The Bludgeon Brothers vs. The New Day (Kofi Kingston & Xavier Woods), WWE Smackdown Live (8/21/2018)

This was a No Disqualification match for the Hammer Homies’ WWE Smackdown Tag Team Titles.

It was great.

Nobody here — from the four wrestlers to the commentators to the people in charge of putting this or the show at large together — is all that interested in anything THAT great, but what we get is a pretty fun ten minutes. In that ten minutes, the WWE finally pulls the plug on this absolute loser gimmick whose only real value is giving Big Harp and Rowan the title reign they should have had four years prior, but also throws enough props and cool shots and sick spots out there that it can even make the least likeable New Day team (it does not include Big E) into an uplifting choice to end that reign and this incredibly weird string of dominance.

Woods puts Brodie through a table with his rope walk elbow drop to regain the titles.

The highlight of the match comes when Corey Graves suggests the concept of Godzilla wielding a machine gun. As fun as his is, as classic pro wrestling ass pro wrestling as a match like this offers up, some things are simply better than that. I would love to see the King of the Monsters with an assault rifle in his hand, ready to take it to Gigan. I would also like to give him a sword (Carly Rae Jepson is the Godzilla of 2010s pop singers, yes, that is correct).

***

The Bar vs. The New Day (Big E/Kofi Kingston), WWE Smackdown Live (8/7/2018)

This was the finals of a tag team #1 Contender’s tournament.

It’s a long long awaited rematch to one of the best WWE tag team matches of the decade, and if not quite on that level, it is yet another great match between The Bar and a New Day team.

While this match does not quite have the narrative advantage over a match that blew off a sixteen month long title reign, nor an angle that had lasted even longer than that, it is still really great, and perhaps given the advantages it did not have compared to their more famous match, it’s a little more impressive that this wound up still being pretty great after all.

The match itself is classic tag formula, but the charm of it lies in that it is on WWE television and gets fifteen to twenty minutes to genuinely develop, resulting in a better match than The New Day has gotten to have since the end of the Usos feud ten months prior, and a better match than The Bar (a depressingly underachieving team given the talent between them) has gotten to have since the last time they fought The New Day.

You can put a lot of that down to also being a television main event, giving these guys the green light to go a little bigger than they have in a while, that’s not unfair. It is a match with some less than common offense from everyone involved, and the sorts of twists, turns, and payoffs you might not get otherwise from a WWE television tag (that doesn’t involve a long term effort to get over one or more golden boys, so you know, don’t count 2013-14 Shield stuff). Kofi in particular gets to go a lot wild here, not only with a rare dive, but some bigger bumps and offense on the outside, but given how restrained their work had been for the past nearly two years together, Cesaro and Sheamus finally taking the machine out of neutral and putting a heavy foot on the gas is super noticeable as well.

Really though, so much of it just comes down to them now having the time to not only have a match that’s paced a lot better than usual on free television, but also one where they can really get deep in the weeds and establish themes and patterns, so that it means so much more later in the match when those themes and patterns get paid off in little moments, creating small individual victories within the larger one.

Cesaro and Sheamus spent ninety five percent of the match stuffing The New Day. They do so in a bunch of different ways, so it never gets boring, but the only moments when they are not in control are either quickly snuffed out, or lead directly to their defeat at the end. It’s a multiple control segment match, but one where both feel different because of the different tact required to control Big E as opposed to Kingston. They repeatedly send Kofi away and out, or catch him out of the air, and whenever New Day tries something even a little complex like the Midnight Hour finish, Cesaro and Sheamus swarm and cut it off. This match has a real gift for pulling things seemingly out of thin air as counters, resulting in a few nearfalls far more dramatic than you would think.

When it comes time to make some hay out of all of these ideas, to pay them off for those miniature victories, it’s maybe the best thing this match does. Kofi constantly being cut off when Big E needs help by being dodged and thrown into things leads to Kofi finally reversing by leaping onto the railing and hitting Sheamus with a Tornado DDT on the floor to take him out. Kofi’s able to finally be there when he has to, and in a match all about (a) striking in quick moments so as to signal that they still have The New Day’s number like in 2015 & (b) separating the members of the opposing team, it just feels right that The New Day ultimately succeeds when they’re finally able to separate the Cesaro and Sheamus war machine, before then striking in the quickest possible fashion for one singular moment.

Big E powers out of the Crossface and up with Cesaro on his shoulder, and as soon as the shot is clear, Kofi flies in with the Midnight Hour for the win.

These teams, given the time and freedom, have an outstanding match yet again. The proof of the success of this match, and the things it does and stands for, comes in the fact that despite The Bar feeling like a super middle of the road act for most of the last year and the obvious nature of the New Day’s victory (WWE is not running a heel/heel match with no build, sorry, we all know this), within twenty minutes or less,

Among the year’s more underrated matches, given how much praise even passable WWE television matches tend to receive.

***1/5

The New Day (Big E & Xavier Woods) vs. The Usos, WWE Hell in a Cell (10/8/2017)

This was a Hell in a Cell match for the New Day’s WWE Smackdown Tag Team Titles.

Despite there being a whole bunch of these in 2017, this is probably the one you remember, and for good reason.

It’s the biggest one. The match where The New Day and The Usos get to have their longest, flashiest, and most significant match together. It’s been something like fifteen years since a tag team feud got this match prolonged attention and respect from the WWE, and they end it with a bang. It is maybe not booked in the way I would prefer, giving The Usos the duke seemingly because they needed it more whereas The New Day can heat themselves up again at just about any time given a microphone and a ring, but it is a big tag team match blowoff that absolutely delivers, to the extent that it is one of the best matches of the year full stop, and I love so much about what it represents and has to say about the style itself.

The thing here — and what sets this one so far apart from the others for me — is that while all of their other matches were classic kind of 2010s tag formula deals building to these spectacular and positively gorgeous firework show finishing runs, this is a much much meaner affair. Tensions finally boiling over and being unleashed when trapped in the Cell.

Outside of maybe the Undertaker vs. Brock Lesnar match from 2015, a match that succeeded in these confines by largely just working it as a classical bloodbath cage match, it’s the best Hell in a Cell match this decade because it recognizes what this ought to be. Not only in the sense that it’s conducted with real electricity and hatred, but also in the sense that it is the end of a feud, and for once, a match that needs a Cell around it, rather than the inverse as it’s been since this became a yearly pay-per-view.

That’s not to say that this doesn’t have some truly sensational spots though.

It does, and this is also one of the best matches of its kind all decade because it’s one of the few Cell matches (the womens division Cell matches are great at this too) to genuinely innovate.

Some of the things they’re doing here are among the coolest spots of the year, or in a match like this in a really long time. The famous New Day Penitentiary spot, in which an Uso is trapped in the corner of the Cell by four kendo sticks going from side to side wedged into the chain links, is genuinely incredible and one of the most inventive Hell in a Cell spots that anybody’s come up with in a decade plus. Likewise, some of the spots into the cell wall, such as the Doomsday Tope Suicida to Big E, are genuinely sick as hell, striking a perfect balance between the fireworks of their other matches, and something that’s reckless and violent, in a way a match like this really benefits from. Reheating the classic Orton/Cena handcuffs and kendo stick spot from the all-time great “I Quit” match in 2009 to poor Xavier Woods is something that strikes that same tone, combining something that is objectively cool as hell, and adding in enough force and intensity to make it into something even greater.

That feeling is something that’s so much more present in this match than any of their others.

From the start, this is more clearly about anger and punishment and pure feeling than any of the others. This is a match with some real nasty and mean spirited shots, and a million receipts. It’s a match conducted with a great amount of feeling and emotion, largely in terms of the way they move and the way they execute the big spots in this match, but also in the smaller moments in between those highlights. Nobody here is exactly wrestling’s greatest actor, but they each have a great moment or two of real energy and fire to them beyond the purely mechanical, be it Big E’s comebacks, The Usos expressing annoyance in the back half when none of their ideas work and swinging even harder, and especially, Woods fighting at the end without any hands, swinging blindly, and getting up with this look in his eyes like he knows that Big E isn’t coming to save him.

Xavier Woods is not the best wrestler in this match or on his team, but he’s the glue that holds the story of the thing together, and that allows the match to hit on a slightly higher level than simply being a collection of some enormously cool ideas. Narratively, the match does real well for him, allowing Woods to complete his transition from sidekick to maybe the most genuinely heroic of the group, choosing to fight through it rather than flee like he used to, or roll over and take it. His performance of these ideas is also especially strong, managing to be sympathetic during the moments when he’s beaten half to death with the sticks, fired up and believably desperate and frantic when saving Big E for once, and especially shining in those final moments, great enough that I am still genuinely bummed The New Day lost this match, and it’s not because of some outstanding Usos heel performance. This is probably a great match no matter what, but without Woods being as great as he is in this match, in the specific ways both big and small in which he is, I don’t think this is half as memorable as it turns out to be, especially in its closing moments.

Following Big E being taken out with the Doomsday Tope into the cage and the Double Uce, and finally a Double Uce to Xavier Woods under a chair, The Usos regain the titles to end the feud.

It’s not my favorite booking in the world, but in a match that seeks to make a point about their brutality and strategy winning out, opting to get rid of Big E entirely at the end instead of crowding the big man, it’s one that totally and completely succeeds at making that point.

(Whether or not that point is better than “likeable heroes succeed over their villainous foes at the end of a feud” is another debate (the answer is no, of course not you fucking dummy), as is what the point of such a savage villainous victory is when The Usos turn babyface within a few weeks anyways, but in the moment, this is a match that does as well as possible with the subject matter.)

As with any rivalry that’s built up like this one has, going bigger and doing more with (almost) every match, showing more and more not only in terms of sheer offensive scope but also in the evolving strategy of their matches, this gimmick match blowoff is far and away the best one. It’s their Big One together, where not only does everything kind of come to a head narratively (mostly), but in which they throw out the absolute biggest match they possible have, beautifully constructed and executed with as much feeling as they can possibly muster up. The match is a genuine triumph, not only out of a company that doesn’t make a habit out of offering stuff like this all that often, but out of a division that they haven’t allowed that privilege to in a real long time.

You buy the ticket and you take the ride, you never ought to expect anything and should always safeguard your brain before getting in line, but matches and feuds like this are why you go to the park in the first place.

***2/3

 

The Usos vs. The New Day (Kofi Kingston & Xavier Woods), WWE Battleground (7/23/2017)

This was for the Usos’s WWE Smackdown Tag Team Titles.

A month prior, these teams — albeit with the Big E & Kofi Kingston team, aka New Day Classic — first began to show what they had together, now finally given the full support of WWE booking and the room in which to work.

One month later, they top it, despite this pairing being a worse one.

There are reasons one might reasonably expect one WWE version of a thing to be better than another. Sometimes, it is as simple as wrestlers trying a little harder when a match has a real finish, feeling that they can give it a full assed effort when the booking of a match allows them to do one complete thing, rather than using a match simply to build up another one. Sometimes, it comes down to time, greater matches often happen when the talent involved have more time with which to build something. Sometimes, it is pure energy. There are a million things. Professional wrestling, even in the WWE, is a whole lot like cooking, more art than any sort of truly specific science, and sometimes, things just turn out a certain way.

Here, we have a shorter match than the month before, counterbalanced by a real finish, and further counterbalanced by losing the best wrestler of the five in the program (Big E), and yet, it is clearly better than their prior effort.

Sometimes, the thing just works.

A part of that comes down to execution and pure spirit. Everyone puts a ton into this. Kofi Kingston takes these beautiful big bumps, despite being the least important guy in terms of the match’s story. The Usos are as precise as possible, here at the peaks of their powers. Xavier Woods, the focal point of the match, puts so much into everything he does. It’s easy to think about this as a “well, of course” in retrospect given what Woods has gone on to do and that the Woods/Big E New Day Power line up has largely been accepted (at least among a lot of the people I talk to) as the best of the three New day line ups, but in 2015, it is very much not something so obvious that Woods would do so well here, and he turns in maybe the best singular performance of his entire career to date here. Not only the great execution, but these big emotional dramatics, huge hot tags, and the feeling to his offense that every single thing mattered so much to him.

Part of it also comes down to the fact that, rather than the sampler that their match in June offered, this is a match that opts to really go somewhere.

Kofi Kingston is taken out off of his hot tag almost immediately, and the Usos cut the New Day back to their established weakest link in Woods. It’s an outstanding turn of events, not only in that it’s this new thing, but in that commentary does a genuinely tremendous job of setting up the Kofi/Woods team as a speedier line up to try and take the Usos by surprise. The way this stretch of the match unfolds is also exceptionally well done, as they don’t jump right into “Woods has been the weak link for two years, can he win?”, but instead tease out first that he has to try and hang on until Kofi recovers, before shifting more and more into that. It’s a small difference, but it’s through this small difference that they’re able to mine even more drama out of it, allowing Woods the transition from “can he hang on?” to “can he win?”, which is the underdog stuff of dreams, paying off when Woods reels off the rope walk flying elbow drop to win the New Day the titles.

They still don’t totally get into the biggest or wildest New Day vs. Usos match that there is, I don’t think. New Day Power is being saved for a reason. However, a real step forward, and an interesting match in a way that a lot of people, myself included, didn’t quite expect.

A phenomenal outing, and for the first time, one begins to imagine just what these teams might truly be capable of together.

***+

The Usos vs. The New Day Classic (Big E & Kofi Kingston), WWE Money in the Bank (6/18/2017)

This was for the Usos’ WWE Smackdown Tag Team Titles.

Over the next four months, these teams will go on to have a super prolific and creative rivalry that not only never fails to produce a great match given the stage for such a thing, but that in a lesser year for rivalries, would be the best rivalry of the year. That’s not even an insult to their work together in 2017, it’s just that this is a year with a ton of repeat pairings all over the world, even on the WWE main roster, and such a specific category is busier in 2017 than in maybe any other year this decade.

This is very much the first match in a series.

(I know it’s not the FIRST one. Do not ever at me about their late 2015 and early 2016 stuff. Given the change in the Usos since then, that is effectively non-canon, even if this match directly references the finish to one of the matches in that series. I know more than you, do not ever try and correct me.)

I don’t just mean that in the sort of New Japan sense where it’s held back and you kind of know they’re waiting on The Big One to totally unload. There’s some of that here, for sure, but it’s still a match with a lot of real high points that are hit and that avoids entirely feeling that way. Mostly, I mean that in the sense that this is a match about establishing a baseline and this is a match about ensuring future matches. Not a match that leaves room for something else, but with a bullshit finish (in a good way) that necessitates another match or, as it turns out, something like another forty six in the next half decade.

What works about this pairing in the future is already here though.

Firstly and maybe most obviously, this is an enormously creative pairing. Neither team is exactly super rote and boring at this point, but together, it is like they’ve found the opponents that they have been looking for all this time, or at least, they’ve finally found the opponents against which WWE will authorize a match like this on pay-per-view for long enough to really make an impression. There are so many cool little counters and ideas here, to the point that it feels like a match up that both teams are bursting at the seams with material for, which is such an exciting feeling. There are just matches and match ups sometimes that you, as a viewer, can feel the wrestlers’ excitement for in the match itself, and it is such a cool feeling.

Performance wise, I think it’s also the best that The Usos have ever looked up to this point. Their offense is sharp and all of that, but it is so much more about the little things. Great little cut offs in unusual ways, such as blocking a sunset flip through the other Uso dragging Kofi out by the braids under the bottom rope. Unusual but still brutal offense like a double suplex outside, right after the above, into the LED ringpost. What works for them in the past still works here, those big dramatic moments, the bargain Young Bucks stuff, but it’s a much tighter performance than they’ve put forward yet.

The match’s back third or so is also a real beautiful thing, largely in terms of construction, but with some really stellar ideas too. While it’s not as clean as at the 2016 Royal Rumble, Big E again catches an Uso Splash off the top into the Big Ending, only this time The Usos are able to break up the cover. It’s a simple thing, and WWE commentary being what it is, it’s never mentioned, but it’s hard to see that and not come to the obvious conclusion that it’s a show of the Usos’ evolution. Likewise, New Day are able to avoid a few different traps the Usos have used against less experienced teams on Smackdown, and there’s a similar sort of feeling, although a different one, that they are against a different caliber of opponent now.

Come the end of the match, there’s this perfect feeling for a feud like this, where The Usos are much better than they were the last time they met the New Day, but The New Day have improved as well, and The Usos still might not have what it takes. There’s enough to drive a few rematches on that alone, a new thing established, leading towards, once again on WWE pay-per-view this month, the sort of bullshit ending that helps so much more than it hurts.

Big E uses his power more effectively, Kofi flies around with more purpose, and New Day yet again have the Usos beaten off of the Midnight Hour, only for the other Uso to pull his brother out and take the count out loss instead to keep the titles.

It’s a great match for certain, but this one’s more about laying a foundation for the future than anything else, and they laid a pretty perfect one.

***

The New Day (Kofi Kingston/Big E) vs. Cesaro/Sheamus, WWE Roadblock End of the Line (12/18/2016)

This was for The New Day’s WWE Raw Tag Team Titles.

I don’t often praise a lot of 2015-2016 New Day matches on this blog because, save for a stunt show, they’re not usually that good. It’s a babyface act through and through and I always got the sense that they never quite knew how to put together interesting matches as heels. When one compares the amount of good to great matches that they had as villains to the amount they had from their late 2016 face turn onwards, I don’t think this is especially controversial either.

This match is something of a turning point.

Partially, that’s because it is mechanically and structurally the best match they’ve had, and it’s that by a hundred thousand miles.

It has far more in common with the years of better babyface New Day matches to follow than anything before it. The pacing is pristine, there’s absolutely no wasted motion, and above all, there is SUCH a confidence to it. They’re throwing out huge nearfalls in the middle, big spots really early on, and amid so many other formulaic WWE tag team matches, it’s exactly the sort of thing that has a way of feeling not only markedly different, but so much more important as a result. It’s a sort of match that by nature of its surefootedness and the lack of flaws throughout the thing only drawing further attention to that correct confidence, feels like that much more of an accomplishment.

The other part of the thing is that it is one of those occasional WWE main roster booking masterpieces.

Of course, we are all smart enough to not pretend as though any of this is some grand design going back a year and change, or even going back a month and change. It is likely more the result of people in the match or in smaller roles somewhere than any one unifying vision.

However, it still rocks.

Constantly in this match, there is a story told is about New Day leaning on their speed advantage and the teamwork (which allowed them to not only get past everyone for the last sixteen months, but also past Cesaro and Sheamus in their previous challenges), but also on the third man outside in Xavier Woods. This is also about Cesaro, and to a lesser extent Sheamus, having finally figured the system out. In a year where one of real sports’ most crushing and impactful results came as a result of a generational talent figuring out an incredibly fun motion system, there’s something that feels even more real about this when Cesaro and Sheamus repeatedly either survive or cut it off here.

The ending is especially masterful, and the real stroke of genius here. After a real hot back and forth nearfall run, Cesaro fakes on tagging in, only to come in anyways. Kofi catches him, only for still-legal-man Sheamus to dive over the cover and pull Kofi Kingston into a cradle for the win. It’s the perfect finish, not only turning a New Day trick against them, but allowing Cesaro this year and a half plus overdue payoff to the way The New Day first won the titles, a fake tag twin switch over the Cesaro and Tyson Kidd team, way back when. A charming piece of revenge, and in a rarity for the WWE, recently turned babyfaces having to pay the consequences for the shit that they pulled back on the other side of the aisle.

As with any great and smart long-term payoff in the WWE, it is never really mentioned at all and you have to chalk it up to the talents involved for putting something this cool and rewarding together. Likewise, as with any of that, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still also a really cool and rewarding thing that got put together, on top of an enormously fun match to boot.

***1/2

The New Day vs. Roman Reigns/The Usos, WWE Raw (9/20/2021)

In the panic over AEW doing actual numbers at the start of a great last third of the year, WWE did something almost unbelievable. I don’t mean putting the title on Big E, because that always seemed like an escape valve they could pull to make people shut up for a few months while ultimately doing nothing, outside of getting to call him a former WWE Champion for years to come (see: Kofi Kingston). I mean something far more drastic, the likes of which haven’t come out of this company with any regularity since 2017 at the very latest.

They put together a genuinely great episode of wrestling television.

WWE being WWE, it’s not perfect and I’m sure there are flaws to be had, but in terms of actual wrestling, it’s the best main roster television in years and years and years, as they remembered that they have a really good roster and that you can just run good looking wrestling matches for much of a three hour show.

As a result, this is the first of four (4) great matches from the same episode of Raw in the year 2021.

It’s the least of them, probably, being something of a solved equation at this point. New Day vs. Usos isn’t new, but it’s still really good. Adding in the Roman Reigns heel act and a red hot Big E, in the one week here where he really felt like he might be an actual Top Guy, is just enough to get them over the top. It’s also the sort of match that shows how important a crowd is, as there’s an energy to it that a dystopian hellscape of 1000 computer screens looking at the ring SOMEHOW can’t quite simulate. Reactions to a hot tag, the way Big E vs. Roman Reigns feels bigger when it’s been built up all match and people can go a little crazy for it, the energy when Lashley comes out at the end and tries to wreck everybody, even Woods lasting just a little bit longer at the end against Roman than anyone might have guessed. It’s all better with organic reactions, even if they can’t quite give up crowd_cheer_3.wav.

The real goal is to build up a Big E vs. Roman Reigns vs. Bob Lashley main event, and in another mystifying piece of work out of the worst company in the world, they genuinely manage it.

Not surprisingly, it isn’t just that Lashley running out at the end and running through people on the floor is a blast, but also that the chunk of Big E vs. Roman we get before that is all spectacular.

In a just world, this wouldn’t get blown on the same episode of TV or in your classic lifeless BRAND SUPREMACY Survivor Series main event, but be the actual end of Roman’s long reign. Big E’s it, the perfect powerhouse WWE style babyface, the guy who this should all be for, and it feels clear as day here when he gets to fight the top heel as something approaching an equal. It’s not only exciting and great, but above all, it feels correct.

Everything in its right place, a machine running as it is supposed to, even on accident.

Not the greatest thing in the world, nor the sort of memorable year-end-list sort of a thing that everyone needs to see, but being a great match that not only delivers quality but also makes one want to see the match it builds up is a rare enough thing in the WWE that this match — much like most of this episode — feels like something of an mirage.

three boy

The New Day vs. The Usos vs. The Lucha Dragons, WWE TLC (12/13/2015)

This was a ladder match for the New Day’s WWE World Tag Team Titles.

It’s a big dumb stunt show and I absolutely love it.

The trick is both a total honesty about that and also the ability to fill the match with big spot ideas that are both incredibly cool and fairly novel. This match also makes clear distinctions between the teams and wrestlers in the match in interesting ways (Big E is strong, Kalisto is the littlest but has the craziest brain, The Usos need to work in tandem to succeed), and it allows for some tension and struggle at all times. Everyone tries to take Big E out, and it always allows the space for Kofi Kingston to sneak around and so some stuff, and it’s how New Day hangs on despite this match being wildly out of the element of half the line up that they went with in this match. It’s a nice touch, and the sort of thought a match like this needs put into it to exist on a level beyond just shouting “COOL!” over and over for fifteen minutes and to stay in my mind for years like this has.

The one major spot also helps out, and if you’ve seen the match, I don’t even have to say more than that.

For the children though:

It’s the high point of the match, but not the end.

With Kalisto and That Uso being taken out, the other tries to handle Big E for good with an equally God damning splash off the top to Big E under a ladder lying on the floor. It’s the same sort of a move that removes someone at the price of also removing yourself, and shows the value Big E brings even when he can’t climb. The pro wrestling version of the gravity that a great shooter in basketball or a great receiver in football gives you. Kalisto manages to get up, as Sin Cara II has just somehow vanished, but Woods gets on the apron and delightfully hurls the trombone at his back. He’s distracted, and Kofi hurls him flipping off the ladder in another wholly unnecessary and wonderful bump, before Kofi pulls down the weird thing the belts are on in WWE and nowhere else.

A great match, but historically, largely a framework for one of the greatest spots of all time.

It’s a god damner of a thing, the sort of spot that belongs in highlight reels for years and years and years (obviously you feature and retain the sort of talent who can do this…). Like the match itself, if the WWE had any idea of how to canonize their history, or if they cared to, this would have a far greater reputation than it does. Better matches than this have suffered from the same problem, but it’s always a little bit of a bummer when you finish a great WWE pay per view match and come to that same realization.

If nothing else, the one spot at least seems to have had some staying power, which is more than you can usually say for a match like this.

***1/4

The New Day (Big E/Kofi Kingston) vs. Cesaro/Tyson Kidd, WWE Payback (5/17/2015)

This was a Best Two of Three Falls match for the New Day Classic’s WWE Tag Team Titles.

As usual, one of these matches in the WWE never quite gets the time it needs in order to stretch out and be all it can be. Fifteen minutes or less is not enough for three falls, and like so often is the case with matches like these in this company, it feels like a lie. A stipulation shoved into post production, with two nearfalls having a CGI three count added in. As always, it’s a classic example of the WWE insisting on only ever doing things one way, with the changes only ever being purely cosmetic. It’s a three fall match only in the sense that there are three falls, not in terms of tone or length or any noticeable difference to the match compared to past iterations.

As is often the case though, it doesn’t quite matter so much when motivated and talented wrestlers get a hold of fifteen minutes of pay per view time.

That goes doubly so for an all-time great like Cesaro.

Even if this doesn’t hold a candle to the Usos vs. Wyatt Family match from ten months earlier with most of the same issues — as Cesaro isn’t as great here as Harper was there, and for WWE project guys, 2014 Usos are better than 2015 New Day bell to bell — it works for the same admirable reasons. Talent being too good to deny and caring too much to have an average match, and succeeding where they can and while they can.

Again, that largely means this is the Cesaro show. Kofi and Big E are not natural babyfaces and so this first year of the New Day run where they work heel is far more lacking than the rest of their time together in the ring. Some people can reverse engineer it after so long on the other end and some people are just naturally one thing. Kofi Kingston and Big E are the latter, so it’s largely on Cesaro and Kidd to lay the foundation before the gifts of the champions can be best utilized in a second half sugar rush. However, short of the John Cena US Open, there is no better show on the main roster at this point and Cesaro lifts all the boats around him. Kidd has some bright ideas, and Cesaro can plug the power of Big E and Kofi as a generic flyer into just about a million different things, all different from the previous meetings. It’s all candy, but it’s good candy.

The brightest spot of this, of course, is a truly great finish.

It’s nothing NEW exactly. Kofi Kingston gets his ass kicked and saved, and when the ref is distracted, Xavier Woods switches places with him and he cradles Cesaro after a cheap shot to take the titles. The twin switch spot is an old one, and like any other old standard piece of pro wrestling nonsense, it’s not inherently good or bad. This is a fun one, firstly because it’s been long enough since it was last seen in the WWE that it provokes a real reaction.

Secondly it works because it allows everyone to go online and accuse the referee of being a racist in one of the few true wonderful bits to come out of the WWE in 2015. Perhaps second only to Rusev throwing a fish.

Unfortunately, this would be the last match of any real note for Tyson Kidd anywhere. Everyone knows the story, it’s one of the big unfortunate injuries of the last decade, especially as he had finally started to get what he had been due for a long time since mid-2014. We never get a real blow off here, we never even get it again. It’s unfair, and it’s a worse version of the usual. It’s not that it got interrupted now by nobody in a decision making capacity being able to pay attention or having horrible opinions. The conclusion failed to appear this time not because of incompetence, but because of cruel and random chance. Nobody is to blame, there’s nothing to really be said or done about it, and we at least got these two delightful pay-per-view encounters.

It’ll be another year and seven months before Cesaro gets to go back and finally give this the sequel that it deserves, and thankfully by then, The New Day will be far more up to the task and in roles more befitting their bell to bell talents.

***1/4

Cesaro/Tyson Kidd vs. The New Day (Big E/Kofi Kingston), WWE Extreme Rules (4/26/2015)

This was for Cesaro and Kidd’s WWE Tag Team Titles.

It’s yet another WWE midcard pay per view match that succeeds as a direct result of a lack of complexity and of anyone getting in the way of the exceedingly obvious.

The New Day are new to being heels, and if we’re being super honest, never quite become great in-ring heels like they become great in-ring babyfaces a year or more later. That’s largely on Kofi, as Big E has impactful enough offense to make it work, but the solution is one they go to here. It’s just a fireworks show. They control a little bit, but mostly they’re using trickery and then letting the other team go wild.

Now obviously, there’s a reason this pairing works a hundred times better with that approach than with New Day vs. The Prime Time Players or New Day vs. The League of Nations (they call themselves The Lads) or whatever other WWE mediocrities come to mind.

Cesaro is the best.

He gets something of a greenlight here finally as a babyface, and it’s incredible. There’s a stench of failure on him that’s hard to write off after most of 2014, especially the last few months, but even then, it takes him all of thirty seconds of sustained offense to feel like a real ass Superstar. Tyson Kidd is also in this match and he’s great in this match, Big E is awesome in what he gets to do, but this match is Cesaro’s match. He has the most energy, he hits the hardest, he does the coolest stuff, he’s crisper than everyone, and just hoists the entire thing up upon his shoulder every time he gets to do a single thing. He takes the entire thing over, and the entire thing is so much better for it. He and Big E work especially well together, but he also returns a little to 2013 and still has a way of getting more out of Kofi at this point than anyone else can. A masterful performance as a hot tag and then in general from one of the all-time tag team greats.

Naturally, after a hot run of offense and a hotter run of nearfalls, Kofi schoolboys Cesaro with a handful of trunks to take the titles for the first time.

It’s not the most inspiring ending, but given that this feud will have one of the better finishes in WWE all decade and given that the match was still a blast, you really have to just take what you can get when a company that otherwise spends so much time being bad and stupid accidentally lets something loose like this.

***