The more I think about it, the more I realize I was pretty hard on RAW this past Monday. It was a good show that just had some unfortunate booking in the one match. I've come down off my rage boner, and I understand the logic of people defending the Swagger/Orton finish, given the context of MitB and the fact that Swagger looked credible in the ring and that he got put crazy over by the announcers, two things which aren't trivial matters. I understand, but I'll never agree that it's a good idea to have the guy holding your Championship lose clean in a non-title match, even if the circumstances say it should make sense. Like both I and commenter David McKinney said on a previous reply, there are so many other ways you can end a match that protects both guys and that still gives the idea that hey, maybe Swagger isn't ready to be Champion yet. But that's neither here nor there right now, because as it stands, RAW was about a million times better than Impact.
I finally got a chance to see the second hour of the show after watching the first hour on Monday. The first hour didn't really inspire any kind words whatsoever. In fact, it was unadulterated WrestleCrap for the most part. I mean, a match with
The second hour got a little better, but not much. Aside from the fact that there's no way in hell TNA should be running a non-title ladder match on free TV ever again after running so many of them in the past, the match between Kurt Angle and Ken Anderson was pretty good, although I'm sure Angle wishes he had that bump off the ladder onto the arena floor back. That was absolutely BRUTAL looking, and I hope he's okay after that. The Generation Me/Doug Williams gauntlet thing was pretty good albeit way too short. Oh, but God forbid we take time away from Kevin Nash and The Band ending a tag team match for no fucking reason and cut another promo full of insider references and backstage stuff and give good matches with good talent time to develop.
Then, there was the "main event", if you can call it that. The fact that they went through with having Tara lose her Knockouts title despite winning her fall is the first strike. The second strike was following through on YET ANOTHER tag team dissolution angle like it's their job with Tara and Angelina Love. Third strike, well, it had the impact of a pebble hitting the broadside of a trailer on the whole. I mean, was there a reason why the show didn't end with Anderson and Angle's ladder match? Or at the very least with the unveil of the rest of Team Hogan? Or the Pope/Wolfe match which built heat for both main events at the PPV? No, let's end the show with a striptease, a tug of war with the KO title and Velvet Sky making an anti-climactic announcement about the cashing in of her open contract.
Folks, I bitch about RAW because I truly care about it, and I want desperately for the WWE to put on a great product every week. I know they can, they have a good roster. They also have a booking and writing team that actually gets it right sometimes. With TNA, well, I care about it to and I want it to push the WWE, but htere's no sign of that coming about in the near future. I mean, their ratings rebounded this week, but it was more because they went unopposed from 8-9, like they should have done all along. In fact, F4W Online is reporting that they're making the switch permanent. But it's going to take more than just a stopgap to make things better. They need a philosophy shift, and they need one sooner rather than later. Because believe me, if the worst thing that happened weekly on Impact was their Champion, that they were booking in good faith as an entity of his own rather than as a puppet of a 60-something shell of his former self, lost a non-title match after a competitive, well-wrestled affair, then they'd be made.
Photo Credit: TNAWrestling.com
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