5 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE SmackDown (6 March - Results & Review)

Downs...

4. Time For Melo To Move On

Those Friday night writers really need to move on from the ‘Open Challenge’ thing for Carmelo Hayes now. Like, it’s critical. He’s getting decent reactions from fans and consistently has good matches, but the dude needs a feud to sink his teeth into. If they’re gonna turn Ilja Dragunov heel, then just do it. El Hijo del Dr. Wagner Jr was a quirky opponent for Hayes, but it was a match for the sake of a match and never believable that Wagner was winning the United States Title.

Decent action then, but this is WrestleMania season and it’s kinda hard to care about this sort of exhibition stuff. Stories are king in WWE, not one offs, and there’s far too much of a ‘just get to the next show’ vibe about Triple H’s approach these days. Personally, this guy cares about the AAA involvement with WWE about as much as he cared about CMLL in AEW.

In other words, not a lot.

Tony Khan took a fair bit of flak for lazily leaning on "dream matches" for various episodes of TV when the CMLL stuff was rife, so it's only fair that Hunter takes the same criticism. Thankfully, he restricted Wagner's involvement to the midcard title scene, but it's still less-than booking that's killing time rather than working towards anything meaningful for Melo.

He's coming into his own as a babyface, so give him a rivalry that bolsters that. Hayes needed that yesterday, but there's still scope for making something of this 'Dragunov wants to prove himself worthy first' stuff.