8 Ups And 11 Downs From WWE WrestleMania 33

5. Cruiserweights Kick Off The Night Right

WrestleMania 33 Neville Austin Aries
WWE.com

Throughout the build to WrestleMania, this column has repeatedly stated that if Neville and Austin Aries got some time for their match, they’d have the crowd won over.

Sure enough, the Cruiserweight Championship match got enough time for A-Double and the King of the Cruiserweights to shine. Neville and Aries kept it to the ground for parts of the match, but they picked up the pace a few times with some awesome exchanges, most notably toward the end, starting with Neville’s snap German suplex and a series of reversals and counters leading to Aries’ super-hurricanrana and 450 splash.

In the end, Neville did what all good heel champions do – cheat – and gouged Austin’s damaged eye socket to escape the Last Chancery, hit the Red Arrow, and left with his title. For the first Cruiserweight Championship match at Mania in more than a decade, this was a pretty good showing.

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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.