The Final Impact
April 17, 2014
By: Josh Boutwell of Wrestleview.com
After last week I really didn’t know what to expect this week but things kicked off as you would expect with EY celebrating the title win. The promo was perfectly fine and Bully Ray came out to give him an endorsement while trashing Dixie at the same time.
Velvet and Madison was too short to be anything and was ridiculous to be a Street Fight other than to just allow Velvet to cheat without hiding it. I am so beyond sick of these Gimmick Matches for the sake of Gimmick Matches. Tonight alone we had a Street Fight, Tables Match, Handicap Match, and Monsters Ball, my God is this necessary? You are not going to convince me that Vince Russo is not booking this crap or at the very least has some type of input.
Tigre and Sanada was okay but again so freaking short that they weren’t able to show a damn thing other than a couple of spots. What is the point of doing a Best of 3 Series if they are going to get less than 5 minutes each time? Not only that but it looks like this is just set up to put Sanada over to move into a feud with King so Tigre Uno is being treated as filler despite getting the win tonight. With that said if they give them 15 minutes or so at the PPV it could be a truly awesome match. Also, I loved the vignette highlighting Sanada. That was really great and would love for them to do that for Tigre Uno but I get the feeling Sanada is the only X-Division guy they really give a damn about promoting because of the relationship with Muta.
Great promo work from Bully Ray, Bobby Roode, and Austin Aries tonight. I was starting to wonder what the hell is going on with Aries so it’s good to see him back in the thick of things. Hopefully they will actually give him something to do. The Samoa Joe stuff just seems bizarre. Initially certain sites claimed he had a concussion but when Joe publically stated that was untrue that same site claimed instead he was having some family issues that he was going through. Now it looks like TNA is attempting to turn it into a storyline and if Joe has been gone simply because of a family issue that was probably really there only choice. I have no idea where they will go with any of this though.
The Tag Title Match was really good but again suffering from the same thing that every non-Main Event match on Impact seems to suffer from, too damn short. As long as all this screwy stuff leads to The Wolves winning out in the end I’m fine with, but honestly I think TNA is just stretching this out simply because they have no one else to feud with either team. Bad Influence is gone, both are already taking Indy bookings which is just a flat out disgrace that TNA would let them go. So who the hell else is there for either team to feud with? Unless TNA puts Beer Money back together there is not one single regular tag team in TNA right now. They are going to have to bring in some fresh teams and do it quick.
As much as I do not like Eric Young winning the belt in the way he did with little to no build I will admit he was extremely good tonight in all of his roles. I like the serious, aggressive side he’s showing and going out of his way to try and prove himself to everyone. The Monsters Ball was a fun match with several crazy bumps from both guys that I give them kudos for. That probably would have been better saved for the PPV with a little more time but I would assume we will see Magnus get his rematch at the PPV.
I know everyone, or a lot of people at least, thought I was too harsh last week, but go and look at the ratings from last week. Yes the number as a whole was up significantly last week but it was a live show and Impact always does a higher rating when it is live which should be insentive enough for them to go live at least every other week but I digress. The number to really pay attention to is the quarter hour ratings and they fell to a show low during the World Title Match. Now you could argue that could be because no one thought EY would win the belt and it just simply wasn’t a matchup they wanted to see because of that. I guess we will know this week if the rating falls or dips at all, and especially watch it during the Main Event.
– Segment/Promo of the Night: Austin Aries/Sanada vignette
– Match of the Night: Monster’s Ball (***1/2)
– Overall Grade: C
Until next week… PEACE!
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