Ramblemania 27

WRESTLEMANIA 27
Georgia Dome, Atlanta, GE
April 3, 2011

Quick simple notes written shortly after viewing. I don't recall if this was posted on the blog at the time, but in any case... here it is (again?)



Edge (c) pins Alberto Del Rio to retain the World Heavyweight Championship.

It really says something about how people within the company views Edge as a champion when he's defending his title at the start of the show.

The match was okay; it wasn't anything particularly mindblowing, but it was okay. Perhaps the best swerve that was pulled off in this match was that Christian didn't turn on Edge here... because that would have been such a predictable move on WWE's part and the fact they didn't go that route (yet) has to be one of the best moves they've done. The clean finish was rather nice. But on a whole, the match was okay. Wasn't really

Cody Rhodes pinned Rey Mysterio in a pretty neat match. No, this was rather good, actually. Speaking as someone who rarely watches Smackdown, this was pretty entertaining and good stuff all-around. No complaints.

Kane, Big Show, Santino Marella, Coffee Kingston beat The Corre. Did I say beat? I meant, BURIED.

Match was too short for anything other than a glorified squash... er, I mean BURIAL. Anyone who thinks the Corre stands as being a powerful stable on Smackdown, this match is your wakeup call. They are DEAD.

If anything, it was slightly longer than the Victory Road main event... not Wrestlemania-worthy, I'm afraid.

Randy Orton defeated CM Punk.
Not bad of a match. Pretty solid stuff. Again, no complaints.

Michael Cole defeated Jerry Lawler via DQ. Lawler originally won via submission until the RAW GM DQ'ed Lawler due to interference from Stone Cold, who was the special ref for the match.

Look, I liked some of the build-up to this match (not so much the bickerying commentary during other matches), but the match itself blew chunks. It was dull, nothing was happening, and the finish just flew out of left field. This was just terrible.

Undertaker beat Triple H in a No Holds Barred match to maintain his undefeated streak.

I'm sort of split on this. I wasn't expecting much out of this other than the same old shit; I've stated as much in previous blogs and vlogs. Watching the match with others, it did tell a solid story and while I knew better of the end result, these two put out such an intense, hard-hitting bout that almost made you believe that this was the night the streak ended. And when the match was over, even when Taker had won, he had to be stretched out while Triple H barely walked out, defeated but no more battered than the victor. That was such a great story being told and in THAT respect, it was good.

As far as the match itself goes... well, once you get the mystery of who wins out of the way, it doesn't really hold up to repeat viewings. Once they get into the whole kick out of finishers and lay there for five years bit, it really starts to drag and even when HHH is screaming at Taker to stay down, I kept thinking, "Dude. You have him down. He's beaten. Just pin the motherfucker and get it over with." But no, he just keeps yapping and ends up tapping out to Undertaker's Hell's Gate gogogaplata or whatever it's called.

And perhaps worse of all, each time I watch this match, I find myself falling asleep every five minutes or so. It feels less like a fantastic brawl and more like plodding. Funny how I don't get this feeling when I watch the same two guys go at a decade earlier; their Mania X-Seven match is FAR better than last year's. And while I don't find this match to be as amazing as others would, I'd still call it match of the night if only because it's the only match that felt like a Wrestlemania-worthy match.

Okay, I rambled on quite a bit. So we'll keep moving.

Snooki wins... fuck this match. This was the designated piss break match for me and as soon as I came back from my piss break, it was over. Apparently Snooki did a handspring elbow or something like that, but I honestly don't care.  Nobody punched out Snooki, so I do not care.

The Miz (c) and John Cena wrestle to a double-countout; Miz retains the WWE Championship.
The Miz defeats John Cena in a No-DQ match to retain the WWE Championship.

Two positives I could think of regarding this match;

1 - John Cena did not win the match, even with new merch. Maybe someone should have clued the Merch Department that wearing a redshirt is a bad thing.

2 - This was a longer main event than Victory Road's debacle of a PPV. And regardless of what anybody says, there is nothing entertaining about watching a drugged-out Jeff Hardy stumble to the ring and not be in any condition to perform. Anyone who actually believes this to be the case... let's see you defend that point of view when Jeff Hardy is found dead on the floor as a result of a drug overdose. Because that's very likely.

Outside of those two things... ugh.

Okay, let me throw another aside. I like the video packages that introduces the Miz and John Cena, each getting a rather interesting retrospective of their respective careers. A nice way to see how far they've come along. I don't get the AWESOME balloons. I think the use of a choir for Cena's overblown entrance is unquestionably ridiculous and the crowd was right to absolutely PISS on this, with all due respect to the folks, who did fine but were a poor fit in this environment.

The match itself was bad. I mean, BAD. Miz had good matches with Morrison, Danielson, Lawler. And John Cena, for all the times that I rag on the guy for being such a worthless tool and pisspoor wrestler, is capable of having a good match. And I have seen good matches from Cena, mostly when he's in the ring with someone who can help him have a good match. He had a match with Shawn Michaels that was almost an hour long and IT WAS GOOD. But this match, for the WWE Heavyweight Championship, the main event of Wrestlemania... was HORRENDOUS. This felt phoned-in; like they were having this rather pedestrian, dull, and boring match that was going to go on for a few minutes until Cena got his eventual win. And then for them to get outside and get counted out... this was an utterly, utterly TERRIBLE match and a horrific way to end a Wrestlemania. And whatever goodwill this show had left was absolutely pissed away here. It could be argued that this match was a worse Mania mainevent than HHH-RKO at Mania 25... and that's not far off. As dull as I found that main even to be, at least they had a decisive finish. You can't say that much about this match.

The Rock shows up, tosses aside the RAW GM laptop, declares the match no-DQ, and then rock-bottoms Cena. Miz goes for the quick cover, retains his title, Cena loses, and I proceed to imagine myself as Bobby Heenan witnessing Ric Flair's WWF Title win at the 1992 Royal Rumble while producing a wall of text on the blog with nothing but the word YES a million times over.

Overall, a show that was not good.