6 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE WrestleMania 40 - Night 1 (Results & Review)

2. Get On With It

The tag team main event deserves its flowers – and it will get them – but holy hell, does it need to be taken to the woodshed for a minute.

Maybe it was a by-product of sitting in 40-degree weather at the end of a four-plus-hour PLE, but watching a lengthy video package, 15-plus minutes of entrances and another five minutes before the bell rang was bad enough; suffering through a ridiculously long, tentative feeling-out process was damn near death for the match.

Fans audibly grew impatient as 15-plus minutes ticked by without anything truly noteworthy taking place. A brawl into the crowd and up the entrance ramp went nowhere. The initial stages felt like three of the men knew they would be wrestling again Sunday night, and the fourth was being careful to not jeopardize his lucrative movie career.

Yes, things got tremendously better in the second half of the match, but they could have easily trimmed 10, even five minutes off the early portion and it would have worked that much better. Padding running time for a match for the sake of doing it just doesn’t work, unless you give fans a reason to invest and care, and this wasn’t it. Some fans were chanting about how bored they were, and that’s not a good sign for the “biggest tag team match in history.”

Don’t worry though: it got much better.