fun watching and read up on how they are feeling during shows.
Plus at this point, think I'm just running on fumes with WWE's style of wrestling and format for shows after countless years of it not really getting any better. |
:| back-to-back matches ending in a no contest on SD.
This shit is why I've been having a hard time enjoying SD these days. Tag title match was good up until that point but WWE's booking decisions for matches just keeps dragging things down. They've gotten way too happy with DQs and no contests for matches in recent times. |
Don't change anything Smeat, you are a great poster the way you are!
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Noid calling some1 a "drone" when he has the same embarrassing persona as every other one of the psychotically anti-AEW internet wrestling fan guys who "love Jim Cornette" and "hate Dave Meltzer" or whatever
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Judging from twitter this was not the best ep of SD to say the least....
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Seems like total dog shit based on the results...
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That’s why I’m so pissed off at AEW. Could have been something revolutionary. Nope. More bullshit. And it gets a pass consistently just because it’s not WWE. I’ve seen too much shitty wrestling to get on board with that. But I know how hard it can be to give something up. I love wrestling and it’s hard to stop following it, at least a little. Now my joy comes from the schadenfreude of watching people forcing themselves to enjoy it writhing around making excuses when it turns out this shit isn’t going to work. Quote:
675k viewers to 992k in that main event this week. This shit is off-putting, bad and not what wrestling fans want to see. But hey, ignore that I explain and defend my position on this and don’t just shrug like Meltzer or Alvarez when the slightly better product turns things around on actual merit instead of a desperate audience trying to will Anything Else Wrestling along. Vince McMahon just announced an Eye for an Eye Match. This is the pressure the “competition” is putting on him. Enjoy your modern wrestling landscape. |
There is no wrestling company that I really love right now. Most of my time spent watching wrestling, is spent watching older stuff, and OSW review. Actually I probably play Fire Pro more than I watch wrestling at this point.
That said, I still watch out of habit mostly, and I can say with certainty that I enjoy WWE's product the least. Because personally, the one thing I can't stand is when wrestling is boring. And the current WWE product is the most bland, homogenized wrestling that there's ever been. They occasionally get something right and put on some intriguing content but it's few and farbetween, and they usually fuck it up eventually. Even NXT which I used to really enjoy feels like it's lost that spark that made it feel special. Ever since the fox deal, it's felt more like the generic main roster style of programming. Plenty of things I don't like about other current wrestling promotions, but I wouldn't call any of them boring. |
Also, what AEW could have been doesn't even remotely compare to what WWE could be. For the past few years, they've had what I would call possibly one of the best rosters ever. A great mix of big men, high flyers, mat technicians, great up and comers, experienced veterans, a wealth of talented tag teams, and even handful of women that can really go in the ring.
And they've consistently flushed it down the toilet for investor happiness. |
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