It’s something that they’ve spent so much more time on it than others and yet it feels like it’s nowhere near enough time. It felt like the one PPV worthy match from start to finish on this card. There were one or two amazing false finishes that honestly tricked me. It didn’t take long for things to heat up and it just kept going. This match was absolutely my match of the night. On the other, well, it’s Shinsuke and we haven’t seen him recently. On one hand, a win for Seth against Shinsuke would be great for him. So I went into this conflicted about who should win. I’ve really loved the potential that Seth’s messiah character has had from the very beginning, but time and time again they just keep screwing it up by giving him never ending feuds and never presenting him as a real threat. But they still put it in the PPV and so here we are. And I’m willing to acknowledge that this match was not supposed to be anything big at all. I absolutely have no interest in this plot yet and I’m still waiting for it to build to something interesting and this match is obviously building to something. So despite the botch I still enjoyed it a lot. It’s just unfortunate that the funky ending was too big to ignore and as a result it affected the match as a whole. But even then it didn’t completely ruin the match for me. A single minute at the start to taunt each other was enough to get me invested in the rest of a match I might have been otherwise indifferent to. Slow and methodical, both men sold the emotion. Granted, it’s been sad to see the New Day broken up of course but he’s been so much fun to watch.Įxcept for the botch this was a great match. Big E’s character has really stood out by himself without the help of the New Day. Meanwhile, the Big E plot honestly has felt pretty natural, well as natural as a WWE plot can feel. The only time the match really picked up was at the end which I will note did NOT involve Nia and was the other three women. But the real issue with this match was that it was pointless, redundant, and just meant to stall before WrestleMania. The outcome of the match was extremely predictable and the wrestling itself was slow and clunky, in part due to the over reliance on Nia. It just feels like such a weird combination almost as if that team was thrown together at complete random. It doesn’t help that I still can’t get behind Nia and Shayna as a team. Belair match at WrestleMania and threw this together at the last second. It has felt like creative just doesn’t know what to do for the Banks vs. I’ve been enjoying Reginald as a character but aside from that this plot has been extremely…well thrown together. Granted they needed to break them up but they could have done it without burying Ali after the little bit of screen time he had for the evening. They have once again screwed over Ali in order to seemingly break up RETRIBUTION. However, the match was only good when it came to in-ring action, because the plot was absolutely disappointing. And as much as Matt Riddle is kind of a terrible person behind the scenes, I’ll admit that he’s great in the ring. Ali is one of my favorite wrestlers and he goes completely underutilized. Mustafa Aliįor being on the preshow this was pretty plot heavy, and also a really good wrestling match. So, with that in mind let’s jump into the actual show and see just how much it wasn’t needed this year.

It puts creative in a weird spot to build to a PPV that’s less than a month away from WrestleMania.

Fastlane 2021 match card