You're the epitome of the sort of fan I was talking about.

Indie = good
Spot-fests = good
WWE guys = inherently bad

Not really Ryback showed how weak he was after a few mins.

Big guys like Undertaker Kane even Big Show and many others were big but could always put a good competitive match on.

In recent years guys like Sheamus can have good matches Rusev is one of the best things in WWE at the moment I like Brey Wyatt and the Wyatts apart from Braun Strowman who is also useless.

In the past guys like André the Giant King Kong Bundy while not great in the ring were good as they knew how to play to to their strengths I would put guys like Sid and to a lesser point Nash in there to.

Then there is talentless guys like Ryback and it's not limiated to big guys some small "spotfest" guys suck to Sin Cara (Sin Cara 1 more but 2 is bad to)

As we found out at the CWC Live Final, TJ Perkins is the new Cruiserweight Champion and will be on Raw.

WWE.com can confirm that the following Cruiserweights are also joining Team Red:

Brian Kendrick
Rich Swann
Gran Metalik
Cedric Alexander
Lince Dorado
Noam Dar

Pity they put Kalisto on SD he would have been great if they wanted to split The Lucha Dragons to be on diffrent shows they should have put Sin Cara on SD.

Yeah, I was kind of thinking about how they were booked. The Vince who booked Kevin Nash's rise up the card to perfection years ago either has changed his approach to how much he 'gives' talent or is simply not as good anymore. Reeves was interesting in FCW with his Terminator act, but from the get go was given a Goldberg persona. In my opinion, squash matches don't work when the rest of the show features competetive matches. It says to the increasingly hardcore fanbase 'this guy or girl is who we want you to like'. Then they throw him to the wolves by booking him to either beat the beloved CM Punk or have his streak ended. It culminated with a loss to Mark Henry with a shit finish in a poor match at Wrestlemania. It was like a manual on how not to protect somebody while force pushing them for today's audience!

The Reigns experiment was just weird and Del Rio had an actually interesting gimmick but they did literally nothing with it.

Meltzer says Dixie won't sell to WWE as they have zero interest in TNA as an ongoing promotion, they just want the tape library as content for the network.

As a child I first got into wrestling by watching WCW on ITV on a Saturday morning I think it was, as I remember rushing round to my friends house to watch it with him (alas he has long since ago moved on from watching it, I haven't!).

Looking back at it now, it does seem to be just squad match after squash match, but at the time I was not to know that!

Hardly the cutting edge stuff of the attitude era!

I think one of the main problems in wrestling today and it's not just WWE is the people in charge of wrestling companies are either doing what THEY KNOW or what has WORKED PREVIOUSLY.

I think what a lot of fans tend to forget is that when the WWF was losing money in the mid 90s, it wasn't so much a problem with Vince McMahon's vision or the wrestling or who the wrestlers were, the problem was actually people just didn't care for it anymore, they grew out of it or they grew tired of it. British wrestling went the same way. It was simply adults not caring and kids growing out of it.

Of course the second boom period happened, prior to that WCW were already producing mature TV as was ECW but it didn't really matter, none of it was gonna last. Vince Russo even told McMahon that before he left, he had 1 year left to ride that wave because a year more was all it could last for before the people watching in that boom period got tired of the same acts and sure enough.......by the time December 2000 rolled around, look what happened? The Rock? Steve Austin? The Undertaker? Triple H? Were they the same characters they were from 1997 - October 99 when Russo left? No. Vince McMahon went back to what he knew and of course within 4 months of that WCW was sold anyway and the war was over.

That's what you see today. Dixie for years in TNA trying to do something that worked in WWF 15 years ago, WWE now refusing to acknowledge the Attitude Era because they don't have the brains backstage to understand how Russo did it so they go back to a further point in time, the New Generation era, that's all they know and that's what you have today in wrestling. Vince McMahon only knows one way to do wrestling. Dixie only knows what she watched 15 years ago. What did Cornette try and do when he was in charge of anything? He did what he knew which was 1970s Memphis Wrestling.

Until someone comes along like a Bischoff or Heyman or Russo and they don't come from a wrestling family and they don't wrestle and they're completely outside of the wrestling bubble, nothing will change. It's the same in real life. We've all worked with people who are good at their jobs, how many people do you all know that have worked in the same company for maybe 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years or maybe more? We all know someone right? And we don't say anything bad, nor should we because they are good at their jobs but wrestling are wrestlers are the same way, the problem being you have wrestlers involved in creative and OWNERS in charge of the TV shows. They only know one way. Triple H only knows one way of wrestling. Vince McMahon only knows what he was taught by his Dad and what he was forced to do on his own in the 80s. Vince didn't have some creative vision for Hulkamania, it was a chance that paid off. None of them know what a TV audience in 2016 wants.

I don't think that person will ever come along again. I seen video and pictures of Eric Bischoff in Glasgow a few weeks ago and despite how healthy he seems, his hair is pure white now lol. Paul Heyman is clearly just collecting a paycheque and good for him, much like Mick Foley they're just keeping the status quo. Vince Russo is working with a local promotion (which will be on TV in America and available to us via Roku and the internet and the dirtsheets unfairly wont promote it) so he's busy with that but truth be told, I don't think Russo is really able to get on planes every week, it takes a lot out of him and he's flat out said it's too much for him to do at 55 years old.

So i think it really will need someone new to come along, even if it is because everyone else is just getting too old. And to bring my point back round full circle what I said was in 1994 kids and adults just got fed up with wrestling, it was shaken up, people loved it again, it mirrored society, it was exactly what people wanted and 20 years later it's back to PG New Generation style wrestling and much like 1994, I think a lot of kids and adults today have just given up and moved on. So rather than move forward, they've taken 10 steps back. When the most popular shows in the world revolve around blood and guts and sex (Walking Dead, Game Of Thrones) then right away wrestling can't top that. What they need is another outsider to come in and mirror society.........that's all they need to do. Look at society, look at what people want, how people act and speak, look at families, look at what people do and you mirror that in the wrestling. Right now politics is a big thing in the USA and the UK. Like it or not it is. You need characters that represent all of that, you need characters that the person sitting on the couch can relate to, that speaks and acts just like they do and they can connect with. You have characters that are different, they all look act and speak different. Even the heels and faces. No 2 heels are alike. No 2 faces are alike. They don't all do the same things. Heels don't always cheat. They don't always run away. Babyfaces don't always follow the rules. You have never have 2 people act the same and you stay true to who they are and does it take work? Yes. Does it include risks? Yes. It's about wrestling companies and if they want to put the work in and take a few risks, the future of wrestling on TV might just depend on it.

I was at the WAW & Bellatrix tapings on Friday & throughout today and managed to not only meet Paige again & Di Rio for the first time before they go back to the States, but I also had the pleasure of seeing some brilliant wrestling including a match that had Bubblegum in, brilliant wrestler.

They are doing some brilliant things in WAW, in fact the whole British scene is doing pretty darn good at the moment, which I think is great.

There are some very big names that have recently been in this country (Cody Rhodes was one, as is your examples of Paige and Alberto El Patron).

I don't quite know if Bubblegum could continue wearing his City shirt's over in America, but it would be great to him try to, as their at times pushing of American football, does get on my nerves, so a guy wearing a "soccer" shirt might be pretty good (even if it is the wrong team!).

If she keeps on having to sell stock and ownership she may not have any say in it.

That said if WWE did ever buy they would want 100% of it so everybody would have to agree to sell to them.


I can see WWE owning it one day and if it ever dies Dixie and others may sooner it at least live on via the network putting up the old eps than just disappearing forever.

If WWE had really been interested they would have put in a insane offer no one could match.

Im glad WWE doesnt have their grubby hands on TNA TNA, just look at how they handled WCW.

I just wish Bischoff had been allowed to buy WCW as it would still be on air now, not in Turner land but another channel.

Its easy to say it was brash, edgy, dangerous, rebellious when we was younger but that would only be for fans who started from the attitude era, 70s, 80s fans would be different, we had believeable characters who knew how to wrestle and different styles.

Its a shame today its only WWE style.

I used to love WCW on ITV on a saturday morning, just a shame we got a cut down 40 minute version so plenty was cut. My fav memories of the show was seeing Steiner/Steamboat, the Super Nintendo Top 10 Challenge, highlights of Ron Simmons becoming World Champion and a huge aray of misc matches they showed from Windham/Austin to Pillman/Valentine to Rick & Scott Steiner vs. Steve Williams & Terry Gordy.

I didnt really like how they would keep changing the times in the schedule as I didnt have a TV guide so I could see when it was on and alot of times id missed half of it. Id watch it anyday over the overatted Attitude era, at times I felt it was better than the Attitude Era.

Nobody wanted WCW on TV Bischoff said himself the reason he pulled out is he couldn't find any channel willing to air it.

At least with WWE it stayed alive via DVD's and now the Network if anyone else had got it there would be nothing.

They really aren't though.

When browsing through the library on the WWE network, does anyone else find the scrolling through the content and all the blank space really annoying?

I'd rather they have an info bar on the left hand side for 1/4 of the screen and the other 3/4 would be a grid featuring the content.

The Harts are a piece of work. Whether or not people think Seth is a dangerous worker or not to deliberately publicly use someone's death to take a pop at Seth and to imply he is in some way responsible for it (don't think they explicitly said it was but the tone did little to suggest it wasn't) is deplorable. Absolutely deplorable.

Some of the statements they've come out with like this one and the one that Cena should've shot Seth would frankly cause me to want to snipe back if I was Seth.


On Del Rio, they gave him too much without him doing anything to justify it performance-wise. He won the Royal Rumble, a World Title, Money In The Bank, was in a Mania World Title match all in his rookie year in the company. Pushing it even if he was the clear star week-in week-out but he really wasn't.

All this while some superstars who were very deserving of a push were stuck in mid-card hell. The Sheamus/Del Rio feud in 2012 too really was painful - it seemed to never end and never change and some of the segments were just damn right cringeworthy.

Bischoff was allowed to buy WCW, nobody stopped him. The Fusient group pulled out when it became clear WCW wouldn't have a television presence.

I'm seeing ridiculous numbers like $40 million as a value for TNA. If anybody pays that for TNA, especially when WCW went for less than $3m with a larger, IMO infinitely more valuable tape library, they are crazy.

wCw were essentially bankrupt and desperate to sell. Hence why Vince was able to twist their arm and buy them for buttons.

TNA, while not operating at the high level they were four or five years ago, and certainly not rolling in profit, are not in any hurry to sell.

I don't think Vince cares either way if it ever comes up and for the right price he'll buy it but he won't pay more than he thinks it's worth and that won't be much at all.

I think he would have paid more for WCW if he had to just to say he won and now owned it.

$40 million though really? Do you really think that is a true valuation of the TNA brand?

***This is of course based on the reports being true***

I've no idea as to the value of the TNA brand, but what I would say is that a tape library with matches from the likes of Sting, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Kurt Angle, AJ Styles and Samoa Joe is probably worth a lot more than the brand itself.

It's not worth anywhere near that.

Plus it's ownership is spread out Dixie (Well Panda) owns a bit Corgan owns a bit I think even The Harris Twins own a bit so for Vince to even think about it all of them would have to be willing to sell at a low price.

Yes if he got his hands on it he would own almost every match of Hogan Flair Sting Angle Foley The Hardys The Dudleys ever had.

Plus others of course.