6 Ups And 11 Downs From WWE Crown Jewel

7. Uninspired First Round

Tournaments by and large are fun and awesome storytelling devices. One-night tournaments often are not. (WrestleMania IV, we’re looking at you.)

Even a one-night tournament involving eight top WWE wrestlers couldn’t avoid the pitfalls of having wrestlers compete multiple times in a night. The first round of the WWE World Cup tourney was an uninspired lot of matches that largely disappointed. As noted elsewhere, you had short matches with out-of-nowhere finishes and very little heat (though the crowd might have something to do with that).

The first round did set the stage for the later rounds, but it certainly was the kind of fodder you would want to largely fast-forward and skip. The idea was solid – fill the card with matches that mean something without having to defend every title or craft extensive storylines for each bout – but it just gave us four matches that felt like Raw filler rather than PPV-worthy contests.