Topic: Wrestling?

Neville vs Owens is a classic face booking match. Neville is smaller than Owens and face, so he usually gets pummeled early in the match, then makes a comeback with Owens barely kicking out of this and that. Then Owens makes one lucky or clever move, hits the pop up powerbomb as follow up, end of story. Owens also sits higher on the card than Neville and has much more accolades than him so that every win of Neville is a upset victory which can only happen so often. Basically every John Cena match was such a match for a long time despite the guy being a huge human mountain, causing the people to entertain themselves with booing Cena heavily whereever he went for about 10 years. Such is wrestling.^^

When you continue watching wrestling, you will also see that heels usually forget how to wrestle and learn how to bore people with sleeper holds and armbars and stuff like that to make the audience cheer the face when he goes in the offense. It is very rare that a heel does not forget how to wrestle when he changed alignment like Seth Rollins, Kevin Owens, Cesaro or lately and to my continuos amazement, the Miz. That worked very well 20 years ago, but now people boo boring wrestlers and cheer exciting ones, regardless if they are face or heel. An example of that is Austin Aries, a guy who cornered a female ring anouncer and climbed on the second rope to shove his crotch into her face. People still cheered massively for him, and they still do. Some wrestler also can´t do wrong if they do not make sextapes like Hogan because they are legends like Ric Flair, Sting, the Undertaker, the Rock, Steve Austin, Bob Backlund or Brock Lesnar.

To elaborate on Harriers long and somewhat over-complicated statement:

Owens is a heel and is about 2-3 tiers higher than Neville on the card, meaning he is a bigger star and can be considered, and is seen by the audience, as the "Better" of the two.

Now you can't just have a total squash, as that isn't very exciting, so they go with a very standard low tier face vs upper tier heel match.

Heel has control at the start for a bit, shutting the face down when he tries to do things.

The face takes control for a good portion of the match, getting in all his spots and big moves except for his finisher, with the heel alternating between shutting him down to prepare for the face's comeback spots, or doing what heels do best and bumping for all his moves.

The reason they do this is to give the illusion, the idea, that this plucky underdog face CAN make a comeback and CAN beat his opponent. There will usually be one big move leading to a near fall to support this. It makes the face look like they CAN hang on with higher tier opponents.

Then the heel finally has enough of this shit, and either hits a big move, does a big counter, or just cheats in some way, to shut the face down, then hits his finisher for the win. thus making it clear that, while the face MIGHT have been able to pull things off, right now, the heel is just too good for him to take down.

The idea is to get both characters over, make it clear that your heel (though this isn't always with a heel), is one of the upper fighters in the league, while also showing that your lower card fighters aren't THAT far behind and could win given the right circumstances.

It's basic wrestling booking 101, and you'll even find some of it in AFW. Certain tier structures like that (lower card, mid card, upper card) are important. Not everyone can be main event level, but you can show with matches like this that these midcard people CAN rise up to the opportunity in time.

Basically every John Cena match was such a match for a long time despite the guy being a huge human mountain, causing the people to entertain themselves with booing Cena heavily whereever he went for about 10 years. Such is wrestling.^^

He can still pull this off. A good example is the first match he had with Styles. For, like, the bulk of the match, Styles was kicking Cena's ass from pillar to post, but they made it a believable matchup despite the size difference. Part of that has to do with Styles' talent, but John did an excellent job of selling the beating and the frustration of being constantly countered and unable to put AJ away.

I am not disputing the talent of John Cena in any way. He is a solid wrestler that can work a good match in his own style, but he can´t be the general of a really big match. He needs a CM Punk, Cesaro, AJ Styles, Kevin Owens or D-Bryan for a really great wrestling based match. His matches against Orton or Lesnar are good because they have impact most of the time, but Lesnar is not exactly showing why he is such a beast most of the time now.

I give him also credit for trying something new sometimes, but do you remember when he brought out the hurricanrana? I thought this was a very bold and entertaining idea I would have never expected from him, but I also found it telling when he kneed himself in the face with it. That is not a shot against him, that is a shot against WWE forcing the poor man to fight the same match like a robot for literally years.

http://comicbook.com/2016/08/28/wwe-hall-of-famer-manager-mr-fuji-passes-away-/

I will miss him

Awww, not Mr. Fuji...Good man, good talent. Have fond memories of watching him manage Yokozuna.


RIP.

Aww..dude made Yokozuna for me.

No, that was a different Japanese manager called Yamaguchi-San.