{"id":10921,"date":"2013-04-11T12:44:12","date_gmt":"2013-04-11T02:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=10921"},"modified":"2013-04-11T17:03:34","modified_gmt":"2013-04-11T07:03:34","slug":"tv-show-round-up-wrestlemania-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=10921","title":{"rendered":"TV Show Round Up: Wrestlemania 29"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"wm29metlife\"<\/a>

Wrestlemania 29 – 80,000 strong at Metlife stadium. For all the company’s ups and downs in the last decade, there’s no denying their success in turning Wrestlemania into a massive marquee event<\/p><\/div>\n

Wrestlemania 29<\/h1>\n

Wrestlemania 29<\/em> won’t likely be remembered as one of the all time great Wrestlemanias<\/em>.\u00a0 It doesn’t come close to the best – VIII, X, XVII, XIV – but instead it fell somewhere in the middle.\u00a0 The impressive Met Life set design, sellout crowd and excellent CM Punk vs Undertaker match were all big positives but some of the main event matches didn’t really deliver, most notably John Cena vs The Rock II which was mostly notable for how derivative and lackluster it felt.\u00a0 Here’s a recap of the whole event.<\/p>\n

From the get-go,\u00a0Wrestlemania 29<\/em> seemed rushed and under the pump to fit everything in.\u00a0 The show was notable for scrapping a planned eight man tag match, the singing of the national anthem or the use of any backstage segments whatsoever.\u00a0 It was match after match and even then, you could tell certain bouts were cut short.\u00a0 Jack Swagger made his entrance to the World Heavyweight Title match in a camo-vehicle but there wasn’t enough time to fit it in.\u00a0 So instead he was given a jobber entrance – already in the ring when the cameras turned to him.<\/p>\n

The opening bout was The Shield vs Super Best Friends<\/strong>.\u00a0 It was a solid opening encounter and it turns out the friends weren’t so tight after all.\u00a0 After some bickering over who should tag in, Randy Orton was eventually overcome by the teamwork of The Shield and beaten cleanly after a spear from Roman Reigns.\u00a0 Clearly someone up high is pretty big on The Shield who remain undefeated in six months.\u00a0 This is pretty extraordinary when you consider their opponents have been exclusively babyface main eventers.\u00a0 Meanwhile Randy Orton continues to tread water.\u00a0 He’s one of the company’s few main eventers but he’s sitting on two strikes for failed drug policies so the company seems reluctant to do anything with him.\u00a0 It was a solid opening encounter though.<\/p>\n

Ryback vs Mark Henry<\/strong> was a pretty slow, pedestrian affair as you’d expect from a couple of musclebound giants.\u00a0 The match ended when Ryback lifted Henry onto his shoulders only for Henry to grab the ropes, causing Ryback to drop the weight of his opponent onto his own head (!).\u00a0 It was a curious booking decision.\u00a0 After spending the better part of a year building up Ryback, they’ve had him lose every<\/em> pay-per-view match he’s been involved in since October.\u00a0 I hope he gets some traction soon otherwise he’ll end up in that midcard hell currently occupied by Kofi Kingston, The Miz, Antonio Cesaro and Wade Barrett who endlessly trade wins and loses with one another ad nauseum.<\/p>\n

Team Hell No vs Dolph Ziggler and Big E Langston<\/strong>was everything I wanted it to be.\u00a0 The match got a decent amount of time and Daniel Bryan finally got to have his moment in the sun, defeating Ziggler and celebrating with a jubliant crowd afterwards.\u00a0 The sight of Bryan leading a chorus of fans chanting ‘YES!’ put a smile on my face.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Chris Jericho vs Fandango<\/strong>ended with Fandango picking up the upset victory in a passable match with a botched ending.\u00a0 I remain unconvinced with Fandango’s ability to work a match of any length.\u00a0 After Jericho lead the opening ten minutes of the match I thought Fandango looked nervous as hell when he was trying to dictate the pace of the closing minutes of the match.\u00a0 On the plus side, he may have stumbled onto a job-saving goldmine the following night on Raw when the New Jersey crowd began to hum along to his theme song and dancing.\u00a0 If that catches on, he will be over as a performer no matter how much he sucks in the ring.<\/p>\n

\"Dutch<\/a>

Dutch Mantell’s moustache is a thing of beauty. He cut a pretty good promo before the World Heavyweight Title match too where he criticized America’s multiculturalism to draw some decent heat from the New Jersey crowd.<\/p><\/div>\n

I don’t know what I was expecting for Alberto Del Rio vs Jack Swagger\u00a0<\/strong>but we got a reasonable encounter that was alright but not exactly a classic.\u00a0 The strange thing about this encounter was that it is readily apparent that the two most over performers are the two respective valets – Ricardo Rodriguez and Zack Coulter.\u00a0 I can’t really put all the blame on Swagger and Del Rio though.\u00a0 Both have been victims of some spectacularly haphazard booking that makes it hard for the crowd to seriously engage with both performers.<\/p>\n

Easily the match of the night and one of my favourite Wrestlemania<\/em> matches in a long time was CM Punk vs The Undertaker<\/strong>.\u00a0 Both wrestlers had great entrances.\u00a0 Punk had Living Colour perform Cult of Personality<\/em> live and Taker had a great entrance that had a visual of the souls of the damned reaching out for him.<\/p>\n

\"takerentrance\"<\/a>

Taker’s entrance looked pretty rad<\/p><\/div>\n

The best thing about this match is that the setup is really simple – The Undertaker wants retribution on Punk – and the outcome is really obvious – Undertaker wins – but the journey that these two wrestlers took to get us there was memorable.\u00a0 It started from the opening bell when Punk slapped Taker in the face, ducking and weaving from Taker’s enraged flurry of punches.\u00a0 Throughout the match, CM Punk trolled the audience by having the audacity to mimmick trademark Undertaker moves, like the rope-walk, and by constantly evading the chokeslam at the last possible moment.\u00a0 By the end of the match, the crowd was baying for blood and wanting to see Punk get his come uppance.\u00a0 The Undertaker deserves credit for being willing to go along with Punk getting the upperhand for so long but he also showed an excellent understanding of timing and when to deliver his comeback.\u00a0 This match told an excellent story and in that way it reminded me of classic matches from Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Chris Benoit and Kurt Angle.<\/p>\n

Triple H<\/strong> vs Brock Lesnar<\/strong> was a lacklustre match with a strange ending where Triple H went over for reasons best known to Trips and Vince alone.\u00a0 Triple H is practically retired anyway so why he needed to win is beyond me.\u00a0 Lesnar has been giving a contract extension to continue performing at high profile main events but a large part of mystique has already been squandered.\u00a0 He’s got a 1-2 track record since his return and has been cleanly beaten by John Cena and Triple H.\u00a0 It doesn’t really leave him with much to do.\u00a0 The speculation is that he will likely be used in a Wrestlemania main event next year against The Rock.\u00a0 It’s another weird rematch, this time a follow up to their Summerslam encounter from 2002, in a follow up that no one I know is clamouring for.<\/p>\n

This particularly match was a surprisingly slow encounter with a long drawn-out finish.\u00a0 Since the show ended, its been revealed that Lesnar suffered a concussion early on and that Triple H burnt himself on dry ice during his entrance which both likely contributed to the poor quality of the match.\u00a0 You get the sense though that for whatever reason, these two don’t particularly have great chemistry together.<\/p>\n

The main event of John Cena vs The Rock<\/strong> was a strange and disappointing ending to the night.\u00a0 As mentioned before, the show felt rather rushed and after a cluster of other wrestlers getting special treatment for their Wrestlemania entrances, these two were rather unceremoniously bundled out there.\u00a0 They proceeded to put on an indy-riffic contest where they had a completely forgettable pre-amble that didn’t mean anything before lurching into a prolonged exchange of finishing moves for the end of the match.\u00a0 There was absolutely no rhyme or reason to any of this.\u00a0 You hit your finishing move.\u00a0 I’ll hit mine.\u00a0 Now you do my move and I’ll do yours.\u00a0 There was absolutely no sense of momentum and no build towards a final move.\u00a0 Which is why the crowd largely responded with surprised apathy when John Cena eventually got the pin.<\/p>\n

The match finished with a chorus of boos from an uninterested crowd who hated the match, hated John Cena and hated the trite handshake of respect that finished the match.\u00a0 Desperate to pop some kind of cheer from the crowd, they played The Rock’s music and had Cena point at The Rock in adulation but even that didn’t work.\u00a0 Considering that conclusion – John Cena finally<\/em> gets the best of The Rock – has been 3 Wrestlemania main events in the making, it was an unmitigated disaster.\u00a0 Imagine if other Wrestlemania<\/em> moments culminated in such apathy from the crowd.\u00a0 Hogan slamming Andre.\u00a0 Randy Savage reuniting with Miss Elizabeth.\u00a0 Shawn Michaels winning his first heavyweight title.<\/p>\n

It’s such a well worn subject that barely warrants repeating but its absolutely extraordinary that the WWE have persisted with John Cena as their top babyface performer for a decade<\/em>.\u00a0 His reign at the top now exceeds Hulk Hogan’s original Hulkamania<\/em> run in the Eighties and yet he has been in main event after main event where the crowd has soundly rejected him and booed him mercilessly.\u00a0 Ten years of commentators having to pretend like the crowd isn’t vociferously cheering the other guy, desperately hoping for Cena to lose.\u00a0 It’s now become a strange kind of stand off between Vince McMahon and his audience.\u00a0 He refuses to turn Cena heel or try anyone else at the top but the fans are just as stubbornly rejecting Cena as the top dog.\u00a0 The sad thing is that there’s no reason this can’t go on for another ten years.\u00a0 Cena works a very safe style that doesn’t put too much wear and tear on his body so he could comfortably keep working the same match till Wrestlemania 40<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The first half of this show was excellent, culminating in the fantastic CM Punk vs The Undertaker match which will go down as a classic.\u00a0 The second half, the Main Event, was trash.\u00a0 It was kind of like an old WCW PPV from the mid-Nineties that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wrestlemania 29 Wrestlemania 29 won’t likely be remembered as one of the all time great Wrestlemanias.\u00a0 It doesn’t come close to the best – VIII, X, XVII, XIV – but instead it fell somewhere in the middle.\u00a0 The impressive Met Life set design, sellout crowd and excellent CM Punk vs Undertaker match were all big …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,4],"tags":[350,1007,856,855,1576,1600,495,1010],"class_list":["post-10921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-tv","tag-brock-lesnar","tag-cm-punk","tag-john-cena","tag-the-rock","tag-the-undertaker","tag-triple-h","tag-wrestlemania","tag-wwe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10921"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10932,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10921\/revisions\/10932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}