6 Ups And 1 Down From NXT Halloween Havoc (28 Oct)

5. A Priest, A Ring, And A Rich Man...

Much to my shock (I mean, it is Halloween), Shotzi Blackheart's much-hyped Spin The Wheel Make The Deal gimmick wasn't actually gimmicked at all. The digital representation we'd seen previously replaced on the night with an actual wheel, presumably meaning that the horrors of live television could have given us any match you could imagine.

That said, a "Devil's Playground Match" is any match you could imagine. It's a hardcore match, and it's a street fight, and it's no DQ, and it's extreme rules, and it's no-holds barred, and it's unsanctioned. The only difference between this and a Good Housekeeping match is that nobody had a pie to hand.

But I digress. Johnny Gargano and Damien Priest took their otherworldly premise out of the ring, into the back of the CWC and, eventually, up onto the special wheel platform itself. Whether or not the whole thing had to be called on the fly I'm not sure, but the simplicity of their set-pieces suggests that very little planning went into this. The two horrifically-timed ad breaks also giving them the opportunity to lay things out.

The finish loses a bit of edge given that we had pretty much the exact same thing last week - masked man arrives out of nowhere to cause a title change - but it was nonetheless an interesting wrinkle. Gargano also using the wheel itself to finish off Priest, despite his previously mentioned hatred of them, was the kind of subtle, week-on-week, in-ring world-building that gets high praise away from WWE.

A pop by any other name would smell as deft.