10 Very Bad WWE Ideas That Only Lasted 1 Day
1. "Gunther Stark"
There was already something fishy about a Walter/Roderick Strong match main eventing Tuesday 18th January's edition of NXT 2.0 with just a few days notice and a build-up confined to one backstage stare-down filmed for WWE.com.
The former record-breaking NXT UK Champion had only recently arrived on Tuesdays as a permanent fixture, but this represented one of the few remaining matches on the brand that might once have masqueraded as something worthy of a TakeOver. Why now, if it could be so valuable later?
It was a trojan horse. After Strong was defeated in an only-okay headline bout, Walter hurriedly grabbed the microphone and announced that he'd now be going by the name "Gunther", before Imperium and The Diamond Mine waged war to close the show.
Name changes often rattle the commentariat, and this was rather understandably no different. But that same commentariat had helped WWE avoid something of a PR disaster earlier in the day when, upon learning of a trademark application for the name "Gunther Stark", traced the moniker to a Second World War Nazi U-boat commander.
As a convergence of events, it was one of the weirder 24 hours in the company history, but WWE have normalised incompetence to such an extent that it quickly felt far from the bigger disaster it could have been.