10 Impulse Reactions Following WWE Battleground 2017
4. The Power Of 10
The latest strike from WWE against their own fanbase, Tye Dillinger's main roster career took another darkly amusing strike as he somehow managed to eat defeat on the pre-show to WWE's worst supercard of 2017.
The Dillinger/Aiden English pairing serves to represent WWE's most glaring inability in a microcosm. When talent are frozen out of meaningful conflicts (as 'The Perfect 10' has been since his debut) they are hung out to dry by creative disinterest in their characters, and gradually become almost entirely unsalvageable.
'Almost' being the operative word of course, in a year where perennial jobber Jinder Mahal carries the WWE Title and Paige remains on the company's books despite a litany of transgressions in her personal life.
However, neither Tye nor English look set to earn a surprise elevation any time soon, not least until there's finally a payoff to their absorbing war over who can pin each other the most times in matches nobody remembers or cares about (!).
The crowd's enthusiasm will be discussed elsewhere in this piece, but perhaps WWE's worst crime here was including the match altogether.
The company may face fresh new bouts of alienation with their audiences if Tye's shoddy treatment continued. Dillinger earned a solid foothold with the crowd following last November's Toronto scorcher with Bobby Roode, but the platform continues to erode under the company's brightest lights.