7 Ups And 2 Downs From NXT Worlds Collide

Downs...

2. Who Are These People?

We weren’t two minutes into Worlds Collide when one of the biggest problems of the event reared its ugly head.

Finn Balor came out for the opening contest to a tremendous ovation. Then his opponent, NXT UK’s Ilja Dragunov, made his way out… to complete silence. It was just damn creepy, as if a random jobber had showed up and no one cared. Dragunov had a good match with Finn, but fans clearly didn’t care about him, as they only reacted to a handful of his offensive moves and otherwise cheered the heel Balor like crazy.

Later on, the fans were mostly silent as Jordan Devlin and Travis Banks came out for the Cruiserweight Championship match, though they got some good reactions for their offense.

This was the downside of having NXT UK wrestlers compete in the US, where next-to-no one has seen them, at least not regularly. This writer only periodically watches NXT UK and had only seen these guys once or twice each.

Thus, you can’t expect fans to know or care about any of the British-based performers, which is not a good look.