Wrestling Republic Weekly – July 27th, 2017

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Welcome to the Wrestling Republic Weekly! The best free weekly source covering all pro wrestling news, insides, reports and rumours from around the globe! Enjoy it!

This week has been such an up and down week in pro wrestling. We have seen arguably the best G1 Tournament in history in NJPW yet one of the worst WWE PPV’s in memorable history.

The latest SDLive exclusive PPV Battleground has received a ton of negative criticism, which is hardly surprising. The tag team match which opened up the show was undoubtedly the best match of the night where The New Day won the titles off The Usos. Nakamura and Corbin had a dreadful match where Nakamura won by DQ, the ending was most likely because at the time the plan was to have a rematch at Summerslam before a change of plan the next day which was why Nakamura won cleanly on SDLive. Styles vs Owens, which was one of the most hyped matches of the night, was fairly good until the ending. The match ended a lot quicker than people expected and the ending was very weird and looked unplanned. Many people expected this to be a botch because the referee was counting very slowly but no way would a veteran like Styles forget to lift his shoulder up! The truth is that for some reason the result was changed during the match, the referee would have been told so at some point he made the signal to Styles and Owens and AJ was furious about the entire thing so he just didn’t kick out of a crappy role up to show this. The reason why the referee counted slowly was because he didn’t know when the match was going to end and didn’t expect it to be at that spot. The main event which was a Punjabi prison match between Jinder Mahal vs Randy Orton received an unbelievable amount of criticism however except for the ending I didn’t mind it. The match in my opinion was a good heel vs face match and it really helps Jinder’s gimmick of always having a plan look strong however in my opinion the match would have actually look the Punjabi Prison look good again if Khali didn’t return and Orton just climbed out of the cage. PPV rating 4/10

This week’s Raw was a very good episode which announced that Lesnar will defend his title at Summerslam between Roman Reigns, Samoa Joe and Braun Strowman. The original plan for Summerslam in April was for Lesnar to face Braun in a rematch from Great Balls Of Fire but because of the drop in the views and Braun’s injury last month the plan was changed to be Reigns vs Lesnar and for Reigns to win the title however because of the increase in views they decided to have a fatal four way. Lesnar was reportedly going to retain his title however because of the breaking news that Lesnar and Jones want a UFC match together which at the earliest will be in late December but most likely in January meaning Lesnar would miss November, December and maybe even the whole on January means he is now expected to lose his title at Summerslam. The Wrestlemania plan is now to have the universal champion Reigns face Cena however this doesn’t mean Reigns HAS to win the title as long as he wins it before the Rumble.

SDLive’s show this week was a great show which it needed to be after the terrible PPV. Jericho’s return was a huge shock which was kept very secret and the triple threat main event was great, in fact it was better than any match on at the PPV. Styles won the US title back and there is reportedly two reasons for this. The first reason is that Styles was apparently very upset about the match and how he was told he was losing during the match and WWE really didn’t want one of their top stars getting upset. The second rumoured reason is that there was a change of plan because they had originally planned Owens vs Styles vs Jericho for Summerslam but now they are planning Styles vs Nakamura for the yet again and Owens vs Jericho again.

This is the reported current Summerslam match card. I do firstly want to point out though that plans do change as you can see from all the late changes in WWE the last week

Raw Summerslam Card:

Anderson and Gallows vs Hardy’s vs The Revival

Sheamus and Cesaro vs Rollins and Ambrose (Raw Tag)

Balor vs Wyatt

The Miz vs Jason Jordan (IC Title)

Bliss vs Bayley (Sasha Banks may be added) (Raw Women’s)

Lesnar vs Reigns vs Joe vs Braun (Universal Championship)

SDLive Summerslam Card:

The New Day vs The Usos (SDLive tag)

Owens vs Jericho

Naomi vs Natalya (SDLive Women’s)

Styles vs Nakamura (US Title)

Orton vs Corbin (Or Khali)

Jinder Mahal vs John Cena (WWE Championship)

Over the last few weeks the Raw and SDLive ratings have gone back up to where they normally are after the huge recent drop in ratings over the last few months with SDLive having 2.5 million viewers and Raw having 3 million. This is what we all predicted would happen however this will be a huge sigh of relief for WWE who were for sure worried about the entire situation.

New Japan Pro Wrestling’s yearly G1 Tournament has been arguably the best one ever so far. We have seen an amazing match every night so far and in any other year these matches would be MOTY worthy however with NJPW having an absolutely amazing year so far. The best matches so far in my opinion have been Naito vs Ibushi, Elgin vs Okada and my personal favourite Omega vs Suzuki which was every bit as good, or even better than Styles vs Suzuki a few years ago which I believe was match of the year. To watch the G1 go to NJPW World and signup, the service is like the WWE Network and costs about $9 (£7.50) per month.

Since the WWE Championship tournament earlier this year WWE have been planning a weekly UK Show. However this week Pete Dunne said he is open for bookings in September and October meaning the UK Show will not be until November at the earliest! The truth behind all of this is that WWE are unbelievably worried about the return of World Of Sport Wrestling in the UK that will be on the nations most watched channel ITV and is expected to be on a Saturday on Sunday night TV slot! This will mean it for sure should have a lot higher ratings than GFW Impact has worldwide (Yes I know GFW are in association with WOS Wrestling but I was just using it as a comparison). It is also worth noting that WOS Wrestling when it was around 30 years ago was actually bigger and more well known in the UK than WWE and WWE are very worried this would happen again! That is why WWE did this entire tournament to get all the top UK young Indy stars under contract first and that is also why they signed Jim Ross again because Ross was originally meant to call WOS Wrestling. So you can rely that WWE are going to announce the UK Show to take place the same time as the 10 episode WOS series which is expected to be on TV between November and January, yet it is also worth pointing out that the entire season has already been taped. To be honest I didn’t think WOS Wrestling could compete with WWE in the UK these days anyway but after the actions WWE have taken I don’t even think WOS Wrestling will last two seasons before going bankrupt again!

Johnny Mundo (John Morrison) is now reportedly in talks with GFW and WWE again now after his Lucha Underground contract is expiring the same time as Rey’s this month and after the recent issues between his girlfriend Taya and AAA after Vampiro stripped Taya of her AAA women’s title without telling her and in fact Vampiro telling Johnny three titles to come to his photoshoot with Taya’s title to make the photoshoot better! Johnny must have just thought they wanted to photograph the women’s championship for some reason. Anyway they just took the title when Mundo brought it which obviously meant everyone was annoyed and a whole argument between Mundo and Vampiro happened on twitter however Vampiro has since apologised and said he addressed the entire situation the wrong way.

Lucha Underground which is set to lose Ricochet, Mysterio and Mundo in September is reportedly not going to have a fourth season. Nothing has been announced yet and people are saying different things but the views keep on dropping weekly and it really doesn’t look good for the company right now.

Total Bella’s is returning to E! on the 6th of September and Total Divas will start as soon as Total Bella’s finishes.

According to Dave Meltzer, Brie Bella is expected to return to wrestling in 2018 and she and Bryan are discussing getting a ring for their garden. This also yet again hints that Daniel Bryan could return to wrestling once his contract with the company expires.

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