When you aren’t feeling a show, sometimes, you can miss out on some good nuggets. It can take a lot for a segment, a match or anything else otherwise to stand out as entertaining or worthy of praise if the rest of the program is underwhelming, causing you to lose a little bit of interest with each passing segment. That was Smackdown in a nutshell for me this past Friday. Each segment just kept disappointing me, to the point that by the time the main event came around, the only thing keeping me from fast-forwarding to the end of my DVR was the fact that it was Christian wrestling Sheamus.
Boy, am I glad that I watched it.
The first real interesting thing with this match is that both men are heels here. It’s very rare to see a bad guy/bad guy match up in WWE, although with Smackdown having an excess of guys in the main event who can play heel and with Randy Orton out injured, this one might have been a necessity. The funny thing was that it wasn’t what you’d imagine with two bad guys pairing off against each other. There was a great example of that on NWA Hollywood television for their 6/11 show, when Natural Selection wrestled The Tribe. Both teams tried to out-cheat each other throughout the match. There was no such attempt at doing that in this match. Christian was the flat out villain, while Sheamus actually showed signs of being a hero here.
Of course, being that he is Sheamus, a guy who has played the bully since coming up to ECW in late 2009, it was a bit jarring to see any heroic traits from him. He made babyface comebacks after Christian had him down for long stretches. He played off Randy Orton, seated at ringside, as a great equalizer to Christian’s misdeeds. Hell, he even sold his ass off for Christian despite there being a disparity in size between the two that was as great as you could get between two guys in the heavyweight spectrum. Maybe it was just subtle, maybe it was Christian heeling it up so well that anything less would have seemed like wrestling as 1987 Hulk Hogan. I don’t know what the case was, but it worked.
As I take a look at how Christian worked in this match, it’s funny how subtle changes in his demeanor make for greatly different effects. As a face, his ring-based offense (i.e., using the ropes, turnbuckles etc.) always found a way to look natural. For example, any time he’d do his choke where the victim was laying down on the ropes in prime position to take a 619 and he’d stand on his back, pulling up the top rope: there was always a spryness to the execution as a face. He was a cagey1 veteran trying to get every advantage he could, bending the rules while the fans looked the other way. As a heel though? It’s funny how different the move comes off with a different demeanor. It’s all in the facial expression and the added violence with each additional shake of the top rope that wasn’t there when he was the laughing, happy-go-lucky Captain Charisma who ruled ECW for 9 months. He looked like a man who had lost his mind, which in character, he certainly was.
The build-up to the end of this match was sublime, but what puts this match over the top for me was the finish. It was a classic jostling-for-position in the corner, something you see in more than a few matches. These usually end well, but here, after a struggle where Sheamus teased a High Cross powerbomb from the top, Christian, showing his craftiness combined with a killer instinct, leapt from the highest turnbuckle, bringing Sheamus’ head with him and draping it across the top rope in a super stun gun. Sheamus went flying. Christian, who bumped hard delivering the move, came back into the ring to collect the 1-2-3. It was refreshing because it didn’t end in a spear or a Killswitch. It was unique because it came off a move that no one would have expected to finish the match. It worked because of the visual, of Sheamus recoiling in shock and Christian falling to the floor, risking it all to keep the Irish interloper out of his main event match at Capitol Punishment.
In all honesty, I should have expected a good performance, but this one was transcendent. It helped save Smackdown from being a total dud and it was strong enough to keep my attention despite the fact that the show was doing everything it could to make my focus wander to things other than my television set. It just goes to show the power that the theater of a professional wrestling match can have, and how two great performers can put their working boots on and do their best to salvage something that would be otherwise forgettable.
1 - Pun not intended
TH writes The Wrestling Blog and broadcasts The Wrestling Podcast. You can find him on Twitter, or at various other spots around the Internet. He also loves Chikara, and quite frankly, thinks you should too.
Edited by Mitch
