6 Ups And 9 Downs From WWE No Mercy 2016

3. Selling The Drama

Nikki Bella Carmella
WWE.com

Considering that Nikki Bella missed several months of action due to a neck injury, it only makes sense that Carmella would focus on assaulting the former Diva Champion’s neck.

But aside from a couple nasty bumps in the early going, the newcomer simply relied on a series of chinlocks to attack Nikki’s neck. And Bella’s “selling” of the injury consisted of putting her hand to her throat a couple times and grimacing mildly. That’s not exactly convincing the crowd that her career might be in jeopardy.

Not everything can be a technical classic, but if you’re going to use an injured body part as the theme of a match, then you’ve got to be more convincing than that, both on the offense and on the selling sides. This should have felt like a match where Carmella beat Nikki within an inch of her career, and it didn’t.

Advertisement
Contributor
Contributor

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.