3 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE Saturday Night's Main Event (Results & Review - 23 May)

UPS…

3. A Hot Crowd Makes The Difference

Despite the negativity about several of the matches, Saturday Night’s Main Event was a breeze of a watch, in part due to it being only two hours with a fair amount of wrestling, but mostly due to a vocal, enthusiastic crowd.

Fan reaction can make or break a show, and in this case, a mostly hot crowd elevated what for the most part was average wrestling. The audience bit on near-falls, booed the heels, encouraged the faces and stayed invested throughout the show.

Had they been lees than engaged, SNME could have dragged with some of the subpar action, but even the blander matches didn’t feel like a chore because the fans made at least some noise throughout. They even brushed off Sol Ruca’s botch, choosing not to start a “You f***ed up!” chant and instead showered Becky Lynch with a “you suck” chant for grabbing the referee and getting disqualified.

This isn’t to say that the solution to WWE’s woes is to have mindless drones who blindly cheer everything, but a crowd like this can at the worst make house show fare more enjoyable, which is sometimes all you need.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.