WWE Money in the Bank Mother's Day Live Blog

I visited my mother yesterday (my parents are hell on a 6' space, my calves are burning from all the backpedaling I kept having to do) and gave her a cool gift, so that excuses me to watch wrestling of potentially questionable quality on her special day. Let's hope for something good out of this show so that I can at least justify my not calling her to hear repeated stories about dumb things my father has done during quarantine.


Jeff Hardy vs. Cesaro

ER: So Hardy misses an entire year with an injury, they bring him back to Smackdown two months ago, spent the interim showing weekly documentaries about his rehabilitation (which hardly anyone gets, let alone several weeks of them), and then put him on the pre-show? I know that card placement matters less in no crowd era, but it's still really odd. It doesn't really matter to me, as the pre-show are almost always good, and they're worked in a way that makes them feel like good Velocity or 09-10 Superstars matches. They almost always hit the match length sweet spot and the layouts always feel so much less produced than main show matches. That feels like it shouldn't be the case, but there's too much of a sample size at this point. And this was really good! This was a much better singles match than I expected Hardy to physically be able of delivering at this point, but the longest straight time off of his career seems to have really done him good. He's moving quicker and more fluidly than he has in the past many years, but he's still taking the same level of awkward painful bumps so I'll just enjoy this while it lasts. He works quick enough here to convincingly fluster Cesaro, but you knew the best moments of this would revolve around what Cesaro does once he catches him. Cesaro catches him leaping off the ring steps and splats him ribs first over the barricade, later shoves him hard hip first into the ring apron. Hardy always seems to take damage on the least padded parts of the human body. Hardy's hard landings here were really entertaining, loved how Cesaro played off him (his big Fuerza bump over Hardy on the ropes was awesome), really liked all of this.

Big E/Kofi Kingston vs. Gran Metalik/Lince Dorado vs. The Miz/John Morrison vs. Wesley Blake/Steve Cutler

ER: This was good, but it feels like I've been seeing this exact match every week for the past several weeks. When they were running this on TV I just assumed the PPV version would have some extra gimmick or stipulation, but it was just longer. Still it was good overall, not always the tightest multiman, not always the pairings I wanted to see, but good. I really like Forgotten Sons, and I realize I'm in the minority on that. Gimmicks aren't the thing that sells me on a worker, ring work is the main thing I care about, and their ring work is more interesting than most teams in WWE. Their double teams are rock solid, neither skimp on small things (Cutler has far better stomps and kicks to the stomach than anyone else in the match), but also add in big bumps (Blake is always good for at least one big bump to the floor per match). Also, big fan of their double team hiptoss to an opponent draped over the ropes, and they're good at coming up with logical spots like that. I'm completely tired by the Miz/Morrison team at this point, and New Day isn't far behind them on people I wish were featured less. But it's cool seeing them work with the Sons and LHP. Dorado and Morrison pulled off a cool dragon rana, Metalik looked awesome with his while hair flowing around his mask (while working too fast for Kofi who looked like a stumblebum side by side), we got a big Morrison Spanish fly to the floor (while far more people than necessary awkardly stood around like goobs), and this was plenty good.

R-Truth vs. Bobby Lashley

ER: This match was nothing anyway, throwaway match as part of a feud I could not care about, so it's not much of a crime that I was distracted throughout this. Because once I noticed that the announcers ONLY refer to Bobby Lashley as "Bobby Lashley", it was all I could concentrate on. This is a promotion that has been weirdly obsessed with changing someone's name to a single word name, and yet we can't go through ANY part of the match with hearing "Lashley with the slam" or "Lashley with the pin", it ALWAYS has to be "Bobby Lashley with the pin!" Bobby Lashley, Bobby Lashley, Bobby Lashley. They could not stop saying this man's full fucking Christian name for 5 seconds. Nobody else gets this treatment. They either lose one of their names entirely, getting called - very normally - by ONLY their last name in a match because we know who this person is at this point, or have some kind of nickname that you can alternate with (Roman with the slam! The Big Dog with the spear!). But they can only and ever call this one person by their full name. Whose direction is this, any why? This can not be an accident and now we all have ONE MORE reason to hate Bobby Lashley segments.

Bayley vs. Tamina

ER: You have seen me write about this before, and as long as they keep doing it every year I will continue writing about it, but I cannot stand the 2-4 month period of every one of the last 10 years that WWE insists on telling us that Tamina matters and we need to be serious about Tamina and here's your yearly Tamina PPV match challenging for a title before we realize "well she's still Tamina so we didn't learn". There were people like Ruby Riott, Liv Morgan, and Sarah Logan, the former who was returning from a long injury, the latter two who have been quietly overdelivering on syndicated TV matches and house shows for years...but we're going for our 10th go round on Tamina, so you gals will have to back up a bit. You can tell she's really trying, but every year it's the same bad gear and the same way of cumbersomely getting into position for opponent offense. However, this was a real class Bayley performance, as her working aggressively and outpacing the larger Tamina made the match much more interesting than it should have been, and made Tamina's monster moments feel bigger because it's not just her badly dominating a match, it's her using a couple things in spurts. Bayley outsmarts her and it makes Bayley getting the tables turned into some interesting stuff. Bayley bumps big for her when she does eventually go on the rampage, including a big flying bump over the announce table. Tamina still comes off klutzy throughout, but the layout is really smart and she at least does her best within the layout. She does a clumsy missed superkick, but the spot is Bayley catching it and turning it into a kneebar, so her clumsy kick wasn't the important thing in the spot. The match felt carefully constructed to be about spots where her clumsiness was out of the way quickly because it set up something better from Bayley. Bayley's high cradle finish looked great, a legit pin that looked like anyone on the roster would have had a hard time kicking out of, and it went just the right amount of time. Post match is even good, with Tamina immediately picking up Bayley for a samoan drop after losing, but Sasha drops her with a great chop block and then throws a stiff kick to her chest in high heel boots. I'm calling this an easy best case scenario for a Tamina singles match, could not imagine a better version of this particular match.

Braun Strowman vs. Bray Wyatt

ER: I'm happy this was kept short, I just can't get into Bray Wyatt. I actually liked the Fire Fly match, but it's not enough to buy him any kind of goodwill. Still, this was kept short and that's good. Strowman took a few really cool big man bumps (great missed charge into and over the announce table, real sturdy shoulderblock getting thrown into the ring steps), and then got in the ring and got hugged for a long time so I could look at Twitter for a bit. Then Strowman finished him, and I like that.  But honestly this had the same amount of time to do something as Bayley/Tamina had, and this came nowhere close to accomplishing what they did.

Drew McIntyre vs. Seth Rollins

ER: Didn't feel like this one, but I'm sure Rollins talked about his destiny several times and had a Seth Rollins match, which I'm sure are for somebody. I feel bad for McIntyre that this is how his title reign is going, but I wish him the best. I saw the finish of Seth Rolling hitting a superkick by being bounced into the ropes by a nice headbutt, and the superkick causing McIntyre to bounce into the ropes and hit the Claymore kick. Claymore kick looked good, but guys hitting moves because they got hit by moves is the dumbest most played out shit at this point.

Money in the Bank

ER: Oh my god they're doing the Money in the Bank matches CONCURRENTLY!? This has potential to be a tremendous trainwreck, one of those ideas like World War 3 that you can't focus on anything. But World War 3 could have had great potential as a recorded match, as the worst thing about it was knowing there was probably something cool happening somewhere in those 3 rings, and you were likely missing it. Filming one of those and showing the finished product with the best moments chosen from the camera angles would have been a way more successful version of that match. The whole thing has this fake Michael Kamen score that makes it feel like a bunch of backyarders made a movie combining Die Hard and Rat Race. The comedy doesn't work anywhere near as consistently as in Rat Race, but there were tons of great moments and a fantastic lead performance from Otis. The cameo jokes were almost all poorly written (Stephanie plays comedy too smarmy and broad, Brother Love stuff felt forced and pointless, Johnny Ace at least at a pie to the face well), but I smiled a lot and laughed a few times. Otis is the guy who really went for it, and really it shouldn't be much of a surprise that he thrived here. He's someone who can do Looney Tunes spot well, and was constantly saying funny stuff like in the weight room before the match started where he was just saying "sets and reps, sets and reps". It was funny hearing Carmella's sneakers breaking silence with different sounds, milking a squeaky waxed lobby floor for laughs and then doing the same by doing an overly long moonwalk on office carpet. Otis absolutely plastered Heyman with a dish in catering, and Heyman mugged while covered in sticky rice. Otis and Nia smash Rey between their bodies, Dana Brooke slips on a wet floor and is never seen again, Shayna weirdly feels like the least featured person in the match, and things get decidedly less fun once they get out on the roof. The roof stuff was fairly uninspired, other than two casual murders that never get mentioned again. I'm happy with the two winners, as I wouldn't have had money on Asuka or Otis, but think that those two have been two of the best performers of the silent era. I like when matches seem to reward performance.


This show went by quickly (though there was some small help from the fast forward during the Rollins match) and had no high end matches, but had some nice performances, some over-deliveries, slightly better than expected overall.