Beat The Clock
Talk about the land of opportunity. Smackdown Live featured four teams with the chance to become the next challengers to Jimmy and Jey Uso. American Alpha set the pace in a 5 plus minute victory over The Colon’s, but Fandango and Tyler Breeze beat that time when Fandango hit a Falcon Arrow on Viktor for the win. Breezango will fight The Uso’s at WWE Backlash for the WWE Smackdown Tag Team Championships.
Well, I did not expect this to happen. As much as I liked Tyler Breeze in NXT, he has not done a thing on the main roster for me to care about him. Fandango is a solid performer, but the booking of these guys make no sense. It seems like Smackdown Live is just trying to give random people title shots so we should immediately care about them. Do we think that The Uso’s will lose to them? Furthermore, American Alpha continues to get shafted. They will not be used on the WWE Backlash card, making it ANOTHER Pay-Per-View where your most talented tag team is not utilized. When you try to elevate one team, you do not always have to push the others all the way down the ladder to accomplish it.
The matches were below average, combined for about 8 minutes and showed us that “out of the box” thinking does not always work.
WWE Championship Feud
One thing I did enjoy on Smackdown Live was Jinder Mahal. He comes out and talks about being overlooked by Randy Orton. This is coming right after a decent No Disqualification Match between Orton and Erick Rowan. The timing issue is always strange to me, when you are trying to tell two completely different feuds at one time. Randy will not put the title on the line at WWE Payback, so he does not necessarily NEED to be seen with it. If you want to imagine Jinder Mahal with the world championship around his waist, why not let him steal it?
That is exactly what they did, after an attack from him and The Singh Brothers. Mahal leaves the arena in a limo with the title and actually gets me more interested in the feud. He carried himself very well on the mic, is bigger and younger than Orton and certainly seems up to the task of being some sort of international superstar that is trying to buck the trend of the “usual foreign” superstar. He is trying to be different, but will likely come off as similar to others before him.
I applaud Jinder this week, as he was the one running the feud with Randy Orton and not the other way around. Vulnerability is a great thing when trying to build someone new up. Orton is showing signs of that and give us a thought that, just maybe, Jinder could win.
