I felt this PPV was somewhat lackluster, and not one match seemed to have any sort of build up. It was a if they thought, 'well people will watch for the Chamber matches anyway, we don't need any proper angles going into this.'
The Chamber matches you can't really build to anyway tbh, they are now just the set up for Mania fueds. The IC title match had no build, the Divas Tournament which was the only match that had any real build, was scrapped in favour of a tag match, and the US title match was thrown on the card at the last minute for the second PPV in a row!
In the RAW chamber, Kofi continued to impress me, Sheamus didn't do anything spectacular, Dibiase still looks green as fuck. You don't just stand there watching Orton go out the door when the Champion and Kingston are both standing across the ring from you. The announcers are there hyping that he made a career changing decision, that benefitted him for all of 20 seconds. And then to make it worse, we have HHH and Cena in the final two where there was a STF and that was all. You'd have expected them to go at it a little longer considering HHH had been on the floor recuperating for the last 10 minutes.
And then the cherry on top of that shit sunday was Batista coming out and beating Cena in about 5 seconds, making that entire match pointless. So now Edge is a face, does that mean Batista's going to get countless title reigns from 2 minute matches? Is Batista the new Ultimate Opportunist?
Then we had the IC title match. What the hell did they do with McIntyre's music? It nearly put me to sleep before the match even started. It's like they know he's boring so they're going to run with that as his gimmick. Hi gimmick isn't the 'Chosen One', it's 'the guy who gets beat on for 15 minutes, throws a thumb in the eye and hits a DDT, every single match he's in.' At least when Sheamus wins it's somewhat believable because he takes it to his opponents now and again, whereas last night i saw McIntyre hit maybe 2 clotheslines, 2 arm breakers and the rest of his offence were chinlocks and armbars. I'm hoping we DON'T have McIntyre/Kane 2 at WM. This was McIntyre's first match with a veteran, and personally i didn't enjoy it, so Drew didn't prove himself to be anthing special to me last night.
Divas Tournament was completely ignored so that we could watch Michelle McCool and Layla on PPV yet again. Both of them are terrible to listen to and McCool is the only one with wrestling talent out of the two (although Layla pulled out a beautiful rolling pin on Gail during that match, i was fairly shocked), and Maryse did nothing. Considering she's my favourite of the 4, i was most disappointed.
How are we supposed to get behind this Miz/MVP fued when all they do is have matches thrown together on PPV? Don't they think it'd be a bigger draw for the PPV if they actually announced that one of Raw's brightest stars in Miz, would be wrestling that night, instead of talking to him and then just saying 'now have a match!'? Another half decent showing from the two, but i think they're missing out on capitolising on this fued properly by not building up with it at all.
And finally the 2nd Chamber. I was surprised this was the ME as well personally, but it was definitely the better Chamber match imo. Looking at the line-up, i thought to myself, Taker enters last just about every Chamber match he's had so far, he's the only guy who weighs over 250 lbs, how are any of these guys going to actually beat him? R-Truth was disposed of far too quickly imo, JUST so Punk could rant a little longer. Don;t get me wrong i love the SES stuff, but not when they have to make another guy look like shit in order to introduce it in the middle of matches. It was hilarious during the Rumble, didn't work at all in the Chamber. Rey Mysterio put on a great showing for his second chamber match, and i swore that JoMo had taken Taker's head off with his springboard kick, that's probably the most impact i've seen him deliver with that move. Jericho's cowardess was also great to watch. Trying to re-seal himself in his pod was great, and Taker trying to demolish it with JoMo's body was even better. Once this match started however, it was fairly clear how the ending would come about. There'd been no mention of HBK the entire night, and as Taker was cutting across his throat, the guy's in the front row behind him started pointing under the ring, and i thought 'well, here it comes, Jericho's about to have his 5th transitional title reign' and then he did.
Enjoyable Chamber matches, the mid-card sucked overal i think, but we've had a couple of interesting swerves heading into Mania, and the card is starting to take form a lot more, and i eagerly anticipate March 28th.
Oh and all you Taker haters have to respect him more now after he was flame grilled before he even started wrestling last night. I thought he just tripped on his coat and was embarrassed, but this morning i see that his pyro engulfed him, and we were all lucky that the show didn't turn to tragedy right then and there.
