WWE Royal Rumble 2014

WWE Royal Rumble 2014 (1/26/2014)- Pittsburgh, PA

PRE-SHOW:
A BUNCH OF PEOPLE PICK THEIR NUMBERS- eh
Del Rio is happy with his. Kofi’s is okay. Truth’s is bad. Cesaro’s is good. Swagger’s is bad. Khali’s is bad, and Sandow shows up to laugh at him. Sandow then also picks a bad number and Khali laughs at him. If this was anyone other than Khali, I would have been happy to see Sandow get his comeuppance, but Khali’s laugh was so exaggerated that it just annoyed me and made me angry that I have to see this no-talent hack in the Royal Rumble yet again.

WWE TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: Cody Rhodes & Goldust(c) vs. The New Age Outlaws- 5.75/10
Having a commercial in the middle of the match is really annoying. The entire pre-show IS a commercial for the PPV. You don’t need to have a commercial in the middle of your commercial.

MAIN SHOW:

DANIEL BRYAN vs. BRAY WYATT (w/the Wyatt Family)- 8.5/10
Monstrous pop for Bryan to start off the show. This was an utterly fantastic opener. Tons of awesome stuff in here, including a f*cking curb stomp. And that flying tornado DDT! Bryan worked over Bray’s leg while Bray worked over Bryan’s head, playing off of his recent concussion. Dragon losing clean was pretty disappointing. It doesn’t bode well for this Royal Rumble (and Wrestlemania prospects)-

PAUL HEYMAN PROMO- awesome!

THE BIG SHOW vs. BROCK LESNAR (w/Paul Heyman)- no rating. Okay segment.
Brock jumps Show before the bell and beats the crap out of him with a steel chair. Lawler said that Big Show gave Brock his first WWE loss, which was at Royal Rumble 2002. Both part of this fact are incorrect. Lesnar had lost to RVD by DQ Vengeance 2002, and Big Show’s big defeat of Brock happened at Survivor Series 2002, not the Royal Rumble. Brock had not even debuted by the Royal Rumble.
Show eventually fought back a bit, but Lesnar got the win with the F-5. They made it feel important, though. Lesnar beat Big Show down with a chair after the match, too. Much more of a segment than a match, and normally I would be okay with that, but on a show that only had four matches, turning one into a segment is pretty disappointing.

SHIELD PROMO- very good. They say they are united. I bet that won’t last long.

RANDY ORTON PROMO- decent. He seemed t be really pushing the idea of facing Bray Wyatt for the title. That was odd.

WWE WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Randy Orton(c) vs. John Cena- 6.5/10
We got some �"Daniel Bryan!” chants to start this match off. The announcers all came up with various reasons to explain why this chant was happening that didn’t just bury the match by admitting that the chant was happening because the fans wanted to see Daniel Bryan instead of Cena and Orton. The crowd then crapped on their explanations by explicitly chanting �"WE WANT DANIEL!”
We got some more dead heat chants for other wrestlers, including Randy Savage, The Undertaker, and Chris Jericho. Cena and Orton took a shot of their own at the crowd by responding to the �"Y2J!” chants by having Cena go for the Liontamer but Orton countered it.
We then progressed to chants of �"BORING!” and �"YOU BOTH SUCK!” By the time they started exchanging false finishes, we were getting chants of �"END THIS MATCH!” and �"THIS IS AWFUL!” There was even a chant of �"WE WANT DIVAS!”
They kind of jumped right from the beginning stages of the match to the ending flurry. They did tons of false finishes and used each other’s finishers and you got the feeling that it would have been very exciting if people actually cared. The Wyatts caused a distraction, allowing Orton to retain (for which they got a chant of �"THANK YOU WYATTS!”). Then they beat Cena down, which got pops from the crowd.

NEW AGE OUTLAWS PROMO- decent.

2014 ROYAL RUMBLE MATCH-8/10
Batista wins, but Reigns had a star-making performance. Meanwhile, the crowd should have convinced all of the nay-sayers that Daniel Bryan is a major star.
As always, here are my semi-stream of consciousness thoughts, later edited together to hopefully make them easier to read.
Sandow is the first one eliminated. Boo!

Kane’s entrance was a complete and total waste. All he did was get tossed. He could have come out and eliminated Punk at the end anyway.

ALEXANDER RUSEV!
Rusev is CRUSHING them all!... And then Rusev got tossed without eliminating anyone! WTF?!

Kevin Nash is back with the nWo music. Oh joy. Who cares? Sheamus got a big pop for his return. Ziggler, Swagger, and Kofi also all got pretty big pops. Kofi’s big spot this year was running from the barricade and jumping across. I didn’t think he had a chance of hell of making it, but he did… and he even made it look easy.

Goldust accidentally eliminated Cody, so I guess they’re breaking up to feud at Mania.

So JBL’s music starts to play… and the idiot director cuts to THE ENTRANCE RAMP. Cole actually refereed to JBL as �"the JBL character.” JBL and Bradshaw are THE SAME KAYFABE PERSON! That’s what the �"B” in JBL stands for! In fact, Michael Cole was lead announcer during that character transition! I’m not someone who ever types this, but G-d damn you, Cole! Stop sh*tting on kayfabe!
JBL’s entry was a complete and total waste. All they did was JBL turn around and be an idiot so that Roman Reigns could eliminate him from behind. This was an idiotic idea.

Once Rey came out at #30, meaning that Dragon wasn’t going to be in the Royal Rumble, the rest of the match received nothing but prolonged booing, �"NO!”s, and �"DANIEL BRYAN!” chants. WWE REALLY screwed up here.
Roman Reigns managed to get some reaction towards the end, but that was more of a protest against Batista winning. They did a great job of making Reigns look like a star, though. He even broke Kane’s record for most eliminations in a Royal Rumble. They did a very good job with the self-destruction of the Shield.



I wasn’t fond of Xavier Woods not appearing in the Rumble simply because he had been advertised to, and there was no reason that he didn’t. Give us a backstage segment with Brodus beating him up or something.

This big story coming out of this show, of course, is Daniel Bryan and the amazing crowd support he got. This is the third time that I can recall that a crowd has taken over an entire show purely to show their support for Dragon (Raw the day after WM 28 and the Raw in Seattle last month). The support for him inside and outside of the industry in the hours since has been tremendous. As Dave Meltzer pointed out, they got the BBC to pick up the story, reporting on one of Bryan’s Tweets about hwy he wasn’t in the Rumble… which was completely kayfabe. When was the last time a major news outlet reported on a kayfabe story as if it were real?
Daniel Bryan and the Yes Movement are a giant snowball running down the side of a hill. Gaining size, speed, and momentum. WWE can either get behind it and start pushing it, or they can futilely try to stop it and they and Wrestlemania XXX will get crushed and buried underneath it.



STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Lawler asks JBL if someone has one the Royal Rumble from every position. Considering that there haven’t been thirty Royal Rumbles, the answer would obviously be �"no.”