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How much does match order matter?


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I believe it matters, but how much? Is match order simple fodder for us fans/armchair QBs to easily obsess about? Or can it make a measurable difference in taking a show from average to good, good to great, great to epic?

 

An analogy I'll use is batting orders in baseball. Fans obsess over their favorite team's batting order. Who should lead off? Who should hit cleanup? Why is this guy hitting seventh instead of fifth? It's easy fodder for talk radio and blog posts.

 

Most studies show that batting order does make a difference, but not nearly the difference most fans think it does. It definitely doesn't make enough of a difference to justify the amount of ink spilled and words spewed about the topic.

 

Will kept harping on the match order of Summer Slam during the recap podcast. I didn't disagree that the match order could have been tweaked, but I don't think it would have made that much of a difference in the show. That crowd sucked. I don't think an altered match order would have generated better crowd responses in certain situations.

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This is one of those things that are seemingly never talked about in public by people who've actually done this sort of thing. I wish there was a hell of a lot more talk in shoot interviews about exactly how one goes about booking a show, in the nitty-gritty details of why it's This Guy versus That Guy on This Spot On The Card, rather than That Guy versus That Other Guy on This Other Spot On The Card. (Maybe they do that those Kayfabe Commentary interviews where they focus on the history of one year with a guy who was there; I dunno, haven't seen 'em, but it seems like something that former bookers are generally reluctant to discuss in a nuts-and-bolts fashion.)

 

Match order is something we all love to armchair-quarterback; but even as a guy who's worked on hundreds of shows, the decision process mystifies me. Okay, in general you want your biggest money-drawing match to go on last; and you want something relatively light and accessible to go on first. Don't do similar matches back-to-back, try to vary match type/length/gimmicks/stipulations/finishes; at some point, try to make sure you put in a piss-break match or two that most people won't care much about missing if they need to go to the bathroom or buy some concessions. All that is basic Booking 101 stuff. But past that? Your guess is as good as mine, man.

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Jingus, the story you always hear old-timers tell is how they went out 2nd match and had a GREAT match only for an Eddie Graham, Bill Watts, or whoever to give them a total bollocking afterwards for "doing too much" and upstaging the main event.

 

I've heard countless guys tell that story.

 

Also I've seen so many MSG shows now that it is really really obvious that when it's Dominic Denucci vs. Baron Scicluna plodding around for the first 10 minutes it's because people are getting to their seats, and when it's a fucking shitty Samoans curfew draw in the last 20 minutes it's because people are filing out trying to get to the subway before its too late.

 

Vince Jr had a different philosophy and went with the filler matches in between peaks.

 

Crockett went with a STACKED card that built towards a semi-main followed by a main.

 

I think these things are easy to work out when you watch dozens of cards by the same bookers / promotions.

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I think there are multiple ways to do it right and some of them even conflict with each other. I think it does affect how crowds react to a match, which can affect impressions of the match even if they wrestle it the exact same way they would if the crowd was hotter. It's hard for a more "pure" wrestling match to follow a well done gimmicky brawl in almost any setting, though.

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And Jericho vs HHH... and Orton vs HHH... hey, waitaminute!

 

And it's true that it heavily depends on the type of crowd that the show tends to draw. Some smaller venues have an atmosphere which is almost more like an outdoor concert, where people spend half the time wandering around and talking amongst themselves and doing whatever while practically ignoring whatever happens in the ring. You're gonna book a show in that building completely different than you would one in, say, the Hammerstein Ballroom where you've got to constantly be throwing so much shit at the audience that they don't get bored and start chanting you out of the building.

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Just to speak for Summerslam: that crowd sure didn't suck when New Day were out there. Or Cena and Rollins. Or Brock and Taker. They cheered what they'd been made to care about on what was always presented as a two-match show.

 

The women's match seemed like the low point in crowd interest, esp. given that it was long and not that good. That certainly hurt Owens-Cesaro. But you could easily argue that people were burnt out after Cena-Rollins, and that they tuned out during the women for that reason.

 

The flaw to me wasn't match order: it's that you can't do a ten match, four hour show in which eight out of the ten matches have no build, no storyline, and no ramifications going forward.

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Jingus, the story you always hear old-timers tell is how they went out 2nd match and had a GREAT match only for an Eddie Graham, Bill Watts, or whoever to give them a total bollocking afterwards for "doing too much" and upstaging the main event.

 

I've heard countless guys tell that story.

And there is a little bit of truth to the boss's side in those examples. If you burn out the audience with super-workrate-type wrestlers doing EVERYTHING you can possibly do in a ring before the show is even half over, it's hard to keep the people engaged. Of course, in a lot of those older territories the main event was all too often something like "Abdullah beats up one of the Funks for five minutes before they go to a double countout", which is all too easy to show up with something that they can't follow.
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One of the few things WCW was good at was always seeming to have the best possible opener on every show. Usually it was a cruiserweight or Lucha match that got the crowd excited and set the tone for the rest of the event. Of course the main events would more often than not stink up the joint, but that's a different topic.

 

On the other hand, you can easily set a match up to fail as well. WWE has conditioned the fans that there will be a throw away piss break match between the two top matches so you have situations where Owens and Cesaro were led like lambs to slaughter at SummerSlam.

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I'm just saying that if there's a dark match then it changes the thinking of the function of the opener.

 

Something like Liger vs. Pillman is more a slap in the face "WELCOME TO THE SHOW IT'S GONNA BE AWESOME".

 

Something like SD Jones vs. Johnny Rodz is more like "Hey, don't worry you haven't missed anything, relax, get a soda, take your seat."

 

And very often the dark match will be doing the job of the latter.

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One of the few things WCW was good at was always seeming to have the best possible opener on every show.

 

Yep. Except that one time where they had Fit Finlay vs Chris Benoit with the winner going against Saturn later in the show for the TV title. Finlay got over, but not with the crowd, who died a horrible death immediately.

 

But yeah, of course match order matters a lot in how the show flows. SummerSlam's ordering was instance, was piss poor. Among other things, of course.

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I really like Spring Stampede '94 as the ideal, in so many ways. They were actually to pull off two crazy brawls and a "technical" main event, but the matches were different enough that it didn't matter. Maybe that's the key -- variety.

 

EDIT: Then again, Flair-Steamboat couldn't really win over the crowd as much as they usually would, so maybe that's not the ideal.

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Talked about this on the Super Extreme Vault coming out today during the Living Dangerously '99 talk. They put their two junior high flying matches early and then did a bunch of brawls in a row leading to a brawling main event. Just makes the main event feel shitty. Spread this stuff out.

 

They learn their lesson on later shows, but early ECW ppvs are hard to watch due to the match placement.

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So what show/match was it that Vince decided he needed to put a buffer match between the main events? SummerSlam 2002 had HHH/Shawn and Brock/Rock back to back, anything more recently than that?

WrestleMania X-8 a few months earlier had one as well and that seems to be the earliest case of co-main event, bathroom match, co-main event.

 

Hogan-Rock seems to be the genesis of this stuff, which kind of makes sense.

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At some point he took it a step further and decided he needed not just a buffer match but a buffer ninety minutes. I think the first time I noticed this was Wrestlemania 23 when Undertaker vs Batista went on not in the third-to-last position, but halfway down the card. It created this weird schizophrenic up-down-up-down card structure that goes (to borrow the above number analogy):

3

7

5

2

6

8

4

1

 

And I fucking hate it, because it kills any momentum a card could ever build. They put weird semi-main type matches on first (eg. Orton matches) that have no business being on first because they're not worked like an opener. They throw a "main event" out there halfway through the show which tells you immediately to not treat it as a main event, oh and it's probably going to have a shit finish too, because we couldn't end the show with this. Then they run like half the undercard AFTER this main event, where it's impossible to care about them because once you've seen one main event, it feels late in the show and you're just waiting for the (real) main event to come on.

 

A card should progress. It should build momentum, so when you get to the business end it feels like the business end.

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At some point he took it a step further and decided he needed not just a buffer match but a buffer ninety minutes.

 

Wrestlemania 8 was a little like this. Flair/Savage halfway through the card, then Sid/Hogan in the main event.

 

I agree that a card should progress, but I think it is really tough to build momentum without burning out a crowd. I guess it is easier on shows with an interval, as you can have a big match right before intermission, and then a break for people to recover before building again. PPVs are a much tougher proposition. Keeping people engaged over three or four hours isn't easy, let alone guaranteeing that they peak right at the end of that.

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So what show/match was it that Vince decided he needed to put a buffer match between the main events? SummerSlam 2002 had HHH/Shawn and Brock/Rock back to back, anything more recently than that?

It's not something they always do. In fact, statistically speaking, it's not something they usually do. Only three of the past ten Wrestlemanias put a break match before the last main event (always the Divas match, of course). And it hasn't happened at all on any PPV this year, unless you count the tag title match at Money in the Bank. The WWE tends to run at least two important matches back-to-back at the end of their big shows, more often than not.
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So what show/match was it that Vince decided he needed to put a buffer match between the main events? SummerSlam 2002 had HHH/Shawn and Brock/Rock back to back, anything more recently than that?

It's not something they always do. In fact, statistically speaking, it's not something they usually do. Only three of the past ten Wrestlemanias put a break match before the last main event (always the Divas match, of course). And it hasn't happened at all on any PPV this year, unless you count the tag title match at Money in the Bank. The WWE tends to run at least two important matches back-to-back at the end of their big shows, more often than not.

 

 

 

So what show/match was it that Vince decided he needed to put a buffer match between the main events? SummerSlam 2002 had HHH/Shawn and Brock/Rock back to back, anything more recently than that?

It's not something they always do. In fact, statistically speaking, it's not something they usually do. Only three of the past ten Wrestlemanias put a break match before the last main event (always the Divas match, of course). And it hasn't happened at all on any PPV this year, unless you count the tag title match at Money in the Bank. The WWE tends to run at least two important matches back-to-back at the end of their big shows, more often than not.

 

That is only true if you are very lose on what you mean by most important matches.

 

Only 26 and 24 actually have the last two matches being the most important. I guess if you discount the Hall of Fame as a buffer and somehow think the other title match is more important than the Taker match you could make the statement you did.

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