7 Ups And 4 Downs From Evolve 10th Anniversary
A fun change of pace with solid wrestling, some indy stigmas too.
Saturday night was clearly all right for fighting. Saturday night also was a night to make history for WWE.
For the first time, an independent wrestling show was featured in its entirety on the WWE Network, as Evolve 131, the company’s 10th anniversary show, aired live on WWE’s system. This was something the company had touted as a possibility a while back when launching these agreements with promotions like Evolve, but nothing ever came of it… until Saturday.
Evolve’s 10th Anniversary show had a strong WWE flavor to it, with several NXT and WWE superstars competing on the show, though all of them have roots in Evolve, so it wasn’t just some desperate attempt to juice or WWE-ify the show. Adam Cole, Johnny Gargano, Akira Tozawa, Matt Riddle, Drew Gulak and others made appearances on the show and added to the product.
Overall, if you’re a fan of wrestling, then this is worth checking out, if only because it’s something different. It had a distinct feel to it, and the product was almost entirely focused on in-ring action.
As someone who isn’t really familiar with Evolve, this will be more about the action taking place than any backstories or storylines building up the show. But as an introduction to the promotion, this was a nice effort, and definitely something worth checking out.
With that said, let’s get to it…