5 Ups And 6 Downs From WWE Fastlane 2018

1. Headlock City

Jimmy Uso Kofi Kingston
WWE.com

The moment you saw a six-match card, you knew that there was a pretty good chance we’d see several longer matches on the PPV.

Most three-hour WWE PPVs have 7-8 matches, allowing a balance of shorter bouts and longer contests. But when you only have six matches, you’re forced to stretch them out. What we probably didn’t realize is that “longer matches” meant extended “feeling-out” processes and headlocks, and bouts being stretched out to pad out the PPV.

That sort of thing didn’t always work, as some matches took a lot longer to get going. It’s hard to count those instances against each individual match, hence this all-encompassing “down” for the padding of some of the matches, making some of them duller than they should have been.

Thankfully, WWE going back to cross-branded PPVs should alleviate this problem, as there should always be plenty of matches available.

Advertisement
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.