After generously avoiding a distinctly lacking Extreme Rules – which at least offered an exciting Tag Team Championship match and an intense encounter between Roman Reigns and Big Show – and affording positive reviews to WrestleMania 31 and, just a couple of weeks ago, Payback, it seems fair to condemn Elimination Chamber, which took place on Sunday evening in Corpus Christi, Texas.
This wasn’t quite a standard pay-per-view event, because while it was available on pay-per-view in several countries, in the United States it was shown only via the WWE Network: an intermediate attempt to lure subscribers, with Money in the Bank just two weeks away. Still it was structured and built – albeit in the exceedingly limited time available – like a pay-per-view, and was important for WWE precisely owing to the need to entice the host of Network subscribers whose subscriptions were about to lapse. The short time span between major events certainly hampered Elimination Chamber: rather than developing new feuds, many of the confrontations on the card were simply stitched on to occurrences at Payback. But it was the poor quality of the matches more than issues of wider storytelling which made Elimination Chamber a below-par event.
The two matches on the card which actually took place inside the Elimination Chamber vastly disappointed. In the first ever tag team Elimination Chamber match, too much emphasis was placed on two teams yet to win the interest of the WWE audience. The Ascension have been booked weakly since their promotion from NXT around the turn of the year, first feuding against the antiquated New Age Outlaws, then suffering a string of losses; but a recent surge culminated on Sunday in their eliminating of fan favourites Los Matadores and The Lucha Dragons. With a strong run behind them, this may have meant something, but instead it only detracted from the excitement of the match. While WWE needs another legitimate heel team for the resurgent tag division, perhaps too much damage has already been done to The Ascension. Their ponderous ring work and relatively meagre stature does nothing to help their cause.
Titus O’Neil continues to win intermittent acclaim, impressing whenever he takes the microphone; and in the middle of May he was named Celebrity Dad of the Year in the 2015 MEGA Dads Awards. WWE seems eager to capitalise on this, and after Los Matadores and The Lucha Dragons had departed the Elimination Chamber, The Prime Time Players worked to pin The Ascension’s Viktor before also eliminating Tyson Kidd and Cesaro. Thus the team of O’Neil and Darren Young were left to vie with The New Day for the tag titles.
The Prime Time Players can get over with the crowd by virtue of their charisma, but their ring work is flawed and they remain in the early stages of a potential push. On the other hand Kidd and Cesaro and The New Day have combined to steal the show across the last two pay-per-views. Theirs is an issue still surely unresolved, after Xavier Woods cheated Kidd and Cesaro out of the titles at Payback; and while The Prime Time Players could be inserted as a sort of third wheel, preventing the feud from growing stale, it is Kidd/Cesaro and The New Day who should continue to do battle over tag team gold. They have momentum and could continue to put on excellent matches over the course of the next six months.
The tag team Elimination Chamber match involved too many spots which took too long to set up and lacked impact, the clearest example of this being Kalisto’s drop from the top of the chamber. Together, Kidd/Cesaro, The Prime Time Players, and The New Day moved through several entertaining sequences: The New Day suffering a quadruple suplex, and Kidd/Cesaro and The Prime Time Players exchanging moves and reversals. Perhaps if Kidd and Cesaro weren’t going to make the final two, they should have been eliminated before a more concise conclusion to the match; but when the conclusion did come, it was good fun with The New Day piling on Titus to ensure the victory. Still, the presence of all three New Day members in the contest from the outset was debatable, and would have made the trio look especially foolish had they failed to retain their titles.
Likewise later in the show, the Elimination Chamber match for the vacant Intercontinental Championship saw capable talents wade through a convoluted, poorly pitched contest. In the early stages of the match, Wade Barrett emerged as the most vigorous competitor of the night: the only man to show real intent as he went after Dolph Ziggler and then R-Truth. But this tempo was lost as the remaining men were released from their pods. When Barrett became the first casualty, we were awkwardly left with four faces – in Ziggler, Truth, Mark Henry, and Ryback – indecisively squaring off against one another. Making matters worse, people kept breaking up pins: utterly illogical in an elimination affair.
Perhaps Rusev’s absence, owing to a foot injury sustained during last week’s SmackDown, simply robbed this match of its purpose. It meant an imbalance between faces and heels; and a dead-end for the Rusev/Lana/Ziggler triangle which the match had largely been built round. Still, the affair was severely disjointed from start to finish. Sheamus ostensibly pulled a heel trick by trapping himself in his pod, saving himself while the other competitors wore one another down. However nobody involved in the match – neither Sheamus, the other wrestlers, the officials, nor the announce team – sold or even explained this coherently, so that it looked like a mechanical failure as much as a dastardly act.
Again as with the tag team match, the contender in the chamber who the fans were really rooting for – in this case Ziggler – was eliminated fourth. This left Ryback and Sheamus, and after several stiff bumps on the steel outside the ring, Ryback prevailed courtesy of the Shell Shocked. Daniel Bryan, watching the match from ringside after relinquishing his title, presented the Intercontinental belt to Ryback and did a stellar job humanising the character and putting him over. On a personal level it is easy to warm to Ryback’s earnestness and good humour. However it is hard to succeed in such a gimmick positioned in the middle of the card, picking up as many defeats as victories; and the crowd response to him – but even more to his taunts and catchphrases, the fist-pumping and ‘Feed me more!’ – varies drastically from venue to venue. It will be interesting to see how he fares with the first WWE title of his career. As they look to revitalise their two upper-midcard belts, and while Seth Rollins remains WWE World Heavyweight Champion, WWE appears set on strapping the titles to strong, conventional faces.
The Divas Championship match was WWE treading water, willing and talented women given too little to work with – although the ending to the match was intense thanks to Naomi’s ill-executed reverse hurricanrana. Neville vs. Bo Dallas was another filler, but it had a decent dynamic, with Neville trying to inject pace and build momentum, gaining the upper hand in the early stages, before Bo turned the tables and slowed everything down via rest holds. Bo has an intriguing face, and his pleading cries of ‘I just want to help you!’ were fairly amusing. Neville took the victory with the always-remarkable Red Arrow; and it’s nice to see him scheduled for the Money in the Bank contract ladder match, where his athleticism will surely bring him to the fore.
Kevin Owens vs. John Cena seems to have sharply divided opinion: while some have been firmly critical of the match, the majority have hailed it and even argued for its place among the best of the year. From my perspective this latter view owes more to excitement over Owens’ debut, and to the pleasure taken in his victory on Sunday, than it does to the characteristics of the match itself.
It wasn’t a bad match, but it followed a tired WWE/John Cena big match formula: a slow paced, gruelingly physical encounter, with an overabundance of near falls and kick-outs from finishers. Cena doesn’t fulfil any of this well. His kick-outs are poorly timed, on the count of two rather than building anticipation close to the pinfall; and they are too strong, with Cena bouncing his opponent off his chest while he ends up in an awkward position, typically turned onto his front where the audience can’t see his face. For a wrestler who doesn’t have a broad repertoire beyond his signature moves, he delivers these signatures badly: the legdrop off the top rope often more of a butt-bump, and the new addition of a springboard stunner rarely involving a well-cinched facelock or any significant impact to the opponent’s jaw.
Owens and Cena never caught fire, despite a hot crowd during the introductions. The opening was peculiarly constructed, with Cena out on his feet after relatively little offense from Owens. In fact, because of this the match felt like it lacked an opening phase altogether, as though we were being told, ‘This is a big match, now let’s get to the point’, rather than being shown through the nuances of battle. Owens then hit a series of big moves, including a side slam and a cannonball in the corner; but he talked too much trash in between, and then he and Cena went to the well too often as they traded stiff punches. Some of Owens’ offense in the later stages truly impressed, including an attempted moonsault and a successful senton bomb from the top rope, and he also teased his package piledriver. Owens eventually took a clean victory, after delivering a second pop-up powerbomb. This was the only sensible outcome, and by the end of the match, he could certainly be pleased with his own night’s work.
Yet whenever Cena is involved in a match like this, overpowered in the ring, suffering continual punishment and ultimately succumbing to a defeat, he achieves it with an utter absence of selling. He doesn’t sell the agony of his body, or betray any sense of dismay over his predicament; the only time he engages is when he gets in a flurry of offense; otherwise he blandly takes move after move, and lies flat on the canvas without expression. On Sunday, he was in the process of sliding out of the ring, ready to hurry backstage, before the referee had risen from his three count. Obviously this was Owens’ moment, but Cena did nothing to sell the magnitude of the victory. For all the effort he puts in, wrestling is all in the details and Cena is too often no good or unwilling when it comes to them.
He has other serious failings. His calling is incessantly loud, so that one wonders whether it is sometimes an act of sabotage, emphasised particularly against upcoming superstars as a way of showing who is boss. And the rhetoric of ‘never give up’ has stretched too far: it seems dubious to equate his endurance in the ring with the fight of cancer patients; unhelpful to make the act of quitting in wrestling, which ought to be grounded in the immediate and excruciating pain of submission holds, a sort of insult to the sick and those who would come to their aid.
The idea that Cena, more than previous company figureheads, will happily put talent over doesn’t equate with the last few years: Bray Wyatt and Rusev have both been diminished by long feuds with him, with Wyatt still struggling to rebuild some semblance of a career. The odd clean win in his opponent’s favour achieves nothing when Cena follows it up with a string of victories, or by making his challenger yell ‘I quit!’. Owens and Cena will have a rematch in little over a week at Money in the Bank, but it is hard to see the value: Cena’s United States Championship still won’t be on the line; and either this match should have been it, 1-0 to Owens and done, or else Owens has to go on a long winning streak over Cena to retain and enhance the credibility given to him by a victory on his debut. A win for Cena at Money in the Bank will grossly demean the conclusion at Elimination Chamber.
As I suggested in the close to my piece on WrestleMania 31, and again in reviewing Payback, Seth Rollins provides WWE with the rare opportunity for a long-term build around a heel champion. Rollins has all of the qualities to make for a successful and enduring reign. But the way to book him is not as a ‘chickenshit’ heel. He can be flighty, always looking for the easy way out; but when really pressed he has to retain an edge and the threat of violence. Instead, over the last two months, Rollins when pressed has hid behind J&J Security and Kane.
The emphasis given to these three has rendered Rollins’ title defences impotent: his matches struggle to build tension, because the audience is always waiting for some meaningful intervention from the outside. This is disastrous for any wrestler; perhaps especially for one who, for various reasons and through no real fault of his own, finds himself with little decisive offense and therefore, in accordance with his character, having to rely on sneak attacks. If Rollins isn’t allowed to use the Curb Stomp, if he is going to attempt to win matches via quick pins and roll-ups, or by grabbing a handful of tights or using the ropes as leverage, then we as an audience need to believe that these strategies can produce the desired outcome. Instead we sit idly and wait for Mercury and Noble to jump the ring apron.
J&J Security play their roles exceptionally, at once humorous and aggravating; and while Kane suffers inevitably from overexposure, having been a fixture of WWE for so many years, the teasing of a split from Rollins and the Authority has probably made him fresher now than he was a few months back. Still, the presence of these three ringside during all of Rollins’ matches is only holding him down. Perhaps J&J Security could contrive to get fired; pausing on their way out to briefly work for and put over a mid-card prospect.
Once more – and for some of the reasons outlined above – the main event never really burst into life. Rollins and Dean Ambrose are both outstanding workers, and they will surely have many fantastic matches in the years to come. But after a solid opening, featuring a series of pinfall reversals, the action moved to the outside and got bogged down in politics. Eventually Rollins pulled the referee in front of Ambrose as he dove off the top turnbuckle; and when Ambrose subsequently hit the Dirty Deeds, a second referee ran down to the ring to make the three count. Ambrose was announced as the winner and new WWE World Heavyweight Champion. Alas, as the first referee revived, he spoke frantically with the second and overturned his decision: Ambrose was awarded the match, but by disqualification, meaning Rollins retained his title.
The ‘Dusty Finish’ – where the audience are teased with a title victory for their beloved favourite, only to find the decision reversed on some technicality which sees the loathed heel retain – may have a long and storied history, but it scarcely fits in today’s WWE. Referee bumps over the last couple of decades have been a routine occurrence, and they have rarely ever resulted in disqualification finishes. Rather than a stickler for the rules, it must have seemed that the referee who fixed his colleague’s decision was somehow corrupt; in the context of WWE sports entertainment, he seemed to abuse the rules, and for Rollins’ gain, rather than uphold them. A cheap ending which allowed Rollins to keep the title made perfect sense, but the finish as booked was an insult to the audience: it simply wasn’t coherent. Ambrose at least refused to accept it, and roamed off into the crowd still holding the belt.
Alongside Owens vs. Cena, Ambrose will get his rematch at Money in the Bank – in a ladder match, a tantalising prospect provided he and Rollins are allowed to work together and not with lackeys loitering on the outside. Elsewhere – with the issue between Kidd and Cesaro and the champions seemingly cast aside – The Prime Time Players will face The New Day for their WWE Tag Team Championships. The New Day will on this occasion comprise Big E and Xavier Woods: Kofi Kingston is to be involved in the Money in the Bank contract ladder match, with the other announced participants Dolph Ziggler, Neville, Roman Reigns, Randy Orton, Sheamus, and Kane. Expect at least one other participant, and matches to be added for the Divas and Intercontinental titles.
Images via WWE.com
