Bang for Your Buck PPV Review: WrestleMania XXX

Cesaro wins the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal

Winner: Antonio Cesaro

Best Case Scenario: One of the above grey silhouettes is Alexander Rusev, who comes out and cuts a promo on that pedestal. Then proceeds to eliminate the entire back row of participants while Lana makes exaggerated hand motions. Cody and Goldust start kicking their legs out from each other’s legs, Kofi turns on Rey Mysterio … wow, there are a lot of possibilities in this match. That none of them include Big E. winning is kind of depressing.

That this gave us several new storylines all without making anyone look unreasonably bad — even 3MB — meant this match did everything it was supposed to. The match managed to retain a considerable amount of the excitement that the Royal Rumble generates every year without coming off as a transplanted Rumble match at WrestleMania, largely due to the fact that everyone started in the ring, but not for the reasons you may think: by having everyone start in the ring, the inherent advantages (or disadvantages) of when your number is called completely dissipate. Which lets whomeever wins feel like an actual winner who “earned” something instead of, let’s say, being a guy who won because he’s starring in a major movie this summer.

That it did  put an almost solar shine on (perhaps) the most exciting young star in the company in Cesaro, in way that almost no one saw coming and definitely didn’t anticipate in any real way means that it may end up going down as an all-time classic.  Time will tell on this, and yr correspondent may just be high on the residual awesomeness fumes from Cesaro bodyslamming the Big Show out of the ring, but this came verrrrry close to “stealing” the show.

Match +.7 |  PPV 2.0

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