WWE Great American Bash 2008

The Great American Bash usually wins the award for worst PPV of the year, the card is normally terrible, the matches equally as bad and no good storyline developments. This got me to the point where I started to think if this was done deliberately by Vince to bury a PPV concept originally created by WCW for his own amusement. However on Sunday night I witnessed in my opinion the best minor PPV of the year so far.

Good Points

Freshening up

Was good to see the bottom end of the card getting a shake up with Hawkins and Ryder winning the tag title and Shelton Benjamin winning the US Title. This frees up Matt Hardy to go after the ECW title and gives Ryder and Hawkins the chance to establish themselves. The tag match was also very well put together.

Good Matches

With a few exceptions those being the ECW title match and the Divas title match there wasn’t a bad match on the card and luckily the two matches that weren’t up to scratch were kept short. Jericho vs. Shawn Michaels was another great match in the series between these two and kept their feud going.

We Make Movies

In the documentary Beyond the Mat Vince said that about the WWE ‘That they make movies’ which was true of the Cena vs. JBL match. Yes it was preposterous that Cena could get run down on Raw and not have a scratch on him and then participate in a match which saw cars getting set on fire, vehicles smashed and so on but it was great fun. Like every action film needs a good chase scene or a good fight scene I think there is a place for matches like the Parking Lot Brawl on a PPV.

Feuds continue to SummerSlam

I expected nothing else than HHH to keep his title but they managed to do it in a way that kept Edge strong which was important for SummerSlam then we had the double dq finish for the CM Punk / Batista match to keep that going. With one month to go to SummerSlam the Bash should be about building and developing feuds for SummerSlam.

Bad Points

Needed better build

WWE need to just be careful of how they build storylines for the PPV’s with the most exciting developments happening on the episodes of Raw and Smackdown directly before the PPV was a mistake. If fans had missed one week they would have missed some pretty pivotal developments. The big things should happen as early as possible as you want to start the build for a PPV on the first Raw after the last PPV.

Overall

A great PPV after some of the shockers of the last twelve months this restored my faith in the WWE.