First I'd like to say I was at the venue live, and was satisfied with the event.
xfearbefore's review on the first page of this post was actually a quite accurate portrayal of the show- proving that it came across pretty well on television, even from the perspective of the crowd's mood.
D-von won his dark match against Anarchia. It was some real basic work for most of the match, and the finish came off a spinebuster. The highlight though was that after the match they fought out of the cage and D-von hit a suplex on the ramp... then another, in response to a "one more time" chant.
The 6000 attendance number seems pretty spot on. In the arena I was guesstimating 6000-7000 myself; so I wasn't shocked to see that number thrown around.
The crowd was dead for most of the first 90 minutes or so. Aside from a couple moments during the Xscape match and a few pops for Steiner, the crowd didn't really start to build momentum until the Joe/Pope match- and then Morgan/Hernandez tried to blow that momentum too(thank god Velvet's appearence saved that entire segment).
In the Angle/Jarrett match, what I keep hearing referred to as a botched powerbomb from the top, in the arena looked as if the plan may have been for Angle to reverse it- possibly into a Huricanrana, but they couldn't get it around... I don't now how it looked from the camera's perspective though.
The Mr.Anderson dynamic is quite intriguing. There were by far more Anderson T-shirts in the arena than any other(Sting, Jeff Hardy, and Beer Money merch being the others I most commonly noticed), yet his reaction from the crowd as a whole was somewhat subdued. He definitely seemed to be the crowd's third rooting interest in the World Title match(despite how vocal my Wisconsin-native wife was in his favor
).
Who was the most over man in the building??
Probably Ric Flair
And who got the most heat of the night???
No doubt it was Sarita
Now... I have a question myself about how the Angle/JJ match aired on television, since i didn't get to see it from that end- anyone feel free to answer:
I don't know how the camera captured Kurt's top-cage moonsault, but in the arena it was clear that he missed it entirely, did it look like that on the PPV? Because I find it wierd that no one seems to have mentioned it. Did they play it off as a miss or a connection? Jarrett also didn't really look to be attempting to avoid it, if that was indeed his plan. It definitely looked like a pure botch live.