Steve Carrier on January 23, 2018
Taz is joined on today’s show by his co-host, Seth.
Taz opens today’s show by speaking about last night’s 25th Anniversary episode of RAW. He points out that The Manhattan Center crowd had to deal with long breaks between in-ring action, and this resulted in the live audience getting very agitated. Most fans paid hundreds of dollars to be live at The Manhattan Center, and he thinks WWE failed to book this event properly.
Seth says that the Undertaker promo was very open-ended and it didn’t really impress him. He would have preferred seeing Undertaker get physical with a full-time talent. Taz points out that WWE prostitutes their younger talent to the aging veterans enough as it is, so Undertaker cutting a promo was not a bad idea in his mind. He also adds that Undertaker may not have been physically able to have an in-ring confrontation.
Taz believes that Randy Orton definitely should have been on this show and Orton’s wife obviously agreed, since she sent out a social media post yesterday saying so. Taz informs that he wasn’t invited back for this show, and he adds that he’s too critical of WWE’s current product to be invited back for this type of show.
He informs that he was present backstage at a recent commemorative episode of Smackdown, and they didn’t even use him on camera then when he was live in the building. He adds that he’s almost happy that he wasn’t invited to this show because they would have had him walking backstage with a towel over his head or playing poker with the APA. He wouldn’t have been interested in anything like that, especially if they weren’t going to pay him.
Taz thought that Vince McMahon should have made an appearance at The Manhattan Center, either opening the show at ringside with Jerry Lawler and Jim Ross, or cutting an in-ring promo later in the show. He also would have liked to see more of the new generation’s performers wrestling in that vintage setting.
Taz and Seth both agree that The Manhattan Center looked great, and the small setting made the Superstars look like Superheroes. Unfortunately, he didn’t think the Matt Hardy/Bray Wyatt match did anything good for either of those guys, especially Hardy. Hardy didn’t appear to receive a big ovation during his entrance, and Taz thinks that’s mostly due to the crowd being annoyed because of the large gaps in action there.
At the Barclay’s Center, Taz loved the opening segment featuring Vince, Shane, and Stephanie McMahon, and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. He points out that Austin and Vince have always had unbelievable chemistry, and they picked up right where they left off nearly 20 years ago.
DX and The Balor Club concluded the action at The Manhattan Center, and Taz thinks WWE could have been more creative with this segment. He points out that we’ve seen this same promo with Triple H and Shawn Michaels over and over again, and that’s not a criticism of Shawn Michael’s return to Raw – it’s more a criticism of Triple H’s involvement in basically everything that he considers to be cool on WWE’s programming.
Taz welcomes Mike Johnson from PWInsider to the show.
Johnson informs that he was live at The Manhattan Center last night, and there’s no denying that the live audience became restless and agitated after the first half of RAW took place nearly entirely at The Barclay’s Center.
Johnson truly believes that WWE had the best of intentions and tried hard to please all their fans, but it just didn’t work. Taz disagrees and says that WWE simply needed to book this show better. There needed to be more action at The Manhattan Center, and some of the legends should have been utilized to get over the new generation of performers in his opinion.
Johnson also thought that the show lacked a great wrestling match, admitting that the Intercontinental Title match between Roman Reigns and The Miz was pretty good. This wasn’t a problem in Taz’s mind because he thought the Reigns/Miz bout was great.
That sums up today’s episode of The Taz Show. You can listen to the show yourself anytime here, and I’ll catch ya Thursday for another recap!
January 23, 2018 6:24 pm
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