11 Ups & 4 Downs For Impact Wrestling In 2020 (So Far)

Downs...

4. Pushing The Wrong Names

We'll say this from the offset: Impact Wrestling use legends in a far more appropriate way than WWE do because they're not making some 50-year-old WCW legend from the late '90s one of their top champions two decades later. However, they do still have a tendency to focus the majority of their attention on these veterans rather than their younger stars in some scenarios.

Take Rob Van Dam, for example. The guy may have spent 49 years on this planet, but he can still go when needed. Granted, not as much as he was once capable of, but still enough to allow for a quality match here and there. At the Hard To Kill pay-per-view this past January, 'The Whole F'N Show' was scheduled to face Brian Cage in his final Impact match before (eventually) arriving in All Elite Wrestling. However, that match didn't go ahead as planned thanks to a pre-match beatdown to 'The Machine', resulting in Cage heading out of the company on a major Down. Add in the fact that RVD would then defeat rising Impact star Daga in a rescheduled match, and it's a complete waste.

Obviously, some of these older talents have actually benefited the product Impact have been putting out - case in point, Ken Shamrock. We need to speak about the booking for the likes of Rob Van Dam though. The only reason it's the least important Down is due to the fact it's calmed down now, although that's likely due to him only making one or two appearances in the last few months due to the ongoing world issues.