Last night, SmackDown Live hosted the Battleground Pay-Per-View. Depending on who you ask, it either exceeded expectations (which were pretty low, to begin with) or it fell completely flat. Especially compared to Raw’s Great Balls of Fire Pay-Per-View a couple weeks ago, Battleground is not helping SmackDown Live get back to the acclaim it had in late 2016. However, there were definitely some great moments, so let’s take a look at what went well and what kept SmackDown Live as the “B show.”
The Best
The New Day and The Usos Tear the House Down
It is a good sign for a Pay-Per-View when the opening match gets a “this is awesome” chant from the crowd. This may have been forgotten with all of the weeks of buildup, but the New Day and the Usos are two great tag teams who can put on amazing matches. When they are up against each other, it gets taken to another level.
The match featured a ton of great spots, but most notably Xavier Woods getting superkicked out of mid-air. Each team showed their strengths, and with the New Day winning at the end, there are some fresh faces on top of the division. The only downside to this match is that the rest of the show could not live up to it.
It Was Unpredictable
With every WWE Pay-Per-View, we preview the event and predict who is going to win each match. There are times where every prediction is correct and sometimes it is an even split. With Battleground, however, only 3/8 of the predicted results were correct, with Jinder Mahal, John Cena, and Shinsuke Nakamura winning their respective matches. Whether or not fans agree with the decisions, unpredictability is good so that fans are intrigued in what’s coming next and the show will feel less formulaic.
The three most surprising results came with the two title switches and the new SmackDown Women’s Championship #1 Contender. Normally when a feud is played out over a couple months, the titleholders retain their belts and move on to new opponents. As mentioned above, this was not the case with the New Day. Kevin Owens shocking captured his third United States Championship after only losing it to AJ Styles a couple weeks ago. Lastly, it seemed like Natalya was the dark horse to have a guaranteed SummerSlam title match.
One last thing: Nobody in the WWE Universe could have predicted the return of the Great Khali, who helped Jinder Mahal retain the WWE Championship against Randy Orton.
The Worst
The Punjabi Prison
On paper, a Punjabi Prison match sounds awesome. It has the size and awe factor of the Elimination Chamber or Hell in a Cell, but with the excitement of two cage matches in one. Unfortunately, there is a reason that this one was only the third match of its kind. The pacing of the match is very slow, especially with two “slower” workers (for lack of a better word) in Randy Orton and Jinder Mahal. Also, with both cages down at the same time, it is near impossible to get a good view of the match, so even if something exciting was happening, there is a good chance no one could see it.
Anticlimactic Finishes
Two matches suffered from the same issue: being ruined by how they ended. The first match, between Shinsuke Nakamura and Baron Corbin, was a pretty solid match with both men trading blows the whole time. At the end, though, Corbin hit Nakamura with a low blow to end the match. This could be the start to a good story between the two, but they probably should have parted ways after Battleground.
The second match was the United States Championship match between Kevin Owens and AJ Styles. It’s fine that Owens regained the title, because it shows how evenly matched both men are with each other. The pinfall, however, was a bit odd. Owens reversed a crossface into a pinfall, essentially wrapping Styles up with no way to escape. The referee, who was knocked out earlier in the match, crawled very slowly to his position and gingerly tapped the three count. It seemed like Styles should have kicked out and that the finish was messed up, but it is too hard to tell. The fans in attendance were just sitting in confusion when the match ended.
It Was Way Too Long
Next month, SummerSlam is expected to be a long show. With an official start time of 7:00 EST, the “biggest party of the summer” will be at least five hours with the Kickoff Show. Battleground, including the Kickoff Show, was about four hours and fifteen minutes. The length takes a bit away from SummerSlam as a bigger show (although it should be fine since Raw will make up for SmackDown’s shortcomings) while asking the fans to watch an unfathomable amount of content over the next month.
Between last night and the middle of September, there are three Pay-Per-Views (four including NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn III), about six weeks of Raw, SmackDown, 205 Live, and NXT, and the Mae Young Classic tournament. That is way too much content while also expecting all of it to be good. Inevitably, WWE will stretch itself thin and some programs are likely to suffer from it, like SmackDown Live already has.
Looking at the show itself, there was no need for it to run over the 11:00 EST time when most of WWE’s Pay-Per-Views end at around 10:40. This wasn’t helped at all by the slow pace of the Punjabi Prison match (more on that above), but they could have completely scrapped the Sami Zayn vs. Mike Kanellis rematch. Out of all of the matches, that one seemed like it was made just to get the guys on the card as opposed to building a good show.
The Flag Match
By far, the Flag Match between John Cena and Rusev was the worst match of Battleground, and probably WWE’s worst Pay-Per-View match in quite a while. Remember, this is John Cena’s big return after having classic matches with AJ Styles and an amazing feud with The Miz and Maryse, and JBL called this (with a bit of paraphrasing) “John Cena’s biggest win ever.” For a Superstar with 16 World Championship reigns under his belt including several WrestleMania wins, this is the furthest thing from the truth. It’s probably not even in Cena’s Top 500 victories.
From the start of the feud, the match was already going to be terrible. Cena’s first promo a few weeks ago was very hypocritical in celebrating how accepting the United States is while hating Rusev just because he’s Bulgarian. This also gave SmackDown Live its third generic foreign heel, which is already overplayed to death.
Then there’s the match itself. On numerous occasions, both men decided to do something else instead of grabbing their respective flags and winning the match. For example, Rusev had Cena laid out, so he decided to set up two tables instead of winning the match. All around, this match was nonsensical.
