6 Ups And 6 Downs From WWE Backlash 2016

3. Who Booked This Crap?

natalya naomi
WWE.com

Whoever was the agent for the women’s match deserves a handshake and then a smack upside the head. The handshake is for the first 60% of the match, which was really nicely done with some complex spots that looked pretty good.

The smack would be for the eliminations, and the decision to have Carmella, a relatively inexperienced rookie, left as one of the last two to vie for the SmackDown Women’s Championship. No one took her seriously, especially after the best she could muster against Becky Lynch was a series of paintbrush slaps. It was just extremely poor planning to have her be the last one eliminated.

Also odd was the fact that each woman (save for Alexa Bliss, the first one pinned) each eliminated one woman. And to make it somewhat annoying, the woman who scored the pinfall/tapout was the next one eliminated in each case. That’s horribly predictable paint-by-numbers when you realize it’s happening.

They could have had one woman get a couple pins to look strong and emerge as a top challenger for Becky immediately afterward, or have Lynch defeat a couple women to look really strong. No suck luck.

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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.