5 Ups & 2 Downs From WWE SmackDown (28 Nov - Results & Review)

1. This Should’ve Been On The PLE

That subheading probably sounds negative. It kinda is, but more so for Survivor Series and not SmackDown itself. After all, it'd be churlish to give Friday's show a 'Down' just because Triple H decided not to put a traditional Survivors elimination bout on the PLE named after those matches. He really should've, and this match showed why.

The traditional eliminator was all action and worked well. It was never less than watchable, and it put across the merits of these elimination style collisions. If someone's putting together a body of evidence for next year's PLE, then they should start here. The graphics WWE included to help keep track of who’d been eliminated and who was still around were a welcome addition too. They're not essential (it's 5v5, so it isn't hard to count!), but they were a nice quality of life improvement anyway.

Also, dudes the size of Talla Tonga really benefit from this kind of formatting. He wasn’t asked to do a whole hell of a lot, but could look like a difference maker by scoring some eliminations, and the company protected him with a countout elimination rather than pinfall or submission.

Then, there was the closing stretch: Sami Zayn was up against 3 guys (Solo Sikoa, Talla and Tama Tonga), but almost took out everybody to seize the win. That was really, really good, and it had fans around ringside glued to what was going on. Man, Zayn’s such a great underdog babyface.

In summary, the traditional elimination match should've been kept back for Survivor Series. Lesson learned. Hopefully.

What did you think of this week's WWE SmackDown? For more wrestling, check out 25 Things You Didn't Know About John Cena and 12 Things You Learn Binge Watching Every WWE SmackDown From 2003!