i said it tried to be too much wrasslin and it still does TO THIS DAY

pure wrasslin does not really work in this day and age so thats wwe isnt great either.

once in a while it is ok(e.g cena open challenge) but when prime time player 6 man tags span both sides of an ad break you know something is wrong.

I was watching Bully Ray's interview with Vince Russo from last week and he says the same thing........when has a straight wrestling match ever sold a ticket? Not entertainers in the ring, just straight wrestlers. The last time was Benoit vs Angle.

He's the guy both WWE and TNA want right now and even he say's wrestling doesn't sell tickets, it can never be relied upon to sell tickets and he says you need everything. You need your blood and guts, you need your sexy women, you need your tag teams, you need your straight wrestling. He is a wrestler who loves wrestling, but he doesn't want to see 2 hours of it. It's not that interesting.

So anything with more than 6 minutes of wrestling in a single block is a wrasslin show to you?


When has WWE ever tried to sell a PPV on a wrestling match with zero other factors?

matches should not last longer than 3 mins on a weekly show imo except for main event which can go 10 mins

ppvs are the place for classics.

What about years ago then on Prime Time wrestling when you had Bret wrestling Martel going to 20 minute draws?


If I knew where it was id probably take a look.

Saying that though be cool if they had a backlog of stuff from the past decade.

that was a different era dave. one where kayfabe was still intact

it wont work anymore.

Google NJPW World, I'm pretty sure they have an English language website with it being an international service.

It's really lucky then that nobody puts on 2 hours of wrestling in a TV show then really.

wwe probably come close on mondays.

other than promos what else is there? prior to lesnar/taker i cannot remember the last backstage brawl. rarerly is there a storyline theme running from start of show till end anymore either.comedy seems to have vanished too.

its mostly match followed by match followed by match.

Which to be fair ive enjoyed every single Angle vs Benoit match. Not one was under 5 stars.

You have to remember the ridiculous amount of ad breaks that come into Raw on a Monday night.

This week, Raw had slightly less than 70 minutes of actual matches which I wouldn't say is close to 2 hours really. It's much closer to an hour than it is 2.

This will shock you all. Vince Russo has actually said something in a blog I agree with.

"Dixie Carter was never cut out to run a professional wrestling company."

That's another thing Russo and Bully talked about. Giving star ratings to fake fights. Bully said it best.

I don't give a frig how my match was, no one cares about the match, add an extra 0 to my paycheque, that's all I care about.




And he's absolutely right on that count. The matches do mean nothing, what matters is stories and characters. No one cares about a fake fight, what they care about is the angles and twists and turns. Wrestling is theatre. The match is just a tool in a much bigger picture. The unbelievable thing, especially WWE is they fill their shows with actual wrestling! Like literally 2 and 3 hour shows filled with wrestling matches lol. Madness.

Did anyone see WWE house show numbers for this month? 3,000 and 4,000 and people slag off GFW and TNA? The top wrestling company is drawing 3-4k in their house shows. That shows you how far the business has fallen when you can only convince that many people to come see your shows and that's with your Cenas and Ortons and Reigns on them. TNA and GFW really aren't doing too badly at all when the number 1 promotion is drawing those numbers.

Its really sad when wrestlers have to resort to using the term fake fights or fake matches. We all know that but it comes out like a non wrestling fan in the media would call it.

But its wrong to say no one cares about the matches if that was true no one would bother to turn up and watch the match. So im a fan and if going by that logic if I dont care about the match why should I watch it, or why should I even bother watching a TV show if I dont care about the product. I watch to be entertained and to enjoy wrestling, those two are just wrong if they are going to say that.

Of course the matches mean something thats why we watch wrestling shows, stories and characters arent always the most important thing otherwise you should just do angles and stuff and not bother doing matches.

This thread is starting to bring me round to the hazy mentality of just blocking everyone...


WWE 'crushed' TNA by stopping them from running shows in arenas? The same TNA that has barely been a touring company during the entirety of its existence? OK. Well I'm sure you have some kind of documented evidence of this, right? You surely aren't just basing this off of some random internet rumours.

When did WWE make it clear that RoH wasn't a path to the WWE? How many former RoH guys are currently working for them because I'd guess its quite a few and (whisper it) the guy holding the World Title is a former RoH guy.

I'm quite enjoying the implication that WWE planted all the backstage problems stories. This by the way is a prime example of why you come across as blaming WWE for all of TNA's problems.


Oh yeah we're all forgetting the golden Russo rule. If it was good that was him but if it was bad he had nothing to do with it.


Its not a strawman when you actually say it. You repeatedly painted the WWE as the big bad villain of this story and in the process absolved TNA of responsibility for their own failures.

I also really want to touch on this whole 'general decline of the industry' point.

I don't think the industry decline is responsible for TNA's failures. I think TNA's failures are (in part) to blame for the decline of the industry. This notion that they couldn't possibly hope to succeed because the industry is in decline is utterly misguided. As the vibrant upstart promotion they should have been exciting and growing the audience. Their failures have driven the decline of the industry not the other way around.

Hey I'm on your side!!! God, so much for the clique

Kurt Angle vs. Chris Benoit apparently.


Quiet you. Don't you know wrestling only started in the mid-90s? Nothing before then counts.


Yeah its pretty obvious Bully Ray doesn't care about the quality of his matches (Bully Ray burn!).

With that said this idea that people don't care about the quality of matches is nonsense. Want to know how I know this to be true? When Vince Russo got to test out his 'no one cares about matches' theory in both WCW and TNA it alienated the audience and drove them away from the product.


Weird because a couple of weeks ago on Raw John Cena and Cesaro had an excellent match that the audience was completely into purely because it was an excellent match. There wasn't a big storyline with twists and turns behind that. The whole pitch was this is going to be a great match between two great athletes. In fact that match was so successful that its basically resurrected Cesaro as a viable upper card singles wrestler.


Well it isn't. The match is actually the bigger picture. Its the things that all the actual tools (the stories, characters, twists and turns) are supposed to create and sell. The end game of the Lesnar/Taker brawl from Raw last week for example if their match at SummerSlam. That entire angle existed to sell their match at SummerSlam. That match isn't a tool in a much bigger picture. Its the picture WWE is painting.

If we don't break up how can we reform repeatedly and to ever diminishing returns?

That's fine, I just think blocking is a bit far

Agreed! We are all here because we are wrestling fans.

Alexi, we're just repeating ourselves.

Everyone else: Please look at my actual posts for my views, not Alexi's unfair exaggerations of them.

tna main event scene lacking star power at minute. dont get me wrong i like matt hardy but hardy vs ec3 is not something i am clamouring for.

eric young is cool though!

Is Genesis going to be a PPV or a episode of Impact?

Like this one which has WWE running everyone (including TNA) out of business.

Or this one where TNA have struggled to make it because 'WWE'.

Or this one where its all the fault of the 'WWE monopoly'.

Or this one where again its the evil WWE monopoly to blame and not TNA.

Or this one wher 'WWE have basically managed to "passive aggressive" TNA to death'

Or this one which looks to blame WWE for TNA's woes as well 'I still think that even without those failings they faced an uphill battle against the corporate juggernaut that is WWE'

But remember seibu hasn't at all tried to blame WWE for TNA's problems. Maybe I wrote all those posts for him to 'exaggerate' his position.

I was a bit confused by Challenges showing of Slamiversary 2006 last night, Challenge, the Freeview EPG and the announcers all said it was 2006 yet they kept saying TNA started 3 years ago (2006), didn't TNA start in 2002 making it 4 years ago sombody somehwere can't count heh.

Considering the fuss they make of Chris Melendez being a hero and wrestling with with an artificial leg, they seem to have forgotten that back in 2006 there was someone fight entirely one legged which seems more impressive. TNA seems to have the Continuity and Memory of a particularly thick goldfish.