10 Questions from NXT Takeover: Chicago that most need answering
NXT Takeover Chicago did everything it needed to do, and more. This was a magnificent display of professional wrestling at its best, which at times brought our minds back to the glory days of late ‘90s WWE. We also witnessed a very bold show, experimenting with an unconventional card structure and a more than unexpected main event.
If I were getting ready to compete at Backlash tonight, I'd certainly be mindful of the shadow that Takeover is hovering over me. Just how good was this show? Here are 10 questions that might help us decide:
#1 Should that opener have been a gauntlet match?
The match involving Roderick Strong and Sanity was probably the right choice for an opener. The programme between these guys had been thrown together relatively late on after Strong failed to become the Number One Contender for the NXT Championship, and all of the other matches had titles at stake. This was a very solid opener that got the crowd enthused, but not to the point of exhaustion, which is exactly what you should be looking for in a curtain jerker.
While watching the match unfold, however, one thing came to mind quite early on. As far as I knew, this was being billed as Roderick Strong Vs. Sanity. In fact, we mostly ended up with a one on one match between Strong and Eric Young. As a result, this felt more like a conclusion to the feud as opposed to the beginning of it. If the point of this feud is for Sanity to use the numbers game to make Strong’s life, hell, why did they only have Young work the match, and why did Strong end up getting the win?
One thing the WWE could have done here was put Strong in a gauntlet match, where one individual faces all of his opponents one at a time. Strong running the gauntlet would have worked on several different levels. Firstly, they would have been able to showcase the other Sanity members rather than just the veteran Eric Young. Secondly, you would have drawn some real sympathetic babyface reactions for Roderick Strong in the process. The fans were obviously behind Strong here anyway, but it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't have been even more vocal if the odds were stacked against him.
Perhaps the main reason why this should have been a gauntlet match was that it would have given NXT an excuse for Sanity to get the win. If there’s one thing WWE can learn from their experiences with the Wyatt Family, it's that dangerous, psychotic gimmicks don’t work as well if the guys keep on losing important matches. Having Strong win the first two matches, and then narrowly lose to Young at the end would have ticked all boxes. Instead, we got a pretty decent opener that could have done more.