3 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE SmackDown (12 June - Results & Review)
4. There’s A Reason That Live Crowd Went Flat
This...may not be the most popular point made.
Rey Fenix vs. Axiom was technically well-worked and the finishing stretch clicked into place neatly, but here’s the truth: Story and character development matters a hell of a lot more in WWE than flashy moves or one-off matches. Credit to Fenix and Axiom for sticking with it and sucking some of the fans there live in by the end, but management need to learn a lesson here. Neither guy is particularly over with the casual audience, and no amount of AAA Cruiserweight Title wins for either will change that.
Select fans will hate on this as a ‘Down’, but it’s an honest one and comes from a good place. Everyone wants workers as skilled as this duo to do well, but they’re just not over, and that’s because they’re barely featured to any real degree on weekly television. Not in any impactful way, that is. AEW’s more hardcore fanbase would gobble this up, but WWE needs to have a real think about how they implement AAA into Raw and SmackDown going forwards.
Joe Tessitore demanding “give me more” should fall on deaf ears, because the match wasn’t awesome enough to merit it. Announcers always sound cheap when they go hyperbolic in the face of an unenthused live audience following a so-so segment/bout, and this was a classic example of that cheapness.
Again, technically solid, but otherwise mediocre in terms of overall impact. No-one's choking to see what either masked man does next, put it that way. Surely that's a negative.