Pro Wrestling Chronicle

This week, much like the past few weeks, felt like two different shows. There is what’s in the main event, and what’s not in the main event. The WWE continued strong booking of the title picture surrounding John Cena but still seemed lost with other areas. However, there was a glimmer of hope in all this (I think).

The Good:

- They really couldn’t be booking the world title picture any better than they are right now. John Cena is still on top and they did a great job of giving him back his manhood after being made to look like a fool two weeks in a row by Shawn Michaels. Shawn Michaels and Randy Orton had an okay number 1 contender match, but it was far from special. Edge got involved at the end and helped steer the result into his favor. A few segments later during The Cutting Edge: He, Orton, and HBK took turns declaring themselves next in line for the title shot. After Coach, Mick Foley, and the Make-A-Wish kid came out we have a Fatal 4-Way for the title at Backlash with John Cena vs Edge vs Randy Orton vs HBK. The WWE I’d guess is doing everything they can to get this buyrate up after Wrestlemania. Hopefully it works because this should be a great main event.

- Lashley recovered nicely this week after a less than stellar Raw last Monday. It helped him that he had a better character to play off of in Shane McMahon. I think Lashley is at the point where Cena was about 18 months ago. He is clearly getting the big push and they are a contingent of fans against it. If he handles it half as well as Cena did he’ll be fine in the future. The one little downer to this segment was announcing a 4 way for the ECW title which kind of took some steam out fo the other main event and also sets up dissension between the McMahon’s and Umaga rather than Lashley beating three men at once.

The Bad:

- The WWE just doesn’t seem to know what to do with Haas and Benjamin. This is a team that just 3 years ago they were pushing as the next big stars in the business and now they are getting jobbed out weekly in short matches. I understand the importance of putting over the new tag champs strong but there were other guys on the roster (Venis and Viscera for example) who could’ve done a quickie job. The bright spot here is it seems the WWE is ready to give a good natured push to the tag division. They set up the title match already for Backlash and gave the two teams an issue coming off the end of last week’s battle royal. Now hopefully The Hardys and Cade/Murdoch can have a good match at Backlash.

- The latest starting a push of Carlito. They seem to not know whether they want to push or punish Carlito and the constant stopping and starting is grating. I’ll go into more detail later this week in a column I’m preparing but continuously spinning wheels is bad in this instance.

Overall this week I’d agree with Paul. It was a strong edition of Raw but they have more of an idea where they want to go main event wise versus where the mid-card is headed. If they showed a little more devotion to rounding out the cards they would have a great product right now.