6 Things WWE Got Right At Fastlane 2017
Neville and Jack Gallagher stole a pretty terrible show last night.
Let's get the obvious out of the way first of all - WWE Fastlane 2017 was a terribly booked show. Things started off well enough with Samoa Joe and Sami Zayn but once Jinder Mahal was sent out to work an eight-minute pay-per-view match that achieved the seemingly impossible in making Cesaro look boring the show was about to ready to fall off a cliff. Confusing babyface wins and Handsome Rusev being made to look like a fool completed the job.
But nobody is talking about Jinder and Rusev this morning. The 22-second main event will be the talk of the town as Goldberg squashed Kevin Owens to win his first professional wrestling championship in well over a decade. A 22-second main event means everything else in the show is going to need to be stretched out, and as a result Fastlane was one of the worst pay-per-views in recent memory.
Even the darkest light contains some traces of light however, and there were some positives to be plucked from the debris...
6. The Destroyer Destroys
On a night of frustrating booking missteps WWE managed to get through to the end of one match with all of the necessary boxes ticked. Samoa Joe defeated Sami Zayn in the first match of the main show in what was an extended squash, and whilst Sami Zayn fans may lament that they shouldn't lose too much heart.
This is Sami Zayn's role for the time being. Zayn will continue to pick fights that he can't win and put up just enough fight to look like maybe, just maybe he can pull a win out of the bag, before succumbing to the inevitable and coming up just short. It is going to be the story of Zayn's career for the foreseeable future and you know what? That is just fine.
Samoa Joe looked great here. It isn't clear what the Samoan Submission Machine will be doing at WrestleMania 33 but he continues to look like an obliterator on the main roster. Joe is going to be a star for WWE if they continue to play their cards right, and having him defeat Sami Zayn in the manner he did last night was objectively the right move.