Thursday, March 28, 2024
EditorialClash of Champions 2016 Review and Match Ratings

Clash of Champions 2016 Review and Match Ratings

14 views

TRENDING


The New Day (C) def. The Club – RAW Tag Team Championship

Hopefully you didn’t listen to the Vegas Odds that had The Club as overwhelming favorites to win this match. I just don’t get WWE. At all. I mean, The New Day has beaten everyone. Like, literally everyone. There is no where else for them to go. They were white in a period of time last year on RAW, but they’ve gotten grossly stale, and it’s time to move in a direction, yet WWE insists on burying The Club even further. Not that they’ve cared about the Club, but having The New Day continue to run the tag team division on RAW just isn’t for me. Anyways, the actual match felt rushed to me. It started out good, with The Club destroying Th New Day early and looking for ways to gain advantages throughout the match, but my goodness. That finish? Awful. Are the New Day supposed to be the good guys if they cheat to win? They are no Eddie Guerrero, so what are they? This was a whole bunch of meh with teaspoons of BLAH added into it. *3/4

TJ Perkins (C) def. The Brian Kendrick – Cruiserweight Championship

Glad to see that this match got the time that it deserved. TJP’s entrance? Original. Unique. Cool. At least to me. Brian Kendrick used his veteran skills as well as his story telling to use underhanded tactics such as using the ring covering, and he consistently targeted TJ’s injured neck (which he did sell well) throughout the match. TJ won the match by submission with the knee bar, but I wish that he would spend time targeting Kendrick’s knees throughout the match just to build up to the submission, seeing as how it does target a specific body part. Kendrick’s post match head butt tells me that perhaps these two aren’t finished with each other. The match obviously wasn’t of the quality that we saw at the CWC, but it was a decent outing. I just think WWE’s presentation of the cruiserweights feels lacking. They way they’ve been oriented, they don’t seem like anything special. More so, they look like they’re just there for the sake of being there. Forgettable, but a decent start. ***


Cesaro vs. Sheamus – No Contest (Match 7 of Best of 7 Series)

Isn’t that like WWE to have the best match of the night so far not have a finish? I said in my predictions that if these two wanted, they could make the 7th and final match of this series feel important. These two had a great match at Night of Champions two years ago, and they had another great, physical outing tonight. You’d think that two people that have fought as often as Cesaro and Sheamus couldn’t do anything to top themselves, and they did here. However, I can’t help but mention one thing, being how Cesaro damn near killed himself on the spit with a botched suicide dive (and with how he landed, emphasis on the suicide). I think he tripped near the ropes and his body contorted awkwardly with his head and neck hitting the pavement first and his body bouncing up. Freaking scary stuff, but in the context of the match with it being Game 7, it played very well . Let’s just hope he’ll be alright. And Cesaro also brought out the 619, though I was upset he didn’t do the West Coast pop after, because let’s face it, he can do anything. Sheamus did a good job of focusing on his back and maintaining the physicality of the match in the process. The no finish isn’t popular with a lot of people because it is on PPV and the only match of the series that didn’t have a finish was the match that mattered the most, and that does suck. However, in the context of the feud and the match, with both men giving each other all they can handle, a draw isn’t surprising. I wanted to down grade this match because of the finish, but because of the effort both men put into it, I won’t punish them for it. So I wonder what will take place as a result with these two, but bravo to both men for throwing caution to the wind pulling out a fantastic bout. ****

Chris Jericho def. Sami Zayn

Wow, the betting odds for tonight have been OFF. Kind of astonishing to me that Sami Zayn lost clean here. Yeah, it’s Chris Jericho, and I’m sure that they have something planned for Jericho, but I mean, does he really need it? Zayn’s had great performances this year, and while we will forget this happened six months from now, I think this sort of derailed any momentum Zayn had for the time being. All that aside, I enjoyed the match. It started off slow, but Jericho and Zayn were able to pick it up with some good near falls, and the surprise Codebreaker at the end was a good touch to me. It looks like they may be building up Jericho to get into the title picture to me, and since I’m a HUGE Jericho fan, I can’t get mad at that. I just think Zayn deserved a little better. The booking of him is so puzzling. He beats Owens in an emotional match at Battleground, then gets bumped to the pre-show at Summerslam, loses to KO in a last-minute throwaway match on RAW and then loses to KO’s sidekick clean. If that’s what you’re doing with Zayn, then that’s all the more reason why he should have been drafted to Smackdown. Cesaro as well. I guess WWE believes that Y2J is more suitable in the world title picture than Zayn at this point, but that’s just me. Anyways, the match was enjoyable to me. Decent storytelling, good shifts in momentum and aside from a botched DDT from Zayn on the outside, which he NEVER botches, I enjoyed myself here. ***

Charlotte (C) def. Sasha Banks and Bayley – RAW Women’s Championship

Throughout the match, I was comparing it with the WrestleMania triple threat match. While this match wasn’t as good as the one with Becky, this one did just fine. It started off sort of slow, with sloppy execution, but it picked up in a big way once we got tot he near-falls and the submissions towards the end. Dana Brooke coming out with Charlotte practically guaranteed that she was not only going to play into the finish, but that she would cost Bayley or Sasha the match to help Charlotte retained. It’s a shame, because the match was going in a very high direction until Dana started to get involved and the flow got disjointed because of it. It’s a shame too, because I thought it could have been the match of the night had the match been just straight down the middle or with limited interference from Brooks. To me, the right woman won here. Banks’ reign was very recent, and it’s kind of early to hand Bayley the championship as of yet, though I do suspect that she’ll be winning it sooner rather than later. For tonight, though, I thought the three women gave it all they had, and I was entertained down the stretch. ***1/4


Roman Reigns def. Rusev (C) w/Lana – United States Championship

Since 2010, there has always been at least one title change at the Night/Clash of Champions PPV, and I figured tonight if any title would change hands, it would be the tag titles. The feud between Roman and Rusev was grossly one sided to me. Rusev had never beaten Roman prior to the title change and he had the advantage in nearly every face to face confrontation. Despite that, the match was well done to me. Some great near falls, some great physicality and great moments where we thought that the match was was going to end. I thought the match was missing that extra UMPH to it, and I was waiting for it to pick up and it never really did, but this was fine. Roman and Rusev are sort of like Cesaro and Sheamus in a way in how many times they’ve fought each other, so finding chemistry wasn’t an issue between these two. It was just a matter of how they planned to make it fresh again. I liked the match that they did here, and the title win was good for Roman, because at least for the time being he’s going to be out of the main event. Hopefully these two move on from each other as well. Since it’s clear that WWE will probably never have Rusev go over Roman Reigns, it makes no sense for them to continue fighting each other, so please. Let’s move on. There’s nothing more that these men need to do with each other. ***


Kevin Owens (C) def. Seth Rollins – Universal Championship

Talk about disappointing. I was going back and forth with the ratings between these two, so I went back on the Network, rewinded the show, and watched it again and I’ve come to the conclusion that this was just a long cluster****. First, the match just lacked energy. It felt slow, plodding and had no special feel to it. Also, the storytelling was sort of confusing to me. You had KO initially work on Rollins’ leg, then you had him Irish whip him hard into the turnbuckles and then you had him focus on Rollins’ abdomen. It was just sort of all over the place for me. It sort of felt like Stone Cold and The Undertaker’s match at Backlash back in 2002. Just a lot of spots, a lot of fluff, and that a great match does not make. It’s a shame, because KO and Rollins are two of the best performers WWE has to offer, and what we got was just a marathon of no substance. And the overbooking? Perhaps that’s an understatement. Not only did we need yet ANOTHER ref bump tonight, but Jericho running in and getting into the ring with Seth, causing him to fly all over the place. You then had Stephanie come out, bring out another ref, Seth gets distracted and we get the bull distraction finish that people are still, STILL falling for to this day. Triple H not explaining his actions really sort of hurt the purpose of this match. So Triple H, who hasn’t been seen since WrestleMania, all of a sudden screws over his golden boy, Seth Rollins, hands KO the championship and has yet to explain himself. Then Stephanie and Mick keep saying they have nothing to do with it, Seth believes they are lying and now we have a match between them. This was a huge disappointment, as I was looking forward to a potential match of the year candidate. Instead, what we got was an overbooked mess that ruined a potential classic. **1/4


Conclusion:

Two years ago, at Night of Champions, Cesaro and Sheamus fought over the United States Championship and they stole the show as the best match of the night. Two years later, it’s the same deal at Clash of Champions. With the main event being a gross disappointment, this left Cesaro and Sheamus once again left carrying the show. The Club is closed, Rusev’s is in No Man’s Land now (Population: 2 with Sami Zayn) and everything else was either okay or you can do without seeing it. The card on the surface showed great promise, but overall, I call it a disappointingly average show. I’d say thumbs in the middle, but because we didn’t get a finish to Cesaro/Sheamus (After going through not 6, but 8 matches to get to this point), had screwy finishes in every title match save for the Cruiserweights, and a horribly overbooked main event, I’m leaning down on this. This is made all the more disappointing considering the talent on the roster. You’d think that a show featuring Kevin Owens, Seth Rollins, Chris Jericho, Sami Zayn, Cesaro, three of the four horsewomen and two standout cruiserweights would make for a great show, but instead my expectations were dashed. Such is life. Until next time.

- Advertisment -

LATEST NEWS

- Advertisment -

Related Articles