Toxxic

"Job-uh to Goldberg-uh? Or you'll do what-uh? You'll release the dogs-uh? Or the bees-uh? Or the dogs-uh with the bee-uh in their mouths-uh so when-" "No, I'll do this! HIIIII-YAAAAAAAAAH!" *Triple H poses on the floor and spits blood*

You think Miss Piggy would be in charge? Oh no, not in this company. No women having a say unless they're Steph. She'd be competing in- No. The image of Miss Piggy in bra and panties is not one I feel I can unleash on the board. Although the image of her chopping the shit out of Flair is damn funny...

The only two people allowed to be GMs should be Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets. They could watch from a balcony doubling as commentators, tell everyone how shit the talent is and then fire everyone. It'd be a great laugh for one show, and then you'd have a roster of Cruiserweights, Benoit, Eddie, Cena and Matt Hardy and we could see some WRESTLING. GO MUPPETS~!

Raven said he was making about half again as much as he was in WWE the first week he started taking indy bookings again. Granted, Spanky isn't as big a name as Raven but he'll still probably do OK.

What about the Raven push? Raven "sorts himself out" and comes out with a more "serious edge" according to JR (or words to that effect) - i.e. shorter hair, no make-up, absolutely nothing to distinguish him from any random jobber, then gets beat by Mr. Substance Abuse and departs next week. GO RAVEN~!

You can't take Austin off TV. Austin = ratings, at least in the minds of creative. Besides, he probably wants to be on tv, and no-one will pick up on the fact that paying someone lots of money to not do anything useful on tv isn't better than not paying them anything if they walk out given that they'd refuse to do what you actually want them to do, which is not be on tv. If you can understand that sentence, you have my admiration. The problem is that they *can't* turn Hardy face now. They had the perfect opportunity when he returned to Raw - not actually have him propose to Lita, but at least say that he'd switched brands in order to be with her or something like that. Now he's dumped her on-air that's just too fresh for him to be accepted as a face yet. Oh no, sorry, this is WWE and this happened more than two weeks ago. Just have him drink beer and give Lita a Twist of Fate for not coming to Smackdown with him and he'll be well away.

Whatever Coach said, Lawler's "You're not black, you're beige!" outweighs it. Besides, Long's "all white men are racists" speech was racist itself, implying that all white men think the same way. The point is that in this scenario, it's the black guys who are being portrayed as the heels simply because they're standing up for themselves. Standing up in an unnecessarily confrontational and racist way, true, but since this is WWE land they eventually lose all confrontations, meaning by WWE logic that they are wrong. Basic lesson for last week's Raw - it's OK for Stone Cold to stun Long, because Teddy Long is black, he tried to advance the fortunes of fellow black man Mark Henry, and told Lawler that he'd fire him if he attacked fellow black man Coach. Sheesh.

No, Jester. NOW the Apocalypse is on us. I feel for you, AS. It's (very vaguely) like my continued support of Jeff Hardy. When I started watching again in mid-2000 he was insane, over and pretty damn good. And then I watched as he gradually got slower and slower and more and more drugged-up. And I kept wanting to go "Jeff, if you laid off the fucking drugs then you'd be able to actually WRESTLE, and then they might push you and then you might be able to avoid being beaten by a fucking sleeper hold..."

And every single night he'd be interrupted by the music of either the Filthy Animals or the Misfits In Action. And IIRC he gave the Cruiser Title to Elix Skipper... i never knew what happened with the WCW Hardcore Title, or even what it meant since they were allowed to use chairs anyway... and lost the US Title to Hugh Morrus. Go Lance. Being a Brit, I only ever saw Worldwide. But I didn't mind. Because you see, on Worldwide we got Scott Hudson basically doing what Tazz used to do on Velocity - take the piss because he knew no-one from management was watching. The best two Hudson calls I saw were: *Nash steps over the rope to go to the outside in pursuit of Steiner* Hudson: Oh, I thought we were going to see an Asai moonsault there! *Nash has kidnapped David Flair and is on the video wall in order to get at heel Ric Flair, and Flair-loving Mike Tenay is going insane on commentary* Tenay: Where is that? Is that a WCW camera crew? Hudson (without missing a beat): It can't be, they're holding the camera steady.

I think this might be an attempt at some sort of kayfabe. After all, if he's just "dumped" Lita on Raw and the WWE are trying to bring back some vague form of kayfabe, having a commentary written by a wrestler on the home site saying that he's blatantly still with the person he supposedly dumped... you get the idea.

Heenan! Now THAT would work!

Fire Lawler. OK Coach is by no means great, but right now I'd take Coach (with a slightly less obvious heel bias) over JR. Yes JR knows far far more about wrestling - but he doesn't display it anymore, does he? He just waffles on about the Sooners, sucks up to Austin, badmouths Bischoff and occasionally calls a move. And he doesn't even call them correctly anymore. I bet even Christian is starting to think that his reverse DDT is the REAL Unprettier.

i'm not sure I'd call what happened to Raven a push. The guy fianally won the right to reappear on Raw, which he did minus all the things that actually made Raven Raven (hair, make-up, kilt, etc) and then got jobbed out to Jeff Hardy so he couldn't enter the rumble. Bye bye Mr Levy, nice knowing you.

Making a #1 entry can make sense, and in the case of Benoit vs Heyman, it does. Offering #30 as some sort of reward or favour can also make sense, and since henry has that favour left over it would make sense for him to call it in for this purpose. As long as no other numbers are given out, I can live with this. The other thing is it can make the Rumble seem more important. If Henry's had that favour since Survivor Series he can say that he's been waiting until now to call it in specifically to get the #30 slot (please note I won't know what's happened on Raw til Friday, or until I see Dames' review, so if Henry has or has not done this I'm not retarded - just unimformed).

Ex-actly. Unless WWE comes up with the card to end all cards I'm not buying Mania when I had it free last year. If the PPVs on Box Office were the price of say, a football match, I'd consider it. For £14.99 they can go fuck themselves.

TRIPLE H DITCHES STEPH! The wrestling world was rocked today as news filtered out of Titan Towers that Neanderthal-looking, walking-injury list roid-monkey Triple H is no longer married to Stephanie McMahon, and has in fact divorced her to pursue a meaningful relationship with Jesus. Speaking from halfway up his own backside, Triple H said that he felt that while being engaged to the daughter of Vince McMahon had its advantages he could get along in life even better if he was dating the Son of God. When asked if this didn’t require a 180 degree shift in his sexuality Trips replied “Better to be fucked in the ass and get ahead than be fucked in the ass and go nowhere - just ask Ultimo Dragon”. In order to prove his worth to his future Father-in-Law, Triple H bravely went out to confront the minions of Hell, showing admirable dedication to the cause despite having no arms, a left eye that only works on every second wednesday and no less than three pulled groins, while also suffering from a concussion gathered in a freak smiling accident on Raw in late August. After twenty minutes of pitiful television, 19 minutes of selling his opponents’ moves but never actually looking in danger of losing, and repeatedly kicking out of Armageddon, Triple H hit the Devil with the Pedigree, paused to age, die a slow and lingering death and get reincarnated through the Buddhist cycle (starting with an ant and working back up) before pinning Beelzebub after a slow three-count from a referee nearly suicidal with boredom. When asked after the match if not putting over the myriad hordes of Hell wouldn’t damage their credibility, Triple H replied that they had got on national TV and were now better known than any other group of demons. When asked for a comment on Triple H’s actions, Bradshaw replied “What he said, and anyone who says different is obviously a 13-year old on his mum’s computer”.

"Hardcore Coward"? You know, I assumed that there was something behind Foley's disappearance (you know, apart from getting him out of the way to bring the drunken, woman-abusing bah gawd Texas goes over all the heels get-him-the-fuck-off-my-tv-again Rattlesnake Austin) rather than he was just scared of Orton. It didn't look like he was scared. It looked to me like he just couldn't be bothered to get in the ring with Orton. Which i can understand.

That's the point of doing it. I know, what I meant was it's stupid how the ref ALWAYS calls against the faces and ignores the same thing from the heels. If you're watching in kayfabe it would look like the ref was actually on the heels' side, which surely isn't the point.

Heel teams switch without tags every single fucking time anyway. It really annoys me, because the ref always come down on the face team when he doesn't see the tag but never enforces the decision on the heel team. The face-in-peril thing works fine with teams that are over - but precious few are. The Hardyz could do it best because they were both pretty small and would bump like fuck, meaning that not only were they over but they actually LOOKED like they were in peril. London and Spanky could probably do the same thing. I think what really needs to be done is take tag teams that have actually worked as tag teams from OVW and bring them in as a tag team. You know, with a name and a double-team finisher and stuff. At least the Bashams have the Meat-Grinder, the Ball-and-Gag etc, people like La Res only have that appalling double-team spinebuster (aka The Death Of Spike), and the Bashams weren't even a tag team. I mean, the Dudleyz aren't exactly great wrestlers but they do know where each other are going to be when, which helps.

I don't think it was Holly's stiffness that caused the problem, but the fact that he sandbagged on Brock's powerbomb. Now Brock is hugely strong, but even he can't lift a man properly with no help, so Holly's sandbagging backfired because Brock couldn't hold him and dropped him prematurely on his neck (see: Kevin Nash/The Giant, WCW, although that was due to Paul Wight being so damn huge rather than not trying to help). I doubt that Brock would deliberately try to severely hurt a man in the ring, no matter how badly provoked - if nothing else because he hadn't been with the company long. Someone who's been in the main event for several years might have reason to believe that if they "accidently" hurt this midcard guy who's been pissing them off they might get away with it, but WWE hadn't invested enough in Brck at that time for him to have that security, even if he was that big an asshole.

Well, Hardy's appearance on Raw takes away all remnants of the Mattitude "stable", which basically consisted of Shannon Moore messing up and CrashRIPHolly acting like a moron. So Hardy's able to start with a fresh beginning. Unfortunately of course, he turns up as a supposed face, turns heel straight off and then moves into feud with fucking Maven. However - at the moment, I still think that there is a chance Hardy will get pushed. The moment he jobs clean to Maven on PPV however, I will concede that he's done. No-one can take losing to OLM and the Finisherless Wonder in less than a year.

Austin left again, at least for a while. Foley came back~! - but this will lead to the eventual reappearance of Austin, so that's not good. And the WWE have at least given me cause to believe that at some point in the future Matt Hardy might actually get a proper push.

Matthews is a decent commentator - not superb, but decent. The trouble is, when you pair him with no-hopers like The Cat or Bill DeMott he tries gamely to carry them but fails. When paired with Tazz or Michael Cole on Velocity (both of whom just kicked back and had a laugh, knowing that no-one from management would be watching) he was great. And in the last few weeks he's been bringing in more obscure references. A couple of weeks ago he mentioned moves reminiscent of those done by Hayabusa and Tiger Mask, both on the same show. As for Cole and Tazz, they're great. Cole actually defers to Tazz's (relatively) recent in-ring experience and asks him how he would counter stuff, etc. As opposed to JR and King who sit there fiddling through their half-assed catchphrases and burying good workers whilst talking about how impressive John Heidenreich is.

World Heavyweight Champion, I believe.

Uh, Besus? You might want to work on your own grammar and spelling before correcting someone else's. As for Orton winning the Rumble - no. Here's a few reasons. - Orton is one of the less-talented wrestlers on Raw. He's not the pits due to the presence of people like Heidenreich, but he's nowhere near ready to be main-eventing Mania based on his workrate. He's had a couple of not-bad matches, but by and large he's average to poor, with shocking timing and ring-sense. If he goes to Mania it looks like he'll face Triple H, who won't be able to carry him to a match worthy of the biggest Mania ever. - He's also not ready to be main-eventing Mania based on his heat. People like Hogan can pull off being in big matches simply because the crowd temporarily loses their minds and cheers a 50 year-old shaking and staggering around the ring whilst punches bounce off him. Orton hasn't got much heat - it's not non-existant, but people like the Dudleyz get just as big a reaction. And that's not right for someone who's meant to be in the main event of the biggest Mania ever. Plus if he's facing Trips, there's no guarantee that Trip's face act will go down any better now than it went before, so it's not like he'll be playing off a super-hot babyface. - If Orton does go to Mania, he shouldn't do it by winning the Rumble because there's no need for it. There is however a need for Benoit to win the Rumble, because otherwise he can't get a title shot as long as Heyman remains in charge. In fact, if Trips does turn face then it's likely that Orton will remain "in" with Bischoff and be treated well rather than having to defy the odds to get the shot. I'm not expecting this to get through, but we can but hope.