7 Ups And 6 Downs From WWE Money In The Bank 2018

2. Learn To Read The Crowd

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WWE

If you ever watch shoot videos with old-school wrestling personalities, they will grumble about wrestlers today not being able to read the crowd. The fans will turn on a match, but instead of changing things up or going to a finish earlier, the wrestlers will still go through all the motions because they need to get their stuff in.

Watching Roman Reigns versus Jinder Mahal, you couldn’t help but get the same feeling. The crowd clearly didn’t give a damn about the match, chanting for CM Punk, Bruiserweight, NXT and Y2J, among other things. Yes, there’s a contingent of fans who will boo anything Reigns is involved in, but when they so obviously don’t care, why do you need to go through an entire 15-minute match, complete with multiple chinlocks and the “drama” of Roman putting Sunil Singh down?

Given that reaction, wouldn’t it have been better to call an audible and have Roman escape a Khallas, knock Jinder silly with a Superman Punch and spear him back to jobber-land? If Reigns is truly the “uncrowned Universal Champion,” as Michael Cole reminds us every week, then he should have had no trouble dispatching of Mahal.

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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.