One thing that the Road to WrestleMania often means is that in-ring action picks up. Despite having a PPV between the Royal Rumble and Mania, its basically a pit stop on the way to San Francisco. All the build for two months is toward WrestleMania, which means theres a lot of programming to fill, and that means fans get treated to some good matches here and there. Monday night, things seemed to be clicking in the ring. Ryback versus Luke Harper was a really good power match, and it raised the question of why Harper loses so many matches when he is probably exactly what WWE needs an athletic big man with a good moveset and unique look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POyL7y5C93g Jimmy Uso and Cesaro had a decent little match (when the announcers werent obsessed with a pending double date between Uso/Naomi and Tyson Kidd/Natalya) with some good exchanges. It also looks like a tag team title match between the Usos and the Swiss-Can Connection (which really should be their name) could be a show-stealer. Its also noteworthy that Adam Rose was nowhere to be seen, thankfully. Bray Wyatt versus Dolph Ziggler and Seth Rollins versus Daniel Bryan also were PPV-worthy matchups that didnt fail to entertain. Monday was a good start on the Road to WrestleMania as far as in-ring quality is concerned.
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.
