11 Things WWE Got Right With UK Championship Tournament

8. Tournament Pacing

Trent Seven Wolfgang
WWE.com

WWE has a reputation for treating tournaments with utter disdain, but the last 12 months have lent credence to the belief that such hatred begins and ends with Vince McMahon. Both the UK Championship tournament and the Cruiserweight Classic were undoubted successes, exercises in putting together tournaments that start slow and build to an emotional crescendo, alongside booking that leads fans to view many different men as potential winners throughout.

Going into night two, an argument could be put forward for any seven of the eight men left ending the night as champion, with maybe only poor Sam Gradwell being out of the picture. Unpredictability is the key to maintaining interest throughout a tournament, and WWE managed that without resorting to unnecessary shocks and surprises.

The match quality improved with every passing round too, a necessarily slow first round followed by a number of hard-hitting quarter finals and attritional semis, before reaching an emotional peak in the fantastic final. Vince McMahon may not like tournaments, but this proved that WWE knows exactly how to book them nonetheless.

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Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.