10 Things WWE Regrets About Backlash
1. Strapping Jinder Mahal In 2017
Has a WWE pay-per-view ever been more appropriately named?
This marked a tipping point for many long-suffering WWE fans. Jinder Mahal wasn't merely a thoroughly mundane worker by modern standards. He wasn't just playing a covert foreign menace role lost to time. He wasn't just Jinder Mahal.
He was an enhancement talent a few weeks before he inexplicably found himself in WWE Title contention. This was WWE at its most craven and artless, and they didn't credit you with the intelligence to obscure it. They didn't wait. They didn't build. They didn't immerse. They rushed from the finance meeting that informed this decision directly into the creative meeting, and if anybody questioned the decision - they didn't - they'd have been met with a "F*ck you, what else are they going to watch?"
Jinder Mahal didn't know his own finish, and neither did WWE; they mustn't have costed this woefully transparent quest, because as it turned out, Mahal wasn't a draw in India, and in 2017 broadband speeds were too erratic to effectively stream his pay-per-view matches that were available as part of the existing TV deal, anyway.
All WWE had to show for this disastrous decision was a 1995-style attendance in the one show that went ahead - and a jaded, insulted domestic audience tired of the bullsh*t.