I know I’m asking for a lot by wishing any WWE shows would kick off with a match rather than a promo segment, and while I’m certainly glad “SmackDown” is back to just two hours, the first 20 minutes of the show were absolutely brutal. Every show continues to start the same way, but for whatever reason tonight, the opening segment just dragged on and on, though I can’t say nothing was accomplished, at least.
Before new Undisputed WWE Champion CM Punk could come out to speak, General Manager Nick Aldis was in the ring to announce he had been re-instated from his suspension, following his previous confrontation with GUNTHER. He was already on the show on Monday, and was the one who called up Punk to replace Cody Rhodes in the title match against Sami Zayn, so it hardly felt like he had been absent. If I hadn’t already expected that Punk was going to open the night, I would have assumed GUNTHER would come out to get in his face.
But, nope, even that would have been more interesting than “Is It Great to Be Alive in *insert city here*” Punk, who is only more insufferable when he has a championship. It was a lot of boring babyface nonsense involving Rhodes, who came out eventually, and by the end of it, we found out (what we already knew) that Rhodes will be challenging Punk for the title at SummerSlam. And that was it. Almost 20 minutes of just setting that up, plus Aldis being like, “Hey, I’m back!” to kick things off.
While, again, I am extremely glad that the blue brand is back to a reasonable runtime, taking 20 minutes to get this out of the way is a little ridiculous. That’s an entire television match, and then some, that could have been contested, but WWE wanted to get this set up and announced to push tickets to SummerSlam. I don’t know how effective that’s going to be, however, because this crowd was dead when it was made official. They were louder when Punk’s music played to end the segment and commentary was moving on to the next thing.
I also expected Zayn to run out at any point of this lengthy segment to rant and rave about what happened on “Raw.” Turns out, Zayn wasn’t even on the show tonight, which seems pretty darn ridiculous for how fired up he was in the video they showed of him backstage following Monday’s match. He apparently “called” Aldis a bit later on in the night, but it makes me feel like he’s not serious about losing the gold, which just isn’t a good look for him.
Written by Daisy Ruth
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