10 Secrets To A Guaranteed POP In Wrestling

10. Getting The Tables

Picture the scene.

It's a Monday night. WWE is several weeks away from promoting a Premium Live Event. There isn't a great deal going on, which means Triple H - who at the time of writing, anyway, still has the book - is going to phone this Raw in. There's no need to do anything massive, there's major competition on cable, and so he's going to indulge in his favourite pastime: unreasonably inflating the length of a wrestling match in hopes that his stans will hop online and deem it a "banger".

It's Dominik Mysterio Vs. Karl Anderson, no disqualifications, in front of a mausoleum of a crowd in some backwoods market or other. Nobody gives a single toss as the 12th minute of generic nothing action approaches. A smattering of "We want tables!" chants go unheard until the 17th minute, and then, when "Bright Lights" draws one from under the ring, the fans go bonkers. Doesn't matter how sh*tty the match is. Doesn't matter that they don't care about anything else. This is a generation of passive fans who have been programmed to go wild at the admittedly very satisfying sound of compressed sawdust exploding.

That's obviously snark, but it isn't even hyperbole; at Hell In A Cell last year, for a couple of depressing moments, it didn't matter that Cody Rhodes, his body bruised internally to a disgusting extent, was entering the most heroic performance of almost anyone's life.

When he was about to eat a table, those fans turned f*cking feral.