5 Ups And 7 Downs From WWE Payback 2017

3. Matt ‘Deletes’ Hardy Boy

cesaro matt hardy payback
WWE.com

We’ve watched during the past month as Matt Hardy has straddled the line between his old Hardy Boyz persona and the character that revitalized his career last year, Broken Matt.

Sunday night, the crowd and Hardy himself might have tipped the scales even further. The fans chanted “delete” throughout his entrance and called Jeff Hardy “Brother Nero.” But when Matt tagged in late in the match, he himself yelled and gestured “delete” multiple times, lending more credence to that character coming into the foreground.

Couple that with Sheamus and Cesaro calling them a nostalgia act before the match and then decimating them and leaving Matt bloody afterward, and you might have a trigger for a change in the brothers.

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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.