Head To Head, One Night Stand, and Beyond

Well, a week has passed, and ECW is now officially back in operation. And it isn't even just a rebranding of OVW (which is still alive for the forseeable future) -- it's a dedicated brand extension.

It's beginning, however, wasn't particularly mindblowing. In fact I was mightily pissed off when the satellite feed went down five minutes into the 'Head to Head' special last Wednesday night and didn't come back till almost 3am, meaning that I stayed up half the night to see only half the show. And even at that it was nothing special. So my hopes weren't too high for One Night Stand.

Which was a good thing, since the show wasn't a patch on last year's card. For one, Tazz's 'match' with Jerry Lawler was a joke -- you can't introduce a man as 'the human suplex machine' and then not have him throw a suplex! In addition, the Rey Misterio/Sabu match had a bullshitty ending, despite the sick-looking table spot that led to it (it snapped at the end, not in half, so it looked like a blown spot -- good work on that one, at least). And Balls Mahoney and Masato Tanaka were only given a few minutes to do their thing, boiling down the 'extreme' quotient of the show a little too much.

But of course it wasn't all bad. The WWE vs ECW tag team match was a spot-fest beyond: Terry Funk hit the barbed wire hard and bled -- as good ol' JR says -- like a stuck pig, and I don't think Mick Foley has been that close to fire (WrestleMania XXII excepted) since the King of the Death Matches tournament in 1995.

Kurt Angle, too, was phenomenal in his match with Randy Orton, feeding off the energy of the ECW crowd and giving them a real 'wrestling' match to boot. Orton was cleary out of his league, so he wisely stuck to selling for most of the bout -- although whenever he did get the upper hand, he was obviously enjoying the venom the crowd directed his way. It's usually better to play the heel, after all.

And Rob Van Dam beating Cena for the title was what everyone wanted. Even Cena seemed to be fine with it, getting into the hostility towards his character -- he's the man we all love to hate now, and he's finally getting used to it.

The celebrations continued last night with the premiere of ECW's new weekly show on the US version of the Sci-Fi Channel. It'll be shown over here on Sky Sports this Sunday so I'll have to wait until then to pass judgement, but from the photos posted on the ECW website, it doesn't really look like ECW.

Sure, the entrance area is there, and it says ECW on the canvas. But the ringside barrier is WWE-safe, and the ringposts are SmackDown! silver, which only brings home the notion that the 'new' ECW is a B-show to the B-show.

Top that off with the fact that the ECW website is obviously a sub-site of WWE.com -- hell, it doesn't even have its own domain -- and you have a bit of a mish-mash that's going to take some time to gel into a truly unique prospect, rather than just a pool of hardcore guys to feed into the main brands for higher ratings or more pay-per-view buys.