8 Ups & 3 Downs From Impact Wrestling (Jan 14)

Downs...

3. Filling Time

In fairness to Impact, there's not much you can do when you have a pay-per-view on the Sunday, and are then scheduled to air a new episode of your weekly television show on the Tuesday.

Impact Wrestling, much like what NXT used to do with TakeOver before they went live on the USA Network, taped some matches before Hard To Kill to air on this week's episode, with both Joey Ryan vs. Johnny Swinger and the four way tag team match being taped to air (the X Division Championship was taken from a recent House of Hardcore event). However, there is such a thing as filling time.

A short documentary-esque video aired, centred around Michael Elgin's latest trip to Pro Wrestling NOAH, focusing on his matches with Katsuhiko Nakajima and Masao Inoue. This didn't really do anything to further any sort of story 'Big Mike' has in Impact right now. Perhaps the worst part about it was the fact it seemed to be building more hype for his Hard To Kill match with Eddie Edwards, two days after Edwards had defeated the Canadian powerhouse.

Surely this video could have been aired last week instead. The matches took place on 4 and 5 January, so Impact's production team would've had enough time to insert the necessary footage into the project. Then, we could've got the hype for Elgin vs. Edwards before the match, as opposed to after it.