Matt D

What? It was totally disjointed. I didn't know if they wanted to do a straight wrestling match, a character piece or a fight. Dustin says he is going to beat the Stardust out of him. Then he just sort of wrestles him, but with a ton of awkward pauses and no heat. Cody acted weird then cheated and then went for pinning combinations. Did these two want to win or hurt each other? Then Dustin gets a fluke roll up and we are supposed to believe we get Cody. One of the worst matches I have seen in a while. I'll watch it again tomorrow and if it's worth writing up I will.

We kind of wish you were watching an episode of Smackdown instead.

I'm watching on mute with CC on, and in that setting, Gold vs Star was a perfectly fine 3 star match. I imagine the crowd hurt it.

I would have liked something more underhanded for the transition in this match.

Dustin's pretty much the only guy in the company that can get a listless crowd into him solely through his work.

It's pretty nutty how thoroughly they've protected Show/Kane over the last few months. I'm not sure what the payoff is there.

Only going to be able to watch off and on tonight, but Show really needs to start working like late era Andre a bit more and having guys go to him instead of the other way around. He seems to be having a hard time getting to second gear. I really liked the spin kick into the post. That looked great.

Well, he has to face Jon Stewart after all.

My worry is that they do a clean finish tonight and the two of them just end up in whatever sort of multi-man or battle royal they run at Mania.

Was that because Dusty went off script last time they had him on live?

Does that mean you have a monocle or something? With Flair, sometimes looking behind the curtain and seeing Oz is a bad thing.

I really sort of hate Flair on podcasts/shoots. Listening to them always hurt my perception of him as a wrestler. He'll be interviewing other people and I bet a good chunk of them won't be wrestling related at all.

Back and to the left...

Punk should use the old "It's all a work to set up a match" defense. That'll flimflam them.

He gets a vaguely amusing z-pack chant whenever he shows up now.

I feel like all of you poor people are just waiting for Kris Z to crush you like a secret final boss in a video game.

Word Hoard should be the name of a game.

That's stopped being fun about two years ago.

Hopefully Gold vs Star gets 12 minutes at Mania and they just have a talking segment at FastLane.

I think people are afraid Rusev's undefeated streak goes to Cena, a guy who doesn't need it. But there's no doubt the match(es) will be very good-great. Right... I think everyone wants a Cena-Rusev program... that makes Rusev stronger. Totally true, but this idea that every unbeaten streak needs to be broken by some up and comer who "needs it" is flawed. If that happened every time it'd be predictable. Underdogs can't win in that scenario every time, then they wouldn't be underdogs. Sometimes the monster heel who's unbeaten needs to get beat by the top dog. But just not their first match. I think we all figured that Rusev was being built up to be fed to Cena. I think what you're hearing is the combined scream of "No, not yet!"

Yeah, it's because the attitude adjustment he had gotten with Race.

I thought Bryan was dangerously good on commentary, to the point where JBL obviously got the instruction to steer the conversation back to the match.

America loves jerks? As for Cena/Rusev, I think everyone's excited for that, at Wrestlemania 32.

Austin just needs someone to run into his fist a lot. He's good enough to sell without needing to bump a whole lot. I still think the best way to elevate someone with these scenarios is to run a tag match though.

There were plenty of ways to put that match together differently to make it more effective though, even without anything more strenuous being done.