Selling The Importance of the Royal Rumble: This was not a great show to sell the Royal Rumble PPV, but they did do a nice job of selling how important the Rumble match itself is. The opening mini-Battle Royale showed five of the six ECW Extremists who will be in the Rumble. The match itself was okay, but the announcers did a good job of talking up the momentum gained from the match going into the Rumble.
They did the same thing during the C.M. Punk vs.
Elijah Burke match. It was presented like Punk needed a victory to have momentum and Burke wanted to get out frustration from not being in the Rumble. They even mentioned how the last six winners of the Rumble have gone on to win a title at WrestleMania.
All of these things underscored the importance of winning the Royal Rumble.
Hinting at a General Manager: Someone changed the main event, replacing Hardcore Holly with Test. Normally this ambiguous decision would get a Miss, but I am intrigued for a couple of reasons.
The most important reason is that the change was acknowledged and even questioned by the announcers. They said that it seemed like Test had lobbied to get into the match, but they didn't know who he had lobbied. Holly himself stormed into Test's locker room to question it and knew that Test had pulled some strings.
If down the line, ECW still has no on air GM, and this week is forgotten about, I will be upset for including it as a Hit. But for now, I am hopeful enough that it will lead somewhere.
Test Video: Test was never a World Title contender in his first run in WWE.
Now that he is being elevated to that status (albeit on the third level show), it is smart to play him up as a legit contender and this video highlighting his intensity and brutality was a good way to do that.
C.M.
Punk vs. Elijah Burke: This was not a great match, but it was a good one and I think it showed that these two could have a nice feud together. Burke relied a little too heavily on the same Cobra Clutch-like sleeper hold, but that was my only complaint.
Matt Striker did a good job on guest commentary as well. Despite losing his momentum (through no fault of his own), there were still two strong "C.M.
Punk" chants in the audience which hopefully will show WWE creative that this guy is worth giving a better push to.
Extreme Expose: Any individuality that Kelly Kelly had is now gone as she is just one of three bimbos in a Nitro Girls wannabe group of dancers. Maybe that won't be the case, but it sure seemed like it.
This segment was a waste of time. When their music went off, they looked confused and it seemed like there would be an interruption, but instead we got the Test video. I was confused.
Was the Test video meant to interrupt them, or was it just a coincidence? If the video was meant to interrupt their dance, then after it ended they should have gone back to the girls in the ring who would have looked upset at being interrupted by the video. Instead, it cut to commercial.
There was no mention by the announcers as to the end of the dance. All in all it was just a bad segment because it wasted time, it seems to be a waste of all the time used to build up Kelly as an individual who the fans were responding to, and it had a strange ending.
Test vs.
Bobby Lashley: I don't understand giving away this match for free the week before we have to pay for it at the Royal Rumble. Now, truth be told, nobody was buying the PPV for this match. But it still leads me to question why?
Also, the match itself wasn't very good. It was slow and plodding. I've said before that these are two guys who need a certain level of opponent to elevate them to a good match, and putting them against each other isn't a good combination.
That showed here and will likely show again on Sunday.
Inconsequentiality: Everything on the show seemed to have an inconsequential feel to it, other than the momentum RVD, CM Punk and Lashley gained heading into the PPV. By that I mean that while RVD gained momentum, nothing else was at stake in the Battle Royale.
We got a meaningless squash by Marcus Cor Von. The Extreme Expose was incredibly meaningless as I've already discussed. While Punk vs.
Burke was a good match, it did little to further Punk's feud with Striker other than the fact that Striker bad mouthed Punk on guest commentary. A non-title match could mean something if the challenger wins, but I don't know that it has any meaning if the challenger loses the way that Test lost to Lashley. There was just a lack of meaning to most of the show which has been a problem on ECW as of late.
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