I agree both AJ and Joe were in some bad angles in TNA. But any wrestler in any fed for a long time will have to endure some bad angles. There were also good angles.

I remain convinced that TNA's storylines and booking are no worse than WWE's. Its problem is small crowds, low production values and the power of the WWE brand. You switch from RAW to a show in the Impact Zone and a huge percentage of the audience just aren't going to take the latter seriously.

They always seemed to book Styles and Joe in the same haphazard way WWE would book their mid-carders. What with the ill-advised character developments (i.e playboy Styles and thuggish Joe), jobbing to nonentities (i.e Tyson Tomko, Orlando Jordan) or being cast aside for the latest big signing.

I remember Joe even being given his own Finger poke of Doom moment when he handed Kurt Angle the world title at Slammiversary one year.

No doubt TNA didn't book both guys as well as they could have, but as I've said before, WWE has booked guys for the past ten years - like The Miz and Dolph Ziggler - into mid-card oblivion, so neither company has a clean slate here.

Unfortunately I don't have the same optimism DejaVoodoo does when it comes to Joe and Styles. The main problem is that, if you're familiar with their TNA/indy work, it is clear that their styles have been severely curtailed in WWE, which is a real shame to see.

Joe has been curtailed? His work in NXT has been his best since about 2008. I thought he was shot until recently.

And AJ has worked one introductory match against an ageing and declining Jericho and then a squash. What more were you expecting to see?

wwe is bigger than any wrestler (even the biggest names) as they are the only promotion in town able to pay the money they command (it is not like the defect to wcw days)

with the wwe having matured as a business they have also got blander for safety - i.e. they have developed storylines, stars and longer term plans.. thus they might buy in new stars but they are cautious not to ruin what they already have. hence why new stars can look "under used"

i suspect that nxt is also used to deny competition talent. and while they can be "used on nxt in a different style" to raw/smackdown they will never be allowed on nxt to "beat" the raw/smackdown product because the wwe would be worried of damaging the main brand without fully replacing it with the other brand (ie it is bad business) - this is why the "wcw" invasion & raw v smackdown storylines never worked, the "lesser brand" could never be allowed to actually beat (ie replace) the main brand and so it ultimately always looked a poor storyline to the "dynamic" one it was meant to mimic with proper 90s wcw v wwe action, where wcw or wwe could have beaten (in the ratings & loyalty battles) each other in very real competition.

tna were not in a position to give them the "setting" they needed to look different any more and each week looked like the year before (lack of storylines, lack of out of ring filming, treading water while they searched for networks... when aj was leaving they did manage quite a bit of scene setting with the wood shack filming and the driving off in a car etc... but that came at the expense of the rest of the product which seemed extra drab as the promotion money seemed to have been spent on those scenes... pity, but obvious why it had to be like that.

the lack of real competition has damaged the wwe product, and it's continual attempts to remedy that with pretend "internal" competition just comes over as unsatisfying rubbish eventually. the wwe clearly does not want to take risks, but at the same time it is risks that made the product in the first place.

so aj & sj are mid card or lower players, who are being "denied" from the alternative promotions and are really likely to be getting a "raw" push only because raw has a long injury list that has hurt the medium term plans in the current phase. it is possible they might get a "pull" from the crowd to a higher place but the more likely outcome will be both end up well paid, both get midcard roles, and rather than being "the big thing" in a small pond they find when they leave they are clearly mid card players and very much the "christian" character draw rather than any major player draw (bit unfair but they wont be "kevin nash" level)

TNA having smaller crowds is self inflicted. Their product wasn't consistently good enough to attract new fans, which in turn affected the money they had to use for production, out with being subsidised by Panda Energy. When Panda Energy withdrew some of their funding, production was the first thing to be cut back on.

WWE has been stale for years and have lost a large chunk of fans, however the hardcore remain, hopeful that WWE will produce a great product that they have done at times in the past.


Chances are that WWE will do their usual awful booking at some stage with AJ and Joe, the latter of which is rumoured to be moving up to the main roster soon. At the minute though, they've been booked well.

I do agree with most of what has been said. Unfortunately for a lot of people, this is how fickle people are, they will look at TNA and the small arenas and just assume it's bad and then see WWE with the big arenas which are really just 7,000 -1 0,000 now but they film it to look good and people think that's better. People would sit and watch 3 hours of a boring Raw over a 2 hour Impact show just because it's meant to be better and it looks better. Just like a thread i made in GD about people wearing brand name clothes to fit in, it's nothing to do with the material or price or if you need it, as long as the logo is there that is all that matters.

I know Vince Russo talked about Panda Energy and Spike putting the money up for Ric Flair, Hogan and Bischoff and TNA did the Jeff Hardy, Ken Anderson contracts and both sides ran into millions and with the TNA side of it they did have to take money from their production budget which wasn't much to begin with and he suggested rather than spend millions on other wrestlers coming in, why not let Panda Energy and Spike take care of the main contracts and if you're really wanting to spend millions of dollars why not go and hire the best marketing team you can find, the kind that know trends and what's cool and they can do all the TV ads and billboards and pay them good money to make sure people know about the TNA brand and they'll know what they're doing and they can do the house shows aswell and do the proper advertising for them but they never done that.

I think the best way to describe TNA and WWE right now is they are both good wrestling shows. If you love wrestling, you will love TNA and WWE because it is just match after match after match that have no rhyme or reason to exist, they're just there for the sake of it so if you are a wrestling fan you should love TNA and WWE because that's what they give you.

Unfortunately many people grew up on wrestling as it used to be, as it was since the 70's. There were feuds, there were feuds that ran for months, wrestlers had characters, you got to hear everyone talk, you got to know about them, they interacted with the audience in the arena and at home, the announcers told you why a match was happening, even squash matches had a purpose of being on TV. I think today you have a combination of the people at home, and really they are the most important, the people at home don't have a reason to care and it's hurting the business to the point of, even if you are a die hard wrestling fan that loves wrestling matches, you will find it hard to make it through the shows without skipping or fast forwarding because you are getting closer and closer to the point of you just don't care about anyone on the show.


And to bring Russo up again, the one thing he was taught not only by Vince McMahon but the veterans that worked backstage at WWF was that you never ever play to the house, you ignore the live audience in the arenas, you always play to the audience at home so it doesn't matter what the live audience wants or boos or cheers, the audience at home will be far greater and it's the audience at home that drives viewership, the viewership drives ratings, ratings drives advertisers and sponsors, advertisers and sponsors equal money for the network, more money for the network means they will pay YOU more money for YOUR show when the contracts need negotiating. It's a domino effect.


I think what WWE has done over the last 15 years is completely change what pro wrestling is and was. What it was for decades and worked for decades and didn't need to be changed. I think the way they have made those changes has made changes to the wrestling business that cannot be fixed in the short term infact i don't think they can ever be fixed, after all the work that Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff did in the 1990's to once again get people interested in pro wrestling and treat it seriously was completely undone by the end of 2001, they might aswell have not bothered in the first place because by the end of 2001 to right now wrestling is back to where it was in 1994. Back to childish cartoony pantomimey wrestling that shouldn't belong on television.

And people say wrestling is cyclical. It's not. What happened was the world woke up to it being fake in the 1980s but that was ok because Vince McMahon took a chance and made what was mainly a North American fixture, a worldwide one and with the birth of Hulk Hogan and several other larger than life characters took the sting of pro wrestling being fake by showing people how entertaining it could be and they done a hell of a job doing it. Wrestling was great. By the early 90's the world had moved on from it already, it was already old news. A few years later you have ECW and Eric Bischoff and Paul Heyman and they all changed the perception of pro wrestling again and this time made it more mature and adult and more challenging to you and made you think and gave you realistic storylines to follow. By the time 2001 came all 3 men were nowhere near a booking sheet and all you have to fall back on?......is Vince McMahon. And what was the last thing Vince McMahon did that was successful on his own......1980s wrestling. That's what you have today. 1980s wrestling on TV on a Monday night.

So wrestling isn't cyclical at all. There is no boom periods. What's happened is over the last 15 years there hasn't been another mind to come along and change the perception of wrestling again and i don't think it will happen again. I think 15 years is too long. Too much time has passed. I don't think it will go back to how it was and if history is to be repeated then if it ever did go back to those levels of popularity, it would only last for 5 years anyway before people get fed up again and they want to see something new so it has to keep changing. I don't think it can. I think people outside of the hardcore fanbase have given up on it, they've seen everything they need to see. If that's the big companies doing that, how can TNA or anyone else really stand a chance? They don't. No one knows how to fix wrestling.

there is no excuse for ROH having better lightening than TNA

people need to be fired, chumps

ROH are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, who are a massive TV company. If they want to spend money on production, I would imagine they would do. ROH are arguably the number 2 promotion in the States.

Isn't the crap lighting meant to disguise the lack of a crowd?

I really don't know how anybody could argue that ROH aren't #2 now. Growing live event attendance, national television deal, a solid brand.

Conversely I have zero idea how anybody could logically argue ROH are a number 2 brand. Lucha Underground have a better claim than them but neither comes close to TNA in any meaningful or measurable way.

This is like those who hilariously try to argue that ECW was at any point in time a bigger brand than wcw.

I've explained why they are in my opinion. They tour, their attendance is growing, they are on national television. LU are on TV, and do really well, but to my knowledge they are a TV operation.

Kong has been released following the altercation with Hardy's wife.

As said in the WWE thread she is far to good for TNA.


Getting fied for slapping that ring rat is stupid though.

If anything good comes out of this hopefully Dolls House gets released as all 3 of them are about as usefull as a pair of Binoculars for Stevie Wonder

Those are all valid reasons to explain why the ROH brand is growing. None of them explain the leap from that to them being the number two promotion in the USA. There's no doubt TNA does not hold the clout it once did, financially or in terms of brand drawing power, but let's be honest here - ROH are still, by and large, a bingo hall promotion. TNA outgrew that a decade ago.

And then fell right back into it

At least fans pay to go to a ROH show TNA can't get them in for free.

Let's be honest: There is no number two promotion in the US right now. And there will probably never be again.

Nice to see ROH improving their production values.

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To all those on here who hate TNA then I think you should leave this forum I gave up on WWE in 2006 so I don't bother going on their forum. Simples

Maybe you should try TNAmecca then if you don't want positive and negative discussion about TNA.

They did?

How many fans did ROH draw on their latest UK tour?

Oh wait...

lol ags. Sometimes they do give me a right giggle but then you need to remember that for some people wrestling is this innocent thing, they just have no clue how it really works.

How many fans did TNA draw on their latest US your?

Oh wait...