Oh boy, I genuinely don’t even know where to begin with this one.
I knew heading into this edition of “SmackDown” that I wasn’t super excited about the Undisputed WWE Championship match between Cody Rhodes and GUNTHER as Sami Zayn served as the special guest referee. It just seemed like a bit of a boring match to me, and WWE had already done it once at Clash in Italy.
Expectations aside, I was willing to give it a chance. While it definitely did surprise me, I can confidently say that it was absolutely not the good kind of surprise. I already thought it was weird enough for such a big match with a big title on the line to kick off the show instead of being the main event, but that turned out to be the least of my worries.
First off, we didn’t need to have the spot in the middle of the initial match where Zayn went down, and a second referee ran out to temporarily replace him. It felt like it was drama for the sake of adding drama into this match, and I think it would’ve simplified things a little bit if Zayn had just been down the entire time to miss Rhodes pinning GUNTHER.
Second, I didn’t love the ending of the initial match at all. It seemed pretty apparent that Zayn would be getting involved in the match somehow, but he had already been involved in the ongoings of the match enough and didn’t need to make the fast count when Rhodes had rolled up GUNTHER. It put a damper on the match for me, and was an abrupt ending to something that I already was on the fence about enjoying.
Third, WWE completely lost me when we came back from the break and were in a split screen that saw Rhodes in the ring and GUNTHER in the back with Zayn, Nick Aldis, and some other officials. It was so incredibly hard to follow what was going on with so much happening at once, and WWE truly would’ve been better off with just one camera that caught the arguing backstage and Rhodes going back out to the ringside area.
Fourth, doing the match restart between Rhodes and GUNTHER ended up being a total moot point. Given that Zayn ended up interfering anyway to cause a no-contest ending, there was absolutely no need to restart the match, and it didn’t really have any kind of reasoning behind it other than creating even more unnecessary drama in the storyline between Rhodes, GUNTHER, and Zayn.
Essentially, this all boils down to being a completely overbooked mess that was really hard to follow. It seems pretty clear that the endgame for this was always going to be a Triple Threat Undisputed WWE Championship match between Rhodes, Zayn, and GUNTHER, but there was a much simpler way to do this: just book the match instead of trying to do whatever it was they did.
Written by Olivia Quinlan