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Jun 1

Payback 2014

Posted on Sunday, June 1, 2014 by Paul in Uncategorized

If the television is anything to go by, the WWE’s prime motivation in naming one of its minor annual shows “Payback” was to let people do promos claiming that Payback will be a bitch.  With this card, that may be closer to the truth than usual.  Payback 2014 looks like a dog.

This is basically a water-treading exercise while we wait for the rather more important “Money in the Bank” show next month.  The card is a mixture of rematches and blatant filler – many of which ought to be fine as matches, but don’t seem particularly inspiring in any wider sense.  Consequently, this preview is not going to take long.  You might want to just look at the live show post immediately below.

The big story in the WWE at the moment is actually the collapse of the company’s share price following the combined effect of disappointing subscriber numbers for the WWE Network streaming service and a disappointing result in the renegotiation of their US TV deal for the next few years.  It should be noted here that “disappointing” means “disappointing to Wall Street”, where many analysts bought in to the company’s own projections (and one suspects many more didn’t but figured it was a smart move to buy while the price was rising and sell at the peak, which indeed it was).  It was not particularly disappointing to those who actually follow wrestling, where the projections were always recognised as being wildly optimistic.

This is not to say that the company itself didn’t believe them; in fact, much of their business strategy only seems to make sense if they had convinced themselves that the Network was indeed a goldmine (despite needing to convert pretty much every Wrestlemania buyer into a subscriber and then some, just in order to cancel out the lost PPV revenue); and that their TV deal this time round would be comparable to Nascar’s (even though it never has before, largely because wrestling viewers are, rightly or wrongly, considered unattractive by advertisers – and yes, that’s even in comparison to Nascar).

The fact that so many professional analysts bought into an analysis that always seemed a bit dodgy to wrestling journalists might be viewed as evidence of how much understanding the average stock analyst really has of the industries they claim to advise on.  It might, alternatively, be seen as evidence of how reasonable the WWE’s thinking was, even if it turned out to be wrong with hindsight.

But the company now has at least a short term problem.  They have tanked their pay-per-view business by undercutting it with a bargain priced product; but they need to attract way more subscribers to that product in order to equal the revenue they had before.  They may well get there in the end, but it seems unlikely that they will have any good news to give the markets any time soon.

A further problem for this show is that the world champion Daniel Bryan is currently out of action, recuperating from minor neck surgery.  He will be on this show for a non-wrestling segment in which he will be asked (again) to surrender the title, something that he will no doubt refuse (again) to do.  The company has written itself into a corner here, since after an insanely protracted chase to have Bryan win the title, they don’t really want to strip him of the title if it’s realistic (as it apparently is) to expect him back within a few weeks.  But since that chase involved authority figures repeatedly obstructing him and overturning his wins on dubious grounds, it’s very hard to explain why they aren’t simply stripping him of the title now that they actually have a legitimate excuse to do so.

Even if Bryan was on this show, though, he would have been defending in a rematch against Kane, whom he already beat last month.  This would not have been a match anyone would have been going out of their way to see.

All of the above is more interesting than anything that can be said about the matches that are actually taking place, which, combined with the time available to me to actually write this post, explain the brevity of what follows.

1.  No Holds Barred Elimination Match: The Shield (Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins & Roman Reigns) v Evolution (Triple H, Randy Orton & Batista).  A rematch from last month, with the stipulation added.  Since the Shield already won last time, there’s significantly less heat this time around, and this looks to be simply a holding pattern match.  Batista is about to take a leave of absence to promote Guardians of the Galaxy, so it’s unlikely that Evolution will be winning here, as that would logically lead to a further rematch.  So the options are that the Shield simply win again (in which case it’ll probably be done so as to push Reigns as the big star who overcomes the odds), or they do the break-up angle where Ambrose and Rollins turn on him (which would make some sense, as it’s clearly been in the works for a while, and the Shield have no other obvious opponents lined up).  The match should be fine but we’ve seen it before.

2.  Last Man Standing Match: John Cena v Bray Wyatt.  A rematch from the last two shows, hampered by the fact that the writing of this feud has been little short of diabolical.  Cena has already beaten Wyatt twice, yet the writing continues to portray Wyatt as having the psychological upper hand.  So what is supposed to be at stake in this match?  Having established firmly that beating Wyatt doesn’t seem to change anything, why is anyone meant to care?  This feud has droned on too long already, and the match last month was poorly received; at this stage I would just have Wyatt beat the guy to bring the results into line with the story, and then use the Money in the Bank match to ease both guys into new stories for next month.

3.  WWE Intercontinental Title: Bad News Barrett © v Rob Van Dam.  The parade of filler begins.  Barrett only just won the title and is getting a push, so he obviously isn’t losing to Rob Van Dam, a guy who was in the main event a decade ago but is now doing a sort of comeback tour as a mid carder.  This is a perfectly sensible match, feeding Barrett a credible opponent, and it might well be fine, but there’s not much to it beyond that, and the outcome can’t seriously be in much doubt.

4.  WWE United States Title: Sheamus © v Cesaro.  This is perhaps a little more interesting.  Sheamus won the US Title at the start of May in a battle royal which was supposed to be a deliberately unfair way of getting the title off Dean Ambrose.  This was apparently intended to double as a heel turn for Sheamus, but that seems to have gone on hold following Bryan’s injury.  Besides, they already did a rematch with Ambrose on Smackdown, which Sheamus won clean, thus purging the supposed unfairness of his title win.

The abandonment of the planned heel turn seems to leave Sheamus as a likely candidate for a transitional champion, and Cesaro – who plainly is getting pushed as a singles act – ought in theory to be a better choice to hold the belt.  That’s subject to the possibility that they want to get him into their depleted main event picture, in which case they might decide that giving him a mid card title is a bad idea.  (A big part of the company’s problem is that they’ve devalued the mid card titles to such an extent that they are no longer remotely effective at building future main eventers.  Fixing this ought to be a priority.)

This could be a decent enough match, and my guess is that Cesaro wins in order that something can happen on the show.

5.  WWE Divas Title: Paige © v Alicia Fox.  Fox is getting a renewed push with the gimmick of throwing a big tantrum whenever she loses.  Of course, this requires her to lose most of her matches, which makes her positioning as number one contender at bit weird.  I assume she loses here; it favours her gimmick anyway, and taking the title off Paige so quickly would be wildly ill-advised.  It’ll be short.

6.  Alexander Rusev v Big E.  Rusev is still working his way through the familiar starting pattern for new monster heels: destroying people and starting to come up against stronger opposition.  Big E is notionally his biggest test to date, but since the company is plainly going cold on him, I assume Rusev is winning, though possibly with a bit more competition than usual.   They really need to start giving Rusev more experience in competitive matches to prepare him for moving onto the next phase of his character, but the place to do that is house shows, not television.

7.  Pre-show match – Mask versus Hair: El Torito v Hornswoggle.  A rematch of the midget comedy feud from last month, of which the less said the better.  Reportedly the actual match last month was pretty good, but who wants to sit through yet more midget jokes?  It’s very telling that the WWE still doesn’t seem to grasp the connection between this sort of nonsense and the perception that their viewers aren’t worth advertising to.

Worth getting?  Not really.  There are several matches here which could be good in theory, but you can see plenty of good matches for free on Raw and Smackdown.  There’s no wider context here to change the position.

Bring on the comments

  1. kelvingreen says:

    The Cena/Wyatt feud has been a bit of a disaster for everyone except Wyatt; he seems to have come out of it with some popularity, which has of course been a problem as people are supposed to be cheering for Cena, not him. Oops. Wyatt did a last man standing match with one of the Usos last week that wasn’t very good, and the Usos are much better athletes than Cena is right now, so I imagine this one will be interminable.

  2. Taibak says:

    Out of curiosity, how come only some of the names have the little copyright C’s?

  3. Frodo-X says:

    The copyright C’s are being used to signify the current champion involved in the match.

  4. Odessasteps says:

    They are champions/title holders.

    Payback also has the problem of following the very good / excellent NXT special last week, which had 3 top notch matches.

  5. Corey says:

    The WeeLC match from last month actually was pretty entertaining. You should watch it.

  6. Thomas says:

    It’s a shame if they are already cooling on Big E. Langston. I see him as having more long-term potential than Rusev, who will probably fall flat the second they separate him and Lana.

  7. Paul says:

    @Corey: I don’t believe it was ever actually available in the UK. They don’t air the pre-shows over here (as far as I know).

  8. james brooks says:

    “With this card, that may be closer to the truth than usual. Payback 2014 looks like a dog.”

    almost actually said SICK BURN out loud

  9. BringTheNoise says:

    The pre-shows used to be available on YouTube in the UK, but since WWE decided the best place to run an infomercial was on their subscription VOD service (and thus pulled them from places non-subscribers might see them and theoretically get interested in purchasing either said servic or even just the PPV it advertises), we can’t get them anymore.

  10. Dasklein83 says:

    Paul, stupid American question. You are a completely different Paul O’Brien than the one who writes for the Wrestling Observer, right? I think he lives in the UK too, but your writing styles are completely dissimilar, so I assume he’s a different guy.

  11. Zach Adams says:

    IIRC, the POB who writes for WON is Irish. I know he was on Figure Four Daily once and it was immediately obvious it wasn’t this Paul.

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