Mia might have actually been more over than Charlotte. She didn’t even get an entrance on TV, but the fans were chanting for her anyway. Charlotte squashed Mia, with the fact that the fans were chanting for this nameless jobber instead of the babyface champion, they really should have found some way to tone down the crowd volume in post-production.
POST- MATCH SEGMENT- Sasha comes out onto the stage. She and Charlotte were both wearing the same shirt, which was blue and said “If you’re gonna do it” on the front. I have never seen this shirt before and have no idea what the phrase means, but the fact that babyface champion and the top heel were wearing the same shirt jumped out at me as being very strange.
Anyway, Sasha cuts a great promo and Charlotte responded by being awesome and either completely ignoring her doing the “kicking dirt on you” motion and it was all awesome until f*cking Bailey showed up and ruined it.
As I have described, Charlotte was doing a great job of not only ignoring the troll, but looking cool while doing so. Bailey then comes out on crutches and says “Hey Sasha. Charlotte won’t say it, but I will: Why don’t you shut you stupid ratchet face up.” Yes. She actually said that. So insulting was this verbal barb that Sasha responded to it by doing her best not to laugh (and she probably didn’t manage to hold it in very well because the camera randomly cut to Charlotte for a moment.
Sasha then kicked Bailey’s crutch out, then kicked her in her injured, braced knee. Charlotte ran up the ramp to save Bailey while Sasha ran away with her heat because apparently everything in this division must be about motherf*cking Bailey. Hopefully the focus on Bailey in this feud is building up to some sort of Bailey Leaves Town stip being added to their title match where if Sasha wins, Bailey must leave WWE forever, and if Charlotte wins Bailey must also leave WWE forever.
Sasha tried to get some more heat by attacking Charlotte while Charlotte was tending to Bailey, but Charlotte saw her coming, picked up, carried her down the ramp and dumped her in the ring. Sasha begged off like great heel as Charlotte cornered her, but then Becky Lynch appeared the apron (I imagine that she stepped on Bailey’s face on her to the ring because that makes me happy). Charlotte knocked Becky down, but this was enough of a distraction for Sasha to hit the Bankrupt (her lungblower) on Charlotte, then posed with the title. Good heat for Sasha, but WAY too much focus on Bailey. I assume we’ll wind up with Becky and Bailey in their respective corners on the Takeover special, but it really shouldn’t be happening.
VAUDEVILLANS SILENT MOVIE- nowhere near as funny as last week. This one was just whacky.
WESLEY BLAKE & BUDDY MURPHY vs. THE VAUDEVILLANS- 2/10
Murphy & Blake’s entrance music is ATROCIOUS. The announcers tried to sell to us that they might be good contenders for the tag titles after Takerover: R Evolution. They did this by reminding us that they lost a tag team match to the current tag champs last week. Then we got to watch them get beaten with ease by the #1 contenders to the tag team titles. Yeah… I don’t think they’re getting a tag title shot any time soon, no matter who wins at Takeover: R Evolution. (Edit: Upon further research it appears that the match between Murphy & Blake and the Lucha Dragons NEVER HAPPENED! So the announcers made it up just to bury them for no reason).
That being said, Murphy and Blake really impressed me here. Blake sold well and Murphy got some cool offense in. The Vaudvillans, on the other hand, were boring as hell.
REGAL BACKSTAGE WITH SOME HEELS- we wound up getting an announcement of Breeze & Kidd vs. Itami & Balor. I would be really excited for this if I wasn’t certain it is going to end in a damn DQ. We also learned that Marcus Louis has no-showed tonight’s show and is missing from his house as well.
BULL DEMPSEY vs. ELIAS SAMPSON- squash. Duh.
Once again, the show was apparently timed out so that they played one guy’s music for the winner of the last match had even left the ring. Dempsey stared at Corbin, but Corbin just ignored him. Like was week, the jobber in the second match got no entrance.
BARRIN CORBIN vs. A NAMELESS JOBBER- squash.
This entire segment was pretty boring, mostly because we saw THE SAME EXACT THING two weeks ago. To make matters worse, I am nowhere close to excited for the “Battle of two guys who are so green they can only do squash matches” because we just saw it on the last Takeover special with Dempsey and Mojo, and it really wasn’t particularly good.
KEVIN OWENS VIDEO PACKAGE- I LOVE the idea that he feels that he really has something to prove because guys like Rollins, Bryan, Neville, and Zayn got called first even though he was every bit as good as they are, but I hated their claim that he and Dragon were a tag team. According to Cagematch.net, they have teamed exactly TWICE in their entire careers- once in a six man tag (ROH The Hunt Begins and once as a standard tag team (ROH Validation… and that match only happened because Dragon’s originally scheduled partner (who was, ironically, Seth Rollins) got injured (and to make matters worse, if my memory serves me correctly, the story of that match was that they both wound up wrestling large chunks of it as a handicap match of dastardly things the Wolves did to them throughout the match, so it’s not even much an exaggeration to say that they haven’t teamed at all). Yes, I know that this is the nitpick of an indy fan with a great memory for minutiae, but why tell a lie when the truth is even better? Danielson has NEVER beaten Steen, while Steen beat Dragon in their only one-on-one encounter (ROH Eye of the Storm). This should only feud Steen’s fire because guys he has beaten got called before him, and the of the lot of them, the guy who has been the most success is a guy Steen in undefeated against.
He made sure to point out that Sami Zayn wasn’t just someone he had wrestled, but was his best friend… and they even had A BACKSTAGE PICTURE OF THEM WITH GENERICO SANS HIS MASK!
FINN BALOR & HIDEO ITAMI vs. TYLER BREEZE & TYSON KIDD (w/Natalya)- 5.75/10
Well… it didn’t go to a DQ, so that was good, but just seven minutes is WAY too short for a clean finish in a match with so much talent in it.
SAMI ZAYN & ADRIAN NEVILLE SEGMENT- AWESOME!
Neville was awesome with his “do you think I wanted to win that way?” stuff. Sami was also awesome, and seeing him snap that like really makes you wonder if he might go full heel, which an utterly amazing thing to be saying SAMI ZAYN.
A bad go-home show from NXT. The tag champs weren’t even on the show and one half of the only big non-title match announced so far was not on the show either. The build to the Women’s Title match was decent, but could have been better, and we still only have four matches for this show, and not having something like Corbin vs. Dempsey on the show makes all of the TV time they have spent on those two a waste.
The go-home segment for the NXT Title match undeniably awesome and there are those who say that that is really all you need to sell a “PPV,” but aside from that match, Kevin
