Look at those names there. It’s easy to bitch and complain about the WWE because it’s so genuinely horrible at nearly everything it tries to do. It’s a real accomplishment on their part that they’ve managed to take a roster filled with some of the best wrestlers of their time and make them just another warm body that’s part of the scenery to make even their biggest fans occasionally forget how valuable and skilled they are.
Anyway, one of the benefits of running matches in front of empty arenas is that the match is only ever as good as the action in the ring. The factors of crowd popularity, timing and pacing, all of that pretty much goes out the window. In the end, what one personally makes of what’s presented in the ring is essentially the correct opinion because there’s no crowd noise to argue otherwise.
So of course this was awesome.
Bryan works the first half of the match for his team, locking it up with Nakamura on the mat for just the briefest glimpse of what those two could have down together in singles action. Bryan sprints his way to a big dive on the outside before getting cut off by Cesaro to go into a heat segment. Cesaro looked awesome on his part, really laying in all his strikes to make the control on Bryan look devastating. Hell, I can’t even complain about Nakamura too much as he didn’t really take any down time here and just hit his spots well.
Gulak gets the hot tag and nails a sweet German on Nakamura before the heels regain control again. It all builds steadily to a nice classic style tag finish of Gulak holding Cesaro in place for Bryan to hit the sunset flip off Bret’s rope. It’s so good. Everything makes sense, everything looked great, and it went just as long as one can stand when watching an empty arena match. A wonderful piece of wrestling that plays perfectly to its spot on the card under incredibly strange circumstances.
