5 Botches, slip ups, and outrageous moments from WWE SmackDown (December 27th, 2016)
The final SmackDown of the year is in the books, and if you missed it, shame on you. There were three title matches announced ahead of time, plus the return of John Cena, making the entire two hours feel like it was one of the better-produced shows of the year.
If you missed out on the main event, go watch it. If you did watch the main event then you know that it’s probably not a bad idea to put that contest on a “watch again” list. It was an exceptional TV match.
Even with all my praise for the show, it still had it’s botchy and outrageous moments. Baron Corbin failed to break up a pinfall that almost cost AJ Styles his title, Becky Lynch struggled to lock on an arm-based submission manoeuvre, and Alexa Bliss gave us a cringing visual of an arm that clearly looked broken in the moment.
I don’t care if Alexa’s arm is actually okay, she should still probably get that thing X-rayed.
We’ll talk more about Bliss’ elbow later in the article but kicking things off this time around, is the possibly intentional top rope slip up from Heath Slater...
#5 Alexa’s not broken elbow
Now that we have the benefit of hindsight, it’s obvious that Alexa Bliss has a double-jointed elbow that allows her to appear like she’s hyperextended. That wasn’t common knowledge before this match, so in the moment this looked like a fairly gruesome injury.
This was simply a ruse to distract the referee, allowing whichever woman was portraying La Luchadora this week to interfere and harm Becky Lynch. Bliss retained her SmackDown Women’s champion thanks to all of these happenings, then narrowed down the masked wrestler to someone between the sizes of Sasha Banks and Nia Jax.
Alexa isn’t very good at giving clues.