Extreme Rules 2020 was tagged as the Horror Show, which is a name I’ll forever not understand, and in some aspects, it really lived up to its name.
Cesaro & Shinsuke Nakamura bt The New Day (c) – Smackdown Tag Team Championships
We kicked off, with the Smackdown Tag Team Championships on the line. Nakamura and Cesaro defeated The New Day to become champions. This match was good for the short amount of time they had, both teams showed their chemistry in and around the ring and I’m happy with The New Day dropping the belts here as they really don’t need them. I don’t understand why we don’t get more tag matches with stipulations like this, to be honest, it makes things far more exciting.
Bayley (c) bt Nikki Cross – Smackdown Women’s Championship
Following this was the Smackdown’s Women’s Championship match which was just bang average. Bayley retained via a Sasha Banks distraction like expected. I feel like they could’ve done more with this storyline-wise. I thought we were building to Nikki Cross’ downfall being her uncontrollable nature but this just ended up being a typical Bayley vs opponent match. This was disappointing.
MVP becomes United States Champion?
After this, MVP announced himself as the new United States Champion because Apollo Crews was ‘injured’ and couldn’t defend his title. Rumour has it that Apollo caught COVID-19 in the huge outbreak in WWE, because who takes more than a few weeks to recover from a Full Nelson? Also, where were Ricochet and Cedric Alexander? I thought they were part of this mess of a United States championship picture. I don’t know if this official or not but it’s WWE so it probably is.
Seth Rollins bt Rey Mysterio – Eye for an Eye match
They backed themselves in a corner with this one. We had a terrific wrestling match between two greats of different generations but the fact the objective of the match was to extract their opponent’s eye, made it clear we were going to get a tacky finish, which is exactly what we got. Rollins took the ‘eye’ of Mysterio (fake glass eye) out to win and proceeded to throw-up afterwards, showing some flaws in the character of Seth which I rate highly. I’m extremely intrigued to see where this goes on Raw tonight but it doesn’t excuse the poor finish.
Sasha Banks bt Asuka (c) I guess? – Raw Women’s Championship
This was great, until the finish. The chemistry between these two is incredible and I was on the edge of my seat throughout. However, the main talking point is the ending of this match, which was a whole load of confusion. Essentially, Asuka unintentionally blinded the referee with the green mist, Bayley stripped the official of his top, put it on and counted the pin after hitting Asuka with the belt. I’m still confused now, hopefully, this debacle gets cleared up on Raw tonight. Apart from that, I could watch these two wrestle all day.
Drew McIntyre (c) bt Dolph Ziggler – WWE Championship
Predictable but interesting is the best way to summarise this. Dolph chose Extreme Rules to be applied as the stipulation but only for him, which is very smart but we all knew Drew wasn’t going to drop the belt to Ziggler on a B-Level PPV. Ziggler just isn’t as hot as he was a few years ago and it’s evident this a filler feud so we can move onto Drew’s Summerslam challenge. Nothing much to say on this bout, pretty average if you ask me.
Bray Wyatt bt Braun Strowman I guess – Swamp Match
Another match where I genuinely don’t understand what actually happened. This was a horror show (pun intended) and I don’t even want to watch this again. I still don’t know if Wyatt won, I think he did, but this was just extremely confusing and I don’t know why Bray started a promo in the MIDDLE OF THE MATCH! I think it’s safe to say we were all left perplexed by this. Alexa Bliss appearing as Sister Abigail was interesting, we’ll see if that gets followed up or not on Friday. The Fiend popped up at the end as well, surprise surprise, so we’ll get the trilogy match at Summerslam where I expect Wyatt to win. All in all, this was horrific.
This show could’ve been great if the finishes of the matches were better and if Bray vs Braun actually made sense. This one is a mixture of moderately good highs but some really bad lows. I’ll rate it a 2.75/5
The Horror Show lived up to it’s name.
TheWrestlingFallacy 