7 Things WWE Got Right At Backlash 2017

by John Bills

1. Randy Orton Loses The Championship

Jinder Mahal
WWE.com

For all the talk and attention given to Jinder Mahal becoming WWE Champion (still a ridiculous sentence to type), there are positives from this. Importantly, Randy Orton is no longer WWE Champion. 'The Viper' has been at his uninspired worst since burning down Bray Wyatt's house, and moving the championship off him was a creative necessity.

But Jinder Mahal as champion? This is the clearest indication yet that WWE is immensely serious about cracking the Indian market. Just two months ago Mahal was being humiliated by Rob Gronkowski at WrestleMania - now 'The Maharaja' stands on top of SmackDown Live. Mojo Rawley surely deserves a title shot.

The match was exactly what any fan would expect a Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal match to be. It was slow, it was plodding, it was uninspired, it was dull. The match had a noteworthy finish, but there wasn't anything else noteworthy about the match up until that point. Tell a lie: one of the Singh brothers took an insane bump onto the announce table. That was it.

So Jinder Mahal is WWE Champion. If there has ever been a clearer move that shows that WWE isn't interested in what its audience wants, this is it. Congratulations to Jinder of course, a man hindered in the past but hindered no more.

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Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.