WWE No Mercy 2017: Assessing The Potential Of All 7 Matches

No Mercy is surely the best 'B-level' WWE pay-per-view.

While accidental - it's not as if WWE purposefully built towards it, à la WrestleMania - its legacy boasts an embarrassment of wrestling riches. The first non-UK exclusive PPV - and as a UK-based fan, I can confirm that they absolutely do not count - hosted the match of the year. Edge and Christian Vs. The Hardy Boyz was a veritable, violent game-changer for the the company's doubles division. Kurt Angle captured his maiden WWF Championship in a thriller opposite The Rock a year later. Three years after Edge changed the game, he restored it by wrestling a sensational, lightning-paced WWE Tag Team Title bout with Rey Mysterio opposite Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit. It was a proper, traditional tag match promoted by a company which had long since lost interest in it. Might that tradition of change sweep through the Staples Center on Sunday?

In subsequent years, No Mercy became just another WWE PPV - until 2007, at which Triple H and Randy Orton wrestled their best ever match. The event was impervious to their anti-chemistry. One year later, Shawn Michaels and Chris Jericho tore strips off one another and the house itself down in a beautifully ugly reset of the ladder match.

The 2017 iteration promises an awesome continuation of No Mercy's legacy. Half of it, anyway.

"You think you chose to bring your personality to the Cruiserweight division? There was nowhere else for you to go!"

"When you're on the top rope, you fall flat on your face!"

These lines, scripted for The Miz on last week's RAW as a dressing down of Enzo Amore, exposed the folly of blending the shoot and the work; in order to break the fourth wall WWE is so fond of breaking recently, both Enzo Amore and his new division were portrayed as talentless and insignificant, respectively. Hardly an astute means of building interest in his challenge of Neville's Cruiserweight crown. It's not as if their match is the draw, but there is 205 Live to consider - a show so bereft of virtually any redeeming qualities that old WCW pay-per-views routinely thrash it in terms of Network rankings. The wrestling is good - but in a year of wall-to-wall great wrestling, good isn't good enough.

Neville, however, is great - and if there is anybody on the roster capable of dragging something great out of Enzo Amore, it's him. It won't reach the heights of Neville's best work with Austin Aries - quite literally - and hopefully, that's the point. If Neville can successfully work a story in which Enzo's tentative, dramatic climb to the skies is highly anticipated, he'll have worked a miracle. That's surely the only workable story here.

Not miraculous enough to rescue 205 Live, which has drowned - but miraculous as far as carry-jobs go.

Maximum Star Rating Ceiling: **1/2