An Old Nerd Comes Down Off His AEW High To Predict Takeover 25

Here for all of this.

This is a bit of a weird NXT Takeover for me. In one sense, it’s a return to old-school form, in that it’s not pinned to a Big Four main roster PPV. In other ways, well, I’ve felt disconnected from NXT since Mania. It’s less NXT’s fault and more of the dissatisfaction with the main roster bleeding over to the rest of the product. So I’ve enjoyed matches but haven’t felt connected to the stories. For the most part. Luckily, NXT’s more logical booking helps with the predicting.

An Old Nerd Grades AEW As A Company After Double Or Nothing

A lot of that isn’t makeup.

Rather thank talk about AEW’s inaugural show, Double or Nothing, on a match by match basis, I want to start by giving them a report card on what they’re saying they’re trying to do. 

An Old Nerd Enjoyed Money In The Bank More Than Expected

OK. Fine.

Money In The Bank wasn’t an awful show. It wasn’t even as awful as I expected it to be. But man, did the ending leave me with a bad taste in my mouth. We couldn’t get a month without Brock Lesnar in the main title picture? Please.

An Old Nerd Is Going To Watch Money In The Bank, I Guess

I don’t care about much in WWE these days, but I still care about this.

There’s no denying it. Post-Wrestlemania WWE has been an epic flailing shitshow. The Superstar Shakeup, allegedly planned months in advance, was thrown out the window as talent was shifted from one roster to the other and back again over a month, ending in the Wild Card Rule which means anyone can show up anywhere anytime. It’s looking like we’re entering into a Scared Vince / Senile Vince phase, where McMahon overrides everyone at the last minute to give fans what he knows in his hearts they want - chemically burned testicle humor.

It is against this backdrop I make my half-hearted predictions for Money In The Bank.

An Old Nerd Encourages You All To Watch The Damn Tick Already

Definitive.

Season 2 of The Tick is quite simply the definitive version of The Tick that we’ve all dreamed of since we first encountered The Tick.

An Old Nerd Survived 7.5 Hours Of Wrestlemania

Re-valuing the idea of a Wrestlemania Moment

That was a long, long show. Ultimately, WWE knew exactly what they had for the main show of Wrestlemania and built it appropriately. They had three big things, put one at the start, one in the middle, and one at the end, and that way you cared less about the quality of the stuff in the middle, which ranged from awful to fine.

An Old Nerd REally Enjoyed Yet Another Takeover

FWIENDSHIP!

I didn’t expect Takeover: New York to steal the weekend, and it didn’t. But it did surprise me by having every match be better than all but two of the Wrestlemania matches, and most of them better than all but one. 

NXT Tag Team Championship Match: War Raiders (c) vs. Aleister Black and Ricochet: War Raiders keep the belts.

Holy shit. This turned out to be Black and Ricochet’s definitive farewell match in NXT, and everyone involved wrestled like it was. There was incredible action in this match from both teams, and once again I have to admit that while the War Raiders still do nothing for me as characters or champions, as in-ring performers they’re living up to the hype. Black and Ricochet took the pin, of course. (1/1)

North American Championship Match: Velveteen Dream (c) vs. Matt Riddle: Dream will retain and the match will be a hoot.

Dream did retain, as he should. The match was good, but the two of them didn’t click quite the way I thought they would, so the match was solid, but unexceptional. (2/2)

Fatal Four-way for the NXT Women’s Championship: Shayna Baszler (c) vs. Bianca Belair vs. Kairi Sane vs. Io Shirai: I think the last match was setting up a Belair victory.

Nope! Baszler won. I still think they’re planning to move the belt to Belair. There was a hint this week that the Sky Pirates will be  under Paige as manager and coming up to challenge the Iiconics, and that would leave Belair free to finally beat Baszler one on one, say, before Summerslam. Good match, and everyone looked great. (2/3)

United Kingdom Championship Match: Pete Dunne (c) vs. WALTER: as much as I love Pete Dunne, it’s time for him to drop the belt.

And it was. This was a great match - certainly the best I’ve seen out of Walter since his debut. Walter is many impressive things, but there are a couple of things he’s really bad at, like moving at any kind of speed at all, whether running around the ring or kicking out of a pin. Dunne’s not moving on yet, though. He’s insisting on a rematch, which should draw this out for a while. (3/4)

2-out-of-3 Falls Match for the NXT Championship: Johnny Gargano vs. Adam Cole: NXT Champion Johnny Gargano.

I’ll give it to these guys. They knew they were going in under a disadvantage here just because Adam Cole was not Tommasso Ciampa. And they worked their asses off to build tension, build a story, and build the crowd. It was a bit of a dud during the first half of the match where this building was happening, but it just kept getting more exciting, and more tense, and better, and better, until the crowd in the arena and everyone at home was on the edge of their seats, wondering if Gargano was going to win, and if so, how. Great stuff. (4/5)