WWE Extreme Rules 2018: Star Ratings For All 12 Matches
Too many cooks overbook.
They don't like it when you compare WWE to New Japan Pro Wrestling.
To some, there is no comparison: Bigger automatically equals better, and financial success is not depressingly mutually exclusive to the creative process but somehow a commendation of it. To others, there is no comparison. New Japan's in-ring product is everything WWE's isn't: coherent, exciting, meaningful, eclectic, electric.
I can’t not draw the comparison here.
WWE promoted Extreme Rules ’18 in parallel with the beginning of the G1 Climax tournament. Your writer, pressed for time, was forced to make a choice: either sleep for a meagre four hours, watch Extreme Rules in its entirety and catch the top two G1 Night Two bouts, or sleep for longer and miss New Japan altogether. Given that a near-guaranteed five-star classic awaited, the former option was taken. The main event - Kenny Omega vs. Tetsuya Naito - was incandescent; bewitched by a ten minute final third of absurdly-paced, dynamite action, the Tokyo crowd, to a man, reacted like Vince McMahon did when Titus O’Neil botched at the Greatest Royal Rumble.
Kota Ibushi vs. Zack Sabre Jr. was a gruesome technical feast so expertly-worked that you felt Ibushi’s searing pain. After that, to miss the rest of the show - the content comes first, and WWE gets the hits, somehow - was deeply annoying.
Tired and already predisposed to hating this show, any attempt to actively try to care was almost immediately deflated.
If WWE don’t care, why should I?
12. KICKOFF: Sin Cara Vs. Andrade “Cien” Almas
Much too often even for a match between an awesome talent with no ceiling whatsoever versus an undercard job guy with a ceiling bearing down on his masked head, this was, nonetheless, worthwhile for a Kickoff attraction.
After a sprightly opening exchange, Almas discovered an excellent counter to the profoundly overexposed dive. He simply and seamlessly grabbed the back of Cara’s head and smeared his face against the barricade. If that didn’t knock his head off, his how-does-that-not-hurt spinning back elbow nearly did the job. A commercial break-enforced rest-hold spot both dragged and revealed the artifice, but the match recovered as it entered the finishing sequence. An entertaining and wince-inducing fusion of the beautiful and the beastly, boasting a blinding top rope hurricanrana spot, the future fate of Almas was still difficult to shake.
As great as Zelina Vega is in her role, it should be redundant in a match against Sin Cara. Were it not for her interference, the implication was that Cara may have won with his frog splash.
That was a bad narrative choice, but the match itself was comprised of not bad at all lucha things.
Star Rating: **3/4