This match was an excellent throwback to a tag team formula that seems to have been forgotten in the modern era, with long heat segments on Amore and a massively hot tag to the gigantic Cass leading to a frenetic finish. Meanwhile, The Revival is a great old-school tag team in the vein of The Andersons: they hit hard, they’re technically proficient, and they fight smarter than everyone else. Enzo and Cass are a crowd-pleasing act in the vein of the New Age Outlaws, and every indication is that they will be on the WWE main roster by the Raw after WrestleMania at the very latest. Two of those teams battled at Roadblock, with the team of Enzo Amore and Big Cass facing off against The Revival for the NXT Tag Team titles.
#Watch wwe roadblock 2016 full
Beginning at the Dusty Rhodes Memorial Tag Team Classic, NXT has really focused on building a tag team division full of a variety of impressive teams, many of which could probably debut on the main roster this Monday, if WWE were so inclined, and be completely ready to go at that level. Trapped between a good guy they don’t care about and a Canadian in a heel role, the crowd basically ignored their entire match, which just seems like the predictable end result of this entire booking snafu.Īfter getting all that well-deserved credit in the past year or so for reviving women’s wrestling in North America, NXT appears to have set their sights on another badly under-served area of WWE: tag team wrestling. In the Great White North, he barely registers as a living, breathing human being. Jack Swagger barely gets a crowd reaction in the United States, where his uber-patriotic act is the cheapest of cheap heat. Once again, we feel like we should remind you that WWE Roadblock took place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, because it seems like WWE might have forgotten in this instance. That is, until it was revealed that his opponent would be The Real American, Jack Swagger. He is so good at it, that even in a Canadian stronghold like Toronto, which as you know, is predisposed to cheer its Canadian heroes (not entirely, we did boo Edge that one time, but this is the narrative WWE would have you believe), Jericho was initially getting a good negative reaction from his promo at Roadblock. Even at this point in his career, few people are as good getting heel heat as Chris Jericho. Jack Swagger Is Always A Bad Choice, But Even More Than UsualĬhris Jericho is still a pretty good heel, and his turn against AJ Styles on Raw, though obvious, was well-executed. The other problem, of course, that as the only challengers left in the tag division (for now), the League is forcing The New Day to turn face by comparison, and we can’t help but be worried that the cracks will start to show in New Day’s act once they start looking for those cheers.ĩ. Sheamus, of course, fell the farthest, going from a man with a Money in the Bank briefcase to the lamest of lame duck champions, to a guy who looked like a bumbling idiot in the ring against The New Day at Roadblock.
Which you’d think would be hard, considering what someone like Rusev was doing last summer, but his stupid love quadrangle with Dolph Ziggler still did more for his character than associating with the League. The League of Nations has managed to accomplish the near-impossible, by creating a stable which has made absolutely everyone involved less over than they were going in. At the very least, even if a stable fails completely, usually somebody escapes from the wreckage in a slightly better position, because while the whole thing is collapsing, WWE usually identifies someone in the whole mess that they want to protect and keep viable as a potential star. And after the dust settled in Toronto, what did we really learn during this Roadblock on the way to WrestleMania?įorming a stable is supposed to be an easy way to elevate multiple people. But WWE really went all out in promoting this latest show, giving it the name WWE Roadblock, and loading it up with title matches, including Triple H defending the WWE World Heavyweight Championship against the man many wish he’d be facing at WrestleMania, Dean Ambrose. Previous attempts have met with varying amounts of success, with Beast from the East, the exclusive show from Tokyo, getting rave reviews (mostly off the back of a Finn Balor-Kevin Owens match for the NXT Title), while a fall endeavor from MSG seeming like a moderate waste of time, with nothing particularly interesting happening and the show headlined by a fairly dreadful match between Brock Lesnar and The Big Show. Leading up to WrestleMania 32, WWE decided that the time was right to air another live event on the WWE Network.