ECW This Week

I know I come on here a lot and ask for clean finishes more on free TV. Sure, the Dusty finish has its place, especially on shows where major build towards PPVs happen, but even then, the clean finish has its place and do not preclude further building of an angle.

Cue up ECW this week. There were five matches on the card this week, impressive for an hourlong program (even if one of them was a squash). In fact, ECW this week was as much a wrestling program as you could ask for. The wrestlers wrestled, and when they didn't wrestle, they were promoing, or if you did have the backstage segment, it was *gasp* about wrestling! Holy Jesus, what a concept!

There were three really good matches to me. One was Zach Ryder beating Goldust. OF course, I'm a Goldust mark, so maybe that skews my view, but the guy is still great after all these years. The other two were very good free TV affairs, one between Tommy Dreamer and Vladimir Kozlov, and the other, the show opener, between Christian and Shelton Benjamin. Kozlov went over Dreamer clean and Benjamin beat Christian pretty clean as well. Good matches, clean finishes. No problems, right? Well, no. See, Dreamer is the ECW World Champion (the match was non-title). Christian is the number one contender. They're facing off in two weeks at Night of Champions.

I'll say it again. The Champion and number one contender both lost on free TV, clean as a whistle. That's a problem. Basically, the Champion is the best guy on the show. The number one contender is the guy who you're saying is the most deserving of facing the best guy on the show because he's won enough matches in the interim. When both of them lose in a clean fashion on the same program, you're really putting the credibility of your title match in question.

Now, I can see the Kozlov thing happening as it did. Kozlov only lost to Christian last week because of an exposed turnbuckle, and they seem to be angling to get him into the title match to make it a three-way. Of course, I'm not so much a fan of the non-title match anyway, and I think the WWE uses it as a crutch lately, but okay, it's a title mechanism. This current storyline calls for it.

But Benjamin over Christian? You could argue that Christian shouldn't have gone over Benjamin in that situation either, and I would be hard-pressed to disagree. Benjamin needs a lot of strong wins to wash the taste of the flash loss to Yoshi Tatsu two weeks ago. In that case, Christian and Benjamin should have been held apart, or at the very least, the finish of that match should have had Kozlov involved more than just the distraction he had mid-match. In fact, if they had had Kozlov's distraction cause the loss outright, that would have provided for a better overall finish in the grand scheme of things.

But now, you have two guys who aren't in the title match that, in kayfabe, have legitimate claims to get into it. Will they pull the trigger on both guys, or just one? Or neither? At this point, I can't read this angle, but since they seem to do right by ECW in terms of it being an old-school wrestling show, I'm more willing to give them leeway here. Even if neither guy gets in, and it's a part of a greater angle that maybe gets Tiffany fired or sets up something for SummerSlam so that ECW can have more than just two guys on their second or third biggest PPV of the year, then maybe I can go for it. Right now though, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the top two guys lost how they did.

Don't get me wrong though. I like that they're injecting more clean finishes into the program, and hopefully, with this new crop of wrestlers coming in, they can rebound from losing Evan Bourne, The Harts, Mark Henry and Jack SWAGGAH~! without taking too much of a quality hit. I really like what I see so far, especially from Zach Ryder and Big Zeke Jackson. I hope people aren't too quick to give up on ECW even though a lot of what made it so good for the first half of the year have moved onto other brands.