WHO'S NXT?

    It was on paper, a good idea. In practice it bombed faster than Pearl Harbour. WWE's plan to replace the much improving ECW brand with WWE NXT was a great idea. The premise: take a handful of young guys who were treading water on the independent scene and thrust them into the spotlight to see if they had what it took to be the next big thing in WWE. It couldn't go wrong, right? Wrong! Don't forget, this is WWE and everything goes wrong, even if intentions are for it to run long term.
    Everyone, including your saviour, failed to see how this could go tits up. Assigned professional mentors, the NXT rookies were guarenteed to fail. Sadly though, when Vince McMahon, Triple H or any of the McMahon family are involved, there's no such thing as a guarentee. If they'd have just let them go out and wrestle every week then the show could have been groundbreaking and put WWE back on the map. Instead, it took a nose dive into stupidity and made WWE look like it had thrown a bunch of rookies together because it wanted desperatley to can ECW and drop the tragically underated Christian back into mid card status, to make everyone think Captain Charisma was no good.
    This all stems from Vince McMahon's belief that Christian is nothing more than a lifetime mid carder and the veteran of the business could not carry a main event push. How wrong Vince is. Christian is one of the best and most solid performers in the ring. Now though, with ECW gone and nothing for him to do, he's treading water on the much improved Smackdown, when he could be flying in a main event scene that is thining out by the day. Although with the introduction of NXT, the plan was to find the next headliner - no matter how bad they were.
    For a wrestling show that was looking to find the next big thing of the business, there were an awful lot of messing about with challenges. At times, it reminded me more of the awful Diva search segments WWE ran in the middle of this last decade - solely designed to find air headed models instead of women that could actually wrestle. Though NXT wasn't all bad, because it did have one shinign light in it. Daniel Bryan! The artist formerly known as Brian Danielson.
    Coming up from Ring of Honour, Bryan was the only one who could go head to head with guys like Batista and come out looking good. In fact, he was a sure fire winner due to his wrestling talent. I'm sure you've all seen the treatment of Bryan these last few months. Degraded at every turn by the pathetic and repetative Michael Cole, who is trying to be the next Jim Ross (he never will be). Granted, Cole is just saying what's being relayed to him via his earpiece, though it doesn't stop some of the bile he says it with, coming from the heart. The truth is WWE hired Bryan to ridicule him and make people show WWE can hire anyone and do anything to them and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. Bryan was fired by WWE for choking ring announcer Justin Roberts with his tie.
    Everyone thought it was a genuine deal. Bryan returned to the independant circuit and WWE marched on, with the competent Wade Barrett winning the first season of NXT. Skipping foward, the guys from NXT ganged together to invade WWE and more importantly cost John Cena the WWE Championship and enter him into a feud that he had to carry, instead of his opponents carrying him. It's such a shame WWE doesn't follow things through in the long run.
    Cena moutned a team to fight the newly crowned Nexus at SummerSlam, in what was a poor affair. The Nexus, who are acting under orders from a mystery leader (my money's on Triple H when he returns), were embarrassed on the night they should have gone over Team WWE to cement their status as a group not to be messed with. From the night they invaded WWE to SummerSlam, the Nexus invasion was the best angle WWE had run in years, much better than the bungled WCW/ECW Invasion in 2001 which could have been so much more. Sadly, so could this. Cena and his band of merry men demolished Nexus instead of selling for them. Wade Barrett, the awful David Otunga and co, looked like rookies out there on SummerSlam night - a night which also marked the return of Daniel Bryan as the mystery Team WWE member.
    So what was the cause of Nexus failing? Two words! John Cena! I'm not going to keep harping on about the guy, we all know he can't wrestle, but if he could have just done something then Nexus would be stars by now. But the guy can't do anything. The only reason he's the top dog in WWE, is because he puts so much money in Vince McMahon's pocket, plain and simple. At SummerSlam, Cena did his usual, 'Look after himself' job and made the Nexus look like rookies. He did his usual 'Dead Sell' techinque (which is where he looks dead after a move then suddenly srpings back to life like he's superman), or he doesn't sell a beating. This had been the case, all but once, in the Nexus attacking Cena up to SummerSlam. Cena never sold a damn thing. So it should have been too much of a shock when SummerSlam rolled around and Cena did exactly the same thing. After a DDT on the outside which by right should have been the end of the match, Cena literally sprang to life and defeated the final two Nexus members in 30 seconds. Wade Barrett with the STF submisison hold, or rather the no pressure STF, because the guy lacks the common sense to pull back on the move and it look unrealistic. You would have thought that after 8 years in the sport, he would have picked up a little something, but no.
    Had Nexus been give to anyone else in the company, Randy Orton, Kane, Rey Mysterio, Sheamus, Undertaker, then they would be stars by now. Given to Cena, they're nothing more than just more wrestlers now, because of a combined lack of effort and talent by Cena and a lack of interest and talent by the booking team. Another mess up Vince, well done.
    So now WWE are trying desperately to undo the damage. The night after SummerSlam, WWE had all the members of the Nexus win their singles matches except again Cena. It was too late. There's no sense in breaking down a team one night then trying to get them over the next. You've failed Vince, yet again, you've failed to create new stars, new headline acts for the future. You've failed!

    "History never repeats itself...humans always do!"

                                                                     - Voltaire

    Happy times and places...