Oh boy, I genuinely don’t even know where to start with this one.
I knew heading into this edition of “SmackDown” that I wasn’t super excited in regards to the Undisputed WWE Championship match between Cody Rhodes and GUNTHER as Sami Zayn served because the special guest referee. It just gave the look of a little bit of a boring match to me, and WWE had already done it once at Clash in Italy.
Expectations aside, I used to be willing to present it a likelihood. While it definitely did surprise me, I can confidently say that it was absolutely not the nice form of surprise. I already thought it was weird enough for such an enormous match with an enormous title on the road to kick off the show as an alternative of being the essential event, but that turned out to be the least of my worries.
First off, we didn’t must have the spot in the course of the initial match where Zayn went down, and a second referee ran out to temporarily replace him. It felt prefer it was drama for the sake of adding drama into this match, and I believe it might’ve simplified things a little bit bit if Zayn had just been down the whole time to miss Rhodes pinning GUNTHER.
Second, I didn’t love the ending of the initial match in any respect. It seemed pretty apparent that Zayn can be getting involved within the match someway, but he had already been involved within the ongoings of the match enough and didn’t must make the fast count when Rhodes had rolled up GUNTHER. It put a damper on the match for me, and was an abrupt ending to something that I already was on the fence about having fun with.
Third, WWE completely lost me after we got here back from the break and were in a split screen that saw Rhodes within the ring and GUNTHER within the back with Zayn, Nick Aldis, and another officials. It was so incredibly hard to follow what was occurring with a lot happening directly, and WWE truly would’ve been higher off with only one camera that caught the arguing backstage and Rhodes going back out to the ringside area.
Fourth, doing the match restart between Rhodes and GUNTHER ended up being a complete moot point. Provided that Zayn ended up interfering anyway to cause a no-contest ending, there was absolutely no must restart the match, and it didn’t really have any form of reasoning behind it apart from creating much more unnecessary drama within the storyline between Rhodes, GUNTHER, and Zayn.
Essentially, this all boils right down to being a very overbooked mess that was really hard to follow. It seems pretty clear that the endgame for this was at all times going to be a Triple Threat Undisputed WWE Championship match between Rhodes, Zayn, and GUNTHER, but there was a much simpler technique to do that: just book the match as an alternative of attempting to do whatever it was they did.
Written by Olivia Quinlan