Bang For Your Buck PPV Review: The 2014 Tables, Ladders, Chairs (and Stairs) WWE PPV

Ladder Match for Intercontinental Title

Luke Harper (c) vs. Dolph Ziggler

Best Case Scenario: The Match of the Night, and an early frontrunner for match of the year (in this scenario, the Slammys are the line of demarcation between years) with Harper retaining through some next-level shenanigans and/or world-class chicanery that allow Ziggler to move forward in a positive direction and Harper to build momentum and value into his title reign.

What Will Happen: Only hindered in its show-stealing capabilities by the expectations going in, a brilliant performance by both men ends with Ziggler loses in a way that anyone with half a brain will be able to see as relatively positive moving forward, and those who make their living complaining on the internet will see as a “burial” without an even cursory understanding of what that means.

There was literally only one thing wrong with this match: it should not have gone on first. As the venerable Raymond M Wolfhouse (nee Ramon Villalobos) put it, real repercussions happen if a show’s order is out of whack:

https://twitter.com/RamonVillalobos/status/544312523315347457

Ignoring for a second that outside of perhaps Dean Ambrose and (MAYBE Roman Reigns) there is no hotter performer on the roster, or that Dolph Ziggler’s motto is “FOLLOW THAT”, the fact that this match took place in Ziggler’s hometown of (oh-mi-oh-oh-my-oh-oh-)Cleveland (-Ohio)  was reason enough to put this much closer to the end of the show. Even if putting a buffer between this match and the TLC match that ended the night was a necessity for the WWE, requiring the entire roster to follow a massive victory for the local boy — who also went to college in the area —  is a really great way to get a really bad (meaning tired/deflated) crowd. And that’s precisely what they got for the next three hours.
O

utside of that bit, however, this was everything you could possibly want from either man, and may have been Dolph Ziggler’s best WWE match so far. That’s not to say that it’s his best wrestling match while employed by the WWE — that would likely be any number of 2-out-of-3 falls matches throughout his career against people like Cesaro and Daniel Bryan — but his best performance in the type of match that makes someone a major star in the company.
That’s also not to say that this was “Shawn Michaels wrestling a ladder”, either. Luke Harper showed why they felt comfortable putting the Intercontinental Title on him, and his performance showed why he may end up being one of the more unlikely/unorthodox main eventers in the history of the WWE if he continues down the path he’s on. A more mobile and gifted version of first-run Undertaker, there seems to be very little Luke Harper can’t do, and even less he’s unwilling to do.

The announce team was surprisingly good during this match (and most of the night, outside of Jerry Lawler being a misogynist, of course) and really sold the performance of both men without making it seem like they were overhyping it. And while it’s not exactly material to whether or not the match was “good”, given the way that the announcers sold the victory afterwards, my fears of Ziggler being booked into a corner by the IC title win were also assuaged.

With this match and last month’s brilliant performance at the Survivor Series, it appears Ziggler has finally become something resembling, as JBL of all people put it, “the Guy” (or at least one of The Guys) that the WWE will build around for the foreseeable future. That he got there with someone else who may find themselves on that list sooner rather than later just seems like icing on the cake.
Match +1.0 | PPV 1.3

Join the Kayfabemetrics Institute on Patreon!