Retro 3 Things We Hated And Three Things We Loved

Welcome to a different edition of Wrestling Inc.’s retro reviews, where we take notable wrestling shows from the past and apply our universally celebrated loved/hated format! This week, we have Saturday Night’s Major Event coming up, a card that features a big-time women’s tag title match! In honor of that, we thought we would revisit the show wherein the present incarnation of the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship made its debut — contained in the Elimination Chamber!

After all, this show is notable for greater than just Sasha Banks and Bayley reviving the thought of girls’s tag team wrestling in WWE. It was also a vital stop on the road to what would change into referred to as KofiMania, as Kofi Kingston rode a sudden tsunami of fan support all of the technique to a world title at WrestleMania 35. We’ll definitely cover that here — in actual fact, there have been six total matches happening in Houston’s Toyota Center on this particular evening, and we’ll cover all of them! So strap up and strap in as Wrestling Inc. brings you three things we hated and three things we loved about WWE Elimination Chamber 2019!

I’m unsure the Elimination Chamber was the perfect environment for the crowning of the brand new WWE women’s tag team champions after the titles were finally brought back to the promotion; I all the time prefer tournaments to any match involving 12 people for this sort of thing. That said, I do not think this match might have been structured a lot better, and by the top I discovered myself genuinely having fun with it. The eternally underrated IIconics were phenomenal as cowardly heels, while Nia Jax and Tamina Snuka were believable within the powerhouse role – the mix of the 2 because the IIconics hid (unsuccessfully) from Jax and Snuka inside their Chamber pods was excellent. A number of the other teams were underserved and I do not think Fire & Desire were necessarily ready for his or her roles because the runner-ups who lasted the complete time, but that did not really matter, because at the top of the day, the celebs of the show did stars of the show stuff.

Those were obviously Sasha Banks and Bayley, the individuals who lobbied for the ladies’s tag belts for a 12 months and were finally rewarded by becoming the inaugural champions. They’d a special story to inform within the ring – the Boss and Hug Connection has all the time been a fragile alliance susceptible to betrayal, and Banks was selling a shoulder injury – but after Banks scored the submission win with a singular version of her finisher, the story was all in regards to the undeniable fact that that they had finally arrived at this moment. WWE properly lingered on the emotion of the victory afterward, and the complete thing ended up being extremely poignant.

Neither Banks and Bayley nor the ladies’s tag titles have all the time gotten their just due – the titles would ultimately change into the catalyst for Banks walking out on WWE entirely and reinventing herself as Mercedes Mone – but on tonight, their crowning victory was about as perfect because it was ever going to be.

Written by Miles Schneiderman

I used to be within the constructing for Royal Rumble 2019, and I remember my very own shock and dismay when Shane McMahon and The Miz dethroned The Bar for the WWE tag titles. Nothing against either guy, but they each suck and I dislike them. So while I used to be somewhat gratified to see them lose the belts immediately to the Usos (who I like and who don’t suck), I still didn’t really want to see a whole tag title match based on the Miz/McMahon storyline. Babyface Miz is even worse than Heel Miz and 2019 Shane McMahon is Shane McMahon in 2019, so any sense of entertainment was principally out the window from the moment Maryse announced she was pregnant again.

Everyone remembers where this storyline goes, unless you have managed to successfully forget, wherein case, congratulations. The purpose is, there was a Shane McMahon match in 2019 that briefly co-opted the tag titles for a storyline with Babyface Miz, and I simply cannot. Glad they didn’t last long as champions, but I can not do anything but hate a match where Miz & Mac entered with the tag titles around their waists. Congrats to Maryse though.

Written by Miles Schneiderman

Subversion might be thing; presenting a really abundantly obvious final result while leaving the window open for something else entirely. And wrestling has embraced that ideal several times throughout the years — perhaps an excessive amount of, with scores of disqualifications, screwy finishes and interference having seeped deep into the material of recent wrestling. So the occasional time an organization actually follows up on a promise might be a bit of little bit of a welcome treat.

Enter Elimination Chamber 2019, Finn Balor’s pursuit of the Intercontinental Championship held by Bobby Lashley. Balor by this point had just “taken Brock Lesnar to his limit” on the Royal Rumble for the Universal title, which in fact just meant that he had gotten just a few more near-falls than the common squash match. And given he had did not win the Universal title from Roman Reigns beforehand, and in addition the IC title in a litany of contests including a WrestleMania triple threat in 2018, he was drifting further and further away from the blue-chip prospect that had won the Universal Championship in his first attempt in 2016. 

So he really needed to the win the following title he chased. The problem being, that title was held by Lashley, and there was a must keep him credible at the identical time. The booking for each guys right now had really left much to be desired and the pair of them were in a state of upper midcard rehabilitation. But Lashley had also been paired with someone who, unfortunately, was never going to get a good shake at the highest of the foremost roster: Lio Rush. Thus, Balor challenged each Lashley and Rush in a two-on-one Handicap match for the IC title, with the caveat that he could win the strap by pinning either man. 

This was killing two birds with one stone — even when the proverbial birds refused to die within the weeks following — as Balor did actually win the title by pinning Rush, concurrently strapping up “The Prince” and lighting the fuse for Lashley to activate his partner. It could possibly be rare to see a stipulation designed for an obvious final result actually followed through on, and this was certainly one of those welcome treats.

Written by Max Everett

2019 saw the first-ever women’s foremost event at WrestleMania, pitting WWE Raw Women’s Champion Ronda Rousey against WWE SmackDown Women’s Champion Charlotte Flair and the Women’s Royal Rumble winner Becky Lynch. The remainder is history, “The Man” cementing her place atop WWE with a not-so-great pinfall on Rousey. Today, anyone who watches “WWE Raw” each week gets to see the fallout from Lynch’s coronation. 

But there needed to be a construct to that moment, and you’ll be able to all the time leave it to WWE to make things as convoluted and nauseating as possible. One such example got here at Elimination Chamber, a Raw Women’s Championship defense against Ruby Riott — now referred to as Ruby Soho in AEW and on the independents. Rousey in wrestling had all the time been … limited. Undoubtedly a judo machine, a world champion in mixed martial arts, and a superbly credible competitor when mixing it up with one of the best of one of the best in wrestling, she can be a bit of more exposed when working with someone like Riott.

That and surely a litany of other reasons beyond her control ensured that this match was given lower than two minutes to breathe, and that is a bit harsh for 2 people working a throwaway singles match on TV; this was a championship match on pay-per-view. Not only is that super counter-intuitive when it comes to attempting to make the challenger appear to be a reputable challenger (because if she is not a reputable challenger as this match made her seem, then why would you book the match in the primary place?) but there’s also the undeniable fact that this did nothing to stave off any complaints arising as to Rousey’s ability to truly work a match while being presented as a world champion. 

Gable Steveson was an Olympic gold medalist and couldn’t really translate that to wrestling, Francis Ngannou was UFC Heavyweight Champion but got slept when he faced Anthony Joshua in boxing. Even Brock Lesnar, certainly one of the rare athletes to overcome skilled, amateur wrestling and MMA relatively earnestly, had a totally failed stint in football. All those cases were relatively quickly exposed and weren’t booked into holding a world championship heading into WrestleMania season. Rousey had the title in a little bit of a stranglehold, partially because the corporate really wanted fans to alter their minds and green light Flair being the one to beat her, and this title defense was a symptom of that problem.

Written by Max Everett

Remember before how I said that everybody remembers where the Miz/Shane McMahon story was going after this? The identical can’t be said of Baron Corbin vs. Braun Strowman, nor of Corbin’s alliance with Drew McIntyre and Bobby Lashley. I remember nothing about this – not the before, not the after, and hopefully before too long, not the current.

I do form of appreciate the symmetry of Lashley ditching his small friend Lio Rush for 2 greater friends in Corbin and McIntyre, but that is about all I got for this one, folks. This was 10 pretty boring minutes of WWE-approved no disqualification wrestling between two guys whose 2019 incarnations weren’t really that interesting, and it ends in an enormous ol’ schmozz finish that sees the monster babyface who you need to see smoosh people himself getting smooshed. There’s principally no higher lasting image of Vince McMahon’s booking tendencies within the late 2010s. Each up to now and the current, it’s really bad and no person cares. Let’s move on.

Written by Miles Schneiderman

It took over 10 years and a really unlucky injury to Mustafa Ali for it to occur, but Elimination Chamber 2019 marked the primary time that the immensely gifted Kofi Kingston got a chance on the WWE Championship. Now, given my very own preferences when it comes to wrestling and my long-held belief that Bryan Danielson is the best wrestler of all time, it feels egregious to say this, but this was the correct time for Kingston to get the chance because Bryan had never been seen as an infallible main-eventer within the eyes of the corporate. 

Simply put, Kingston was getting over in his title pursuit and for the primary time ever there was someone management saw in an analogous light. Take into consideration how Bryan got here into WWE, how he eventually won the WWE title, lost the WWE title, refused to die despite the corporate’s insistence that he would never again hold the WWE title, after which hadn’t really had the prospect to reign with the WWE title when he did win it because he was forced onto the sidelines. He was all the time a WWE World Champion regardless of the corporate. 

Sure they relented within the face of pressure, but as has been seen time and time again, breaking into the foremost event may be very different to staying within the foremost event. In reality it was Bryan’s own experience pursuing the WWE Championship that informed this “KofiMania” run, Kingston getting organically over to the extent that anything would have been panned on the “Show of Shows.” It was a rare stroke of genius to feed into that with Kingston making it to the ultimate two of a six-man field including AJ Styles, Jeff Hardy, Samoa Joe, and Randy Orton. After which the rug-pull win for Bryan over Kingston to retain the title served to advertise the WWE Championship match at WrestleMania. 

The match itself was nearly as good as one could imagine from sticking six of one of the best wrestlers on this planet inside a steel structure. However the story, each deliberately crafted and organically contextual, helped to bridge it into the right WrestleMania prequel. I cannot stand the best way wherein Kingston’s reign ended, and that basically speaks to the aforementioned point about attending to the foremost event versus staying within the foremost event. However the construct to and the eventual moment was the stuff that pulls me to skilled wrestling.

Written by Max Everett