7 Ups & 3 Downs From Last Night's WWE NXT (Oct 23)
6. Main Event BANGER
Mauro Ranallo is a divisive commentator, truly love/hate, and much of the problem—beyond his distractingly awful wordplay—is how relentless he is. He screams about every morsel of action as if it’s the finish, and it all converges to become overwhelming. His boundless energy is too rarely measured, and it’s a shame: an all-time great play-by-play man lurks within him.
This outrageously good main event absolutely warranted full, unadulterated Mauro. In many ways, it was the match he was born to call: a blistering, richer and more ebbing tweak on the NXT version of the Keith Lee Vs. Dominick Dijakovic banger.
Roderick Strong’s inclusion added a more sophisticated strain of storytelling. His vulture character work neatly wove together the epic hoss spots, creating high drama and anticipation around them. And those hoss spots ruled: abandoning last week’s meh limb work, Lee and Dijakovic caught one another from ridiculous mid-air positions, as the advanced humans they are, in a string of well strung-together moments of awesomeness.
The means to which the match was made were main roster inelegant, but the end result was top-tier NXT brilliance.