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Thursday, December 4, 2008

My Weekly TNA Catch-up, Impact 4th Dec 08

Show opens with The Main Event Mafia coming out to whine that Team 3D fooled them & Team 3D's response. Lots of backstage garbage, no-one cares about the upcoming appearance of TNA's hired Sarah Palin impersonator.
Legends Championship (AKA Belt I Bought) Samoa Joe vs Booker T. We were 17 minutes into the show and finally got our 1st bit of wrestling. Wow but was this awful! Booker did almost nothing and Joe sold it all. It's hard to know how much of the match we missed with the 1st badly timed ad break of the night but it couldn't have been that much better than the rest of this pretty mediocre match. Joe had it won as Booker tapped out but Sharmell kept the ref distracted on the apron allowing The Beautiful People to come down, spray Joe in the face and Booker took the win off the axekick. Awful match, I wouldn't have even given this garbage away for for free. Lasted 5 minutes. Why even bother?
ODB's Angle - After the trainwreck that was the last of these their STILL having another? ODB talks to Roxxi & Taylor Wilde.
Mixed Tag Contest - Awesome Kong (with Raisha Saeed & Rhaka Khan) & Scott Steiner vs Christy Hemme & AJ Styles. Talk about a complete mismatch contest. 2 super heavyweights versus 1 almost heavyweight and a total lightweight in Hemme. We were 38 minutes into the show before this 2nd match got underway so it's really starting to show in a very painful way how badly TNA are struggling to fill their "2 hours" of tv time. Styles & Steiner kicked this off with Steiner using his power and Styles bringing it back to level with with his speed. Kong taking AJ's legs out when he hit the apron, damn but that looked like a hard bump! This match was also interupted with yet another badly timed ad break. You'd think TNA would have learned to not take a break during a match after 6 years but it appears not. Hemme sold a couple of stiff looking clotheslines off Kong, but Hemme took the win of a great looking assisted DDT on Kong. Yet another match that was only just over 5 minutes long with little to no heat at all for any of the participants.
6 Man Tag Match - Jimmy Rave, Sonjay Dutt (with SoCal Val) & Sheik Abdul Bashir vs Consequences Creed, Jay Lethal & Eric Young. Wow, could they have made it any clearer here? It's Heel team versus Face team with Shane Sewell as referee, Bashir left the apron to join West & Tenay at the colour desk. So 50 minutes into the show & we're getting match number 3. Considering this was a ring full of X Division guys this was an incredibly weak match with almost no aerial stuff, no fast or high flying moves. Only Sonjay Dutt making a very early reverse somersault backsplash along with Creed's double cross body block were the real highlights of the match, Creed took the win off Rave using the TKO. This match didn't even make it to 5 minutes in duration.
Filling the show with yet more blah, blah, blah - Kurt Angle speaks to Jeff Jarrett.
Sting vs Rhino. Well it was a non-title match so it didn't really matter who won or lost here. Once the bell had rung there was only just over 8 minutes left until the show ended so we weren't going to get any kind of decent match in that amount of time. Sting bailed from the ring early allowing Rhino to put him into 2 different guard rails then do a well concealed bladejob on himself. Yet another badly timed ad break during the match (so tonight TNA took ad breaks in 99% of their matches seeing as only 1 match didn't have an ad break taken during its run unless I missed it) I assume sending Angle & Styles out as cheerleaders was a Russo idea (seeing as it's practically the next thing to a run-in which he normally thinks is a good idea), Sting had this one won with the Scorpion Leglock but Angle distracted the ref long enough for Rhino to be released and hit the Gore to take the win. And the final match of the night only lasted 4 minutes and 20 something seconds.
Apparently this weeks Impact attracted a record number of viewers, its a shame they got such a god awful show with so little actual wrestling in it to watch. It'll probably put off at least 50% of them thinking TNA are just like WWE (it actually stands for We Won't Entertain) in that they do lots of talking and backstage storyline garbage but hardly any wrestling. In this weeks show we only got 4 matches and they were all pretty awful. I have to assume everyone held back their A game and gave their Q game this week because they wanted to keep something in reserve for this weekends PPV. It's pretty sad to think that the sum total of tonights actual on screen wrestling amounted to about 19 minutes of action. So more time was spent in commercial breaks than was spent on actual wrestling. If TNA continue down this avenue we'll have to rename them to Theres No Action.

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