10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About 2022
7. Those Cheat Code Match Lengths
In the greatest WWE match ever, it took 22 minutes and 6 seconds for Bret Hart to gradually turn heel with a performance unrivalled in its show-don't-tell sophistication and for Steve Austin to sell with such agonised conviction that the fans forgot for a few moments that it wasn't real.
It was the blueprint for a new boom, it was a masterpiece, and it only needed that amount of time to change the very complexion of the wrestling world.
Consider some recent TV results, the likes of which are barely remembered today and stand zero chance of being written about a quarter of a century later.
On the November 21 Raw, Drew McIntyre defeated Baron Corbin in 18:04. That is an unreasonably long amount of time. Also unnecessary: 10 minutes were received with blanket silence, so it was boring and redundant in and of itself with the additional problem of the match doing nothing for either man. Drew struggled to put his lower-rung opponent away, so it wasn't some painstaking hard-earned triumph, and it did little to put Corbin over in defeat because he's meant to be a despicable heel. Neither man was Bret Hart nor Steve Austin in the story of the match.
It was pointless.
Triple H does this because he lacks the imagination to book an engaging three-hour Raw show, and he knows that a certain sect of fans have long been conditioned to accept any match that nears 20 minutes as a "banger".
Sami Zayn and AJ Styles went 20:01 on September 26. Bobby Lashley and Seth Rollins went 20:09 on September 19. Dakota Kai and IYO SKY and Alexa Bliss and Asuka went 18:34 on August 22. Each of those matches generated very little noise until the last few minutes.
If you didn't forget about these match lengths, you might start to think about how little time is spent meaningfully elsewhere making those matches actually feel important.