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Cubed Circle Newsletter – Payback 2013 In this week’s newsletter we look at the 2013 Payback pay-per-view, as well as the fallout from RAW, the rating that the show did, NXT, a decent edition of iMPACT, All Japan fallout and SmackDown. It is a smaller issue than usual, but fear not! As next week we will be back with a look at Saturday’s New Japan Dominion show, as well as ROH’s Best in the World iPPV. We also have a few big changes coming to the newsletter in the coming months, so stay tuned for that. And with all of that out of the way, I hope that you enjoy the newsletter and have a great week. - Ryan Clingman, Cubed Circle Newsletter Editor News WWE Continue Great Run with Payback The past week and a half or so has been a great period for the WWE from a quality perspective, and they continued that run this week with a their 2013 Payback show from the Allstate Arena in Chicago. Going into the show I wasn’t expecting a blow-away card, but they over delivered with some great moments in front of a crowd that has been arguably one of their most consistently great ones over the past few years. The show was expected to be somewhat of an unnoteworthy show, but the opposite was actually the case, with multiple title changing hands, and seeds for the biggest feud of the summer, Brock Lesnar versus CM Punk, being planted during a great outing between CM Punk and Chris Jericho. It is important to note that at this point the Allstate Arena has held the 2011 show of the year in the Money in the Bank show, where Punk won the title from Cena, the 2012 Extreme Rules show where Lesnar faced Cena, and now possibly the best WWE show of 2013 in Payback – suffice to say there is something special about that building. The opener kicked off the over performing night with an Intercontinental title change with Curtis Axel pinning Wade Barrett to win the title in a three-way, which also included the Miz. The 1 match itself really wasn’t all that special, although the crowd bought into it from a perfectplex spot onwards. However, the title change, together with the fact that it was father’s day really being pushed strong, they were able to create a very emotional and memorable moment with Axel celebrating his title win after the match in tears. In WWE’s attempt to outshine the Gail Kim/Taryn Terrell match from Slammiversary, they placed AJ and Kaitlyn for the Divas title in a spot to over perform, and they did, only nowhere close to the same extent as Kim and Terrell weeks ago. AJ submitted Kaitlyn after AJ’s mind games basically got the better of Kaitlyn, and while it was a fine match, I would be tentative to say that it was even highly above average, let alone great. It was even apparent from the crowd’s reaction to the finish that they had lost them at some point along the line, because to be honest they didn’t reacted anywhere near the expected degree when AJ won the title. Regardless of this match and its quality, it looks like both the WWE and TNA are putting a higher emphasis on women’s wrestling. Granted, this match was a bi-product of the Kim/Terrell match, which was in itself an apparition, but it will be something to watch going forward. In what was the worst match on the show Dean Ambrose beat Kane via countout to retain the US title following a bulldog DDT out on the floor. We had seen this match on RAW prior to this show, so we pretty much knew what was coming. However, I honestly saw no point in having Ambrose win via countout, as it was pay-per-view and Kane honestly wouldn’t have been hurt if he had lost to Ambrose here. In what was from my perspective the most surprising match of the entire show, Alberto Del Rio pinned Dolf Ziggler following a superkick to win the World Heavyweight championship. On paper that does sound like a bad idea, but basically the story that they went with had Del Rio working over the head of Ziggler following the concussion, which turned both men in the process. The match got just enough time, and because it was in front of the Chicago crowd it worked even more effectively than it would have otherwise, as this crowd was behind Ziggler from the onset. It seems like they are going with this match again as the Money in the Bank program, which I will be fine with. However, it will be interesting to see how they handle it, as having Ziggler lose a big match after this defeat wouldn’t be good and neither would defeating Del Rio. In the match that was clearly and expectedly viewed as the real mainevent of the evening by the crowd in Chicago, Punk/Jericho followed. It was just about everything that you could have asked for realistically, Punk came out to a great reaction, and the crowd was pretty much into the entire match leading up to the finish, which was a GTS from Punk sending Jericho into the turnbuckle and rebounding into a second GTS for the pin. The major ramifications from the match are going to be the Lesnar/Punk direction, with Heyman presumably being the heel manager for Lesnar. In the mainevent of RAW the next night they had Lesnar lay Punk out. Earlier in the night Punk pretty much turned babyface saying that he didn’t want Heyman as his manager for the night, even though they wanted to remain friends. Now, the logic behind this would be that Heyman called Brock after Punk dumped him, but that wouldn’t make chronological sense, as Lesnar 2 would have had to have been in the building already. There was a similar breakup video that aired on the WWE website, but they reshot the angle due the vast majority of their audience not viewing a random video on the WWE website. It is for those reasons that I think that a spot in this match where Punk reprimanded Heyman for interfering to be used as Heyman’s trigger in the end, or at least that’s what they could do to have the entire thing make sense. Regardless of how they get to the Heyman turn, chances are that the doublecross is coming, and that it is going to lead to a big match with Lesnar down the line. I assume that the match will be taking place at Summerslam, but I have heard rumblings of it taking place at the Money in the Bank show in Philadelphia, which would probably be the hottest crowd, but wouldn’t be write from a build standpoint, and from a business standpoint. Like it or not there is a glass ceiling for WWE B-shows in 2013. Unfortunately, Brock Lesnar, or anyone for that matter, is going to struggle to break that ceiling. Due to time constraints, and the way that the show was laid out, they went straight from the Punk victory to the Shield versus Orton & Bryan tag team match, which was very good for the twelve minutes that it was given. It would have been nice for the match to have gone longer,as they could have used more time to play up miscommunication between Orton and Bryan, but the match that they did was very good. Bryan did miss land topé on Orton, and the finish came when Orton basically move out of the way of a spear, leaving Bryan in its path. The other major Summerslam direction is Cena/Bryan, but because of the fact that Bryan should be in the Money and the Bank match, I expect them to end this program on RAW. In a related Bryan story, on Monday Night’s edition of RAW, Bryan suffered a stinger either following a topé where he went head first into the barricade, or when he took a dropkick from Orton. This resulted in numbness down his one arm. Orton’s response to this was quite unexpected, as he swore and then proceeded to dropkick Bryan to the floor and backdrop him on the barricade, which doesn’t seem like the wisest thing to do when you don’t know a man’s neurological state. Regardless, WWE handled the whole process very well, as they brought trainers out very quickly, and had the match stopped even though Bryan insisted that he could continue. Events backstage were blown out of proportion as Triple H and Bryan apparently had a confrontation over the call, but the fact of the matter is that they had no idea what the issue was, and it could have been something far more serious than a mere stinger. That isn’t to say that Bryan was wrong, as he was supposed to win the match, and the fact that he didn’t and had to take the loss off of a minor injury, which was probably very frustrating. However, they looked out for his best interests and this is commendable. Finally in the mainevent matchup, John Cena defeated Ryback in a three stages of hell match losing the first fall clean, and then going on to win the tables match and ambulance match. As far as the match itself goes it was pretty much all smoke and mirrors, and while it was good for what it was, it really couldn’t hold a candle to some of the other matches on the show, and it is because of that that the show didn’t feel like it ended at its strongest point.