3 Ups And 4 Downs From Last Night’s WWE NXT (July 8)

Considering that there was no way to pre-tape a Finn Balor victory speech without it being immediately leaked all over the internet, filling champion-less time with the match in Tokyo made perfect sense on paper.

Problem was, they removed half of the actual match!

Now, it's highly likely that anyone who's trawling through the WWE Network of a Wednesday night to watch NXT already saw the match in its entirety when it first broadcast, but if NXT were going to dedicate a huge chunk of this episode to the title change, why did they cut so much of the actual wrestling.

The pre-match entrances and ceremonial hoo-hah was presented in its entirety, as was the post-match celebration, but the wrestling itself was gutted right out. An advert for WWE 2K16 played and when the match returned, a lot of the great spots, including Owens' "I hate this country and everyone in it" rant, and the first major false finish of Owens kicking out of Balor's Coup de Grace, were all gone. The audience at home were taken right from the opening exchanges into the thick of the false finishes.

Maybe this is just orneriness, but couldn't the entrances have been trimmed, could the post-match celebration have lost a minute or two? For anyone who hadn't seen the match it was nowhere near a fair representation of the two men's hard work.

A recreation of a great moment, yes, but one rendered hollow and ultimately a little pointless via brutal editing.