Kickin' It Back to 1998: Elimination Chamber Review

Randy Orton, after running afoul of an angry Mark Henry Photo Credit: WWE.com

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Highlights:

• Alberto del Rio used Big Show's placement of a metal bucket to his advantage, kicking it right into Show's head with an enzugiri before tapping him out with the cross armbreaker to retain the World Heavyweight Championship.
• The Miz was disqualified in his United States Title opportunity against Champion Antonio Cesaro when Cesaro feigned being hit in the groin on an errant knee to his inner thigh.
• Jack Swagger won the right to face the World Heavyweight Champion at WrestleMania by winning the Elimination Chamber match. He rolled up Randy Orton for the final elimination right after Orton eliminated Chris Jericho with a RKO.
• Roman Reigns speared Ryback while he was doing the Shellshocked to Seth Rollins, allowing Rollins to fall on top of Ryback and pin him in the six-man Shield/SuperFriends tag match.
• In an impromptu match, Dolph Ziggler dropped Kofi Kingston with a gordbuster across the top turnbuckle and a Zig Zag en route to a pinfall victory.
• Kaitlyn retained the Divas Championship, spearing Tamina Snuka out of a missed Superfly Splash for the win.
• In the main event, The Rock dodged a belt shot from CM Punk and laid him out with the Rock Bottom to retain the WWE Championship.

General Observations:

• Alberto del Rio came out with the inverted color palette on his gear. Gotta say, I kinda dug the medias rojas.
• del Rio whipped Big Show into the corner and followed up with a splash that Show anticipated with a kick. However, del Rio caught the leg and gave it a stunner-type move which I thought was really neat for some reason. I dunno, I like when body parts are transposed into moves destined for other targets.
• I don't care what anyone says, I will never not lose my shit when Big Show counters out of the cross armbreaker by lifting del Rio up with his afflicted arm and Backlund-plexing him with ease over his head. I don't care if you're a giant, that takes crazy strength and coordination.
• Yes, Alberto del Rio flubbed the first bucket enzugiri. No, I didn't get excited when it happened.
• That being said, Big Show, tapping out to del Rio? I don't recall that happening (it's usually a guy like John Cena), so that felt huge to me. Very huge.
• Antonio Cesaro came out for his title defense against Miz with an airbrushed jacket in the style of the old Chalk Line jackets all the "cool" kids used to wear in grade school in the early '90s. It was so ironic-fabulous, I had to wonder whether he has a hook-up or not. Looking in your direction, Zia Hiltey.
• Miz came out with his shoulder all taped up too. I always thought it cool when DDP would come out with the rib tape, but man, that was a lot of tape Miz was rocking.
• Cesaro tried to get Miz in a simple arm wringer, and Miz just batted his hand away, which I thought was really slick.
• Cesaro went into genius level shoulder targeting in this match. Miz went to the top rope to try some foolishnes, and he gt caught cleanly into the over the shoulder position for a shoulderbreaker. Cesaro then pinpointed his Goomba Stomp right on the injured bandage area. Fuck man, some guys just can't stay on the indies forever. Claudio was one of those guys.
• Haha, Cesaro even gouged at the tape.
• Cesaro caught him clean again on the outside from an apron jump, but Miz slipped off the back and ended up shoving him, leg first into the ring steps. Dueling limb work! Haha, I love it.
• Some were nonplussed at the finish being "weak," but the only bad implication I got from it is that a feud that more than likely should be over is going to continue. That being said, anything that would set Cesaro up for being a European football-style flopper is okay by me.
• Kane and Daniel Bryan, potentially hugging it out for the last time? I might have had a bit of the feels back then. Might have.
• Jack Swagger debuted new theme song that sounded like something out of the stock bed audio file for Fox News. Hey, if you're going run with a gimmick, go full tilt with it.
• Ooh, Bryan and Chris Jericho starting things off in the Chamber match? Like it!
• I will also never tire of anyone, whether Tyson Kidd or Jericho, barking at the ref to "ASK HIM!" while getting the opponent in a simple headlock.
• Jericho and Bryan ended an excellent submission tease that ended up on the outer steel platform by having Jericho catapult Bryan into the Chamber wall right in front of a pod. Which one? Kane's. Bryan then attempted a flying headbutt on Jericho early on in the match that missed. Which corner did he attempt it from? The one in front of Kane. Don't think I didn't notice that, guys.
• Swagger came into the match like a house on fire, at one point whitewashing Bryan's face into the steel mesh floor on one side. He went to the other side to work over Jericho, but he didn't count on Bryan recovering and kamikazeing him with a knee from the top. NO ONE EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION.
• Kane was the fourth man in the match, and oh look, he and Bryan worked together until Bryan rolled him up for a school boy attempt. AS a fan of Team Hell No!, I was a bit crestfallen at the development. AS a fan of Daniel Bryan, greatest troll wrestler ever, I was quietly losing my shit.
• DOOMSDAY DEVICE from Kane and Jericho on Bryan, although I never took Jericho as being Road Warrior material. Not the size. He's just too damn snarky.
• Randy Orton in the ring fifth, and after Kane got taken out, he and Jericho went and superplexed Swagger and Bryan respectively. All five men down. EVERYONE WAS DEAD except...
• MARK HENRY CARES NOT FOR YOUR AILMENTS. HE IS BENT ON DESTRUCTION. THAT'S WHAT HE DO.
• No, seriously, I didn't care that he went and eliminated my favorite wrestler and his best friend right off jump. Mark Henry was hossing shit up in the ring, because THAT'S WHAT HE DO.
• Henry tossed Orton into one of the empty pods, and that empty pod, made of LEXAN or not, crumpled under Orton's weight. MARK HENRY IS STRONGER THAN LEXAN.
• I booed out loud when Henry was eliminated, but in all seriousness, him vs. del Rio would've been okay at Mania, but him vs. Ryback is where the hossy action is. Plus, he got eliminated in the best possible manner AND he got to World's Strongest Slam everyone in the ring after he left. I was satisfied.
• Sorry Cole, I couldn't hear you over the sound of Teddy Long's suit.
• I gotta give the three guys remaining a lot of credit; they didn't do much laying around after Henry got eliminated. It was a sprint to the finish.
• RKOs out of nowhere to finish are so passe. In 2013, it's all about the Jack Swagger school boys out of nowhere.
• Even if Sheamus and John Cena as faces in peril is something WWE should be exploring a lot more, man, I thought neither one particularly was compelling as neither guy looked like he'd really done it that much before.
• Ryback though... whooo, that boy's got a mean powerbomb, he does. I don't know what Seth Rollins did to him in a past life, but the way he's beaten him both at TLC in December and during this match makes me think it was some bad juju, man.
• I don't care that Roman Reigns speared Kane through the exact same spot on the fore-barricade at TLC. I don't care at all. It still looked hella sick when he did it to Sheamus in this match.
• Also, thank God Lilian Garcia bailed out when she did, because holy shit, she almost died.
• I thought we were on our way to typical WWE smiles, farts, and rainbows good guy winning the day when Ambrose got Attitudinally Adjusted, but Reigns saved the day with his spear on Ryback that allowed Rollins to pin him. YES! Rollins gets some measure of revenge. The scoreboard now reads Skip Sheffield 238, Tyler Black 1.
• Don't think I didn't catch that subtle jab at Jack Swagger either, Dolph Ziggler.
• This scene was all I could think about watching Big E. Langston in his ring gear tonight.
• Brandon Stroud attended Elimination Chamber live, and I feared for his life when Kofi Kingston was announced as his opponent. I thought he might have suffered an aneurysm. I just hope he ended up at a reputable hospital and not in a bathtub full of ice cubes with his kidneys missing.
• Poor Kofi. After the match, Langston gave him a Big Landing, and the crowd chanted "One more time!" Didn't they use to like him?
• "Sweet T." By the end of his wrestling career, Matt Bloom is going to have more ring names than Gandalf.
• The Divas Championship match would've been better if it had more than just a WWE Backstage App thingy build to it. Imagine if there was an actual women's division in WWE. I know, it's too much.
• "Geaux Punk" sign was spotted in the crowd. Luv u, Louisiana.
• The Rock-loses-on-DQ-or-countout stip was so goddamn tacked on, but God bless CM Punk and Rocky for making it work. I don't care how great a rapport you have outside of the ring out of character; it would take a lot for me to want to agree to getting spat in my face during a match the volume and viscosity that Punk appeared to lay a loogie on Rocky there.
• I hate being "that guy," but Rocky really telegraphed Punk's springboard elbow. I still contend that Rock was underrated in his prime as a wrestler, but now, all these little things just jab out at me. I feel like one of those Rock haters back in the AOL chatrooms in 1999-2000, and that makes me feel dirty.
• Honestly, I have to wonder whether they did the two ref bumps and didn't have Brad Maddox come out as the third ref just to troll everyone expecting it to happen.

Match of the NightWorld Heavyweight Contendership Elimination Chamber: Chris Jericho vs. Daniel Bryan vs. Jack Swagger vs. Kane vs. Mark Henry vs. Randy Orton - Elimination Chambers are one of those gimmick matches that has a high probability of being good. Even if the wrestlers in it are slow, immobile, technically deficient, or just plain awful, the foreboding structure of steel and LEXAN ups the trainwreck potential to high alert. Thankfully, the least-best wrestler in this match from my estimation, Randy Orton, still has the one thing that in limited doses would make him tolerable in this setting - crazy propensity to do goofy offensive moves magnified by the preponderance of stationary points around him to throw people into.

How surprising was it that Orton's biggest weakness, his seeming unwillingness to take the big bump, was absent here as he was thrown with violent abandon by Mark Henry into one of the pods after the World's Strongest Man had just eliminated both Tag Team Champions with World's Strongest Slams and an angry hoss essence that had been missing from WWE pay-per-views for the last nine months. Even though he didn't win, Henry left the most indelible mark, making sure everyone got touched by the chip that has been on his shoulder since the middle of the last decade. It's funny, in a match where two of my three favorite wrestlers of all-time were competing, I was most pissed off when Henry was eliminated and most satisfied when he came back in and murked the three opponents who had just conspired to send him packing from the Devil's Playground. About the only thing wrong with the sequence was that neither Booker T nor Teddy Long were inducted into the Hall of Pain along with Swagger, Jericho, and Orton.

Those three, coincidentally, teamed up for what would have been the best finish of the Elimination Chamber card had it not been for Roman Reigns taking out Ryback with a spear in what may or may not have been a slight troll to one Bill Goldberg. If you're going to lampoon the incendiary hypocrisy of the Tea Party in a character, then the WWE's standard practice chickenshit heel tactics are not only applicable, they're a must. It's one thing to have Swagger and his buddy Zeb Colter hem and haw about never getting a handout before the match, but when it's paired with Swagger getting a flukish school boy roll up after Orton eliminated Jericho with the RKO, almost like he was picking bones and being in the right place at the right time, well, it's like pairing a five-star meal with the most complementary of wines.

Or maybe in Jack Swagger's case, it would be like getting the coldest can of Miller Lite to go with your Whataburger from the good one in town. Not the crappy one that has mostly teenagers working the fryers, but the good one. You know what I'm talking about.

Overall Thoughts: I think it's easy to look at the finish of the main event and condemn Elimination Chamber as a whole. It's easy to look at The Rock winning and sighing because it's not the main event we want or need, but this is the story they've telegraphed for six months now, maybe even a whole year with Cena dropping the first match they had at last year's Mania. I have my own problems, but it was more with them doing a super-overbooked finish for the second straight month. I get it that WWE brought back 1998's star for this run, but did they have to bring back 1998's booking practices with multiple ref bumps, restarts, and superfluous stipulations that only barely added to the storytelling of the match?

But for all the talk about how Punk/Rock II was a foregone conclusion, WWE did something that I don't think many, not myself at least, were expecting. They clearly gave themselves an out to make a change in what we were maybe pessimistically thinking about "Once in a Lifetime" happening twice. I don't know about you, but there was a lot of bullshit being promised in the build for Rock/Cena, straight up. Adding in Punk to the fray cuts a lot of that and actually brings in an element for the disenfranchised orphans from the Summer of Punk, a clear minority, but a large enough one that helped move t-shirts, drown out other fanbases in the arena, and one that acted as a refuge for people who wanted their hero to be a thinking man's wrestler.

So with that being said, the Chamber PPV did its job on several fronts. There was an element of surprise in the air - because really, who thought that the Shield would beat the WWE's three superheroes, clean no less? Even if they blatantly telegraphed their hand with Swagger going for del Rio with the introduction of Colter, there was still a sense of disbelief among even the most hardened and in-tuned fans that they would actually pull the trigger on him. They had del Rio tap Big Show. TAP HIM. Maybe the only really disappointing thing to come from the show was the fact that they're still going to continue the feud between The Miz and Cesaro. Even though I thought their match was the second best one of the night with a really clever DQ finish, that's one feud that I really don't need to see continue. But thus is life.

I think putting on a placeholder pay-per-view event between your two biggest shows can often lead to trap booking and uninspired wrestling, but WWE seems to get good contact on the ball each February with No Way Out/Elimination Chamber. This year was a continuation of that strong tradition with solid wrestling and even bold booking. I gotta say, I'm really getting up for WrestleMania this year, and tonight's PPV helped with that a lot.