10 Wrestlers BANNED From Getting Over
2. Virtually Every Cruiserweight Ever
WWE only ever presented a Light Heavyweight title as an experimental, if-we-have-to means of competing with the white-hot WCW cruiserweight division.
Had Eric Bischoff not scanned the wider landscape to differentiate his product, Vince McMahon would never have had the idea to steal it, either as a passion project or as something he felt would make money. It wasn't in his make-up at all.
You'll unearth the odd hidden gem on the Network, but the library of work simply didn't compare to WCW. You'd see a dazzling aerial and the odd international sensation, but what was missing was the energy. That sense of exhilaration, of a dynamic, frantic match accelerating towards the finish, was only ever truly witnessed in a WWE ring when Paul London and Akio were going f*cking nuts on Velocity in 2004.
It was all just...slower and more generically structured, even when WWE reverted to type after the genuinely great Cruiserweight Classic of 2016. The tempo was a bit faster than main roster matches, but not by much - and the rebooted scene was hardly helped by a stylistic trend. By 2016, the majority of wrestlers had incorporated that style into their work.
205 Live was a loveless bit of Content, capital C, and it was more depressing than exhilarating watching the big head drops at the end of a patterned match. The committed talents were bumping big entirely in vain.