Opinion: The biggest winners and losers of Extreme Rules 2019
Extreme Rules was, for the most part, a very good answer to All Elite Wrestling's Fight for the Fallen pay per view. The difference in production value was obvious, and most of the matches did what they needed to do, in contrast to most of All Elite's, which dragged on for longer than they should have. In many ways, it was WWE's most consistent show of 2019.
But then WWE did what it does best and dropped the ball with a "swerve" nobody wanted to see. It just handed its competition a talking point ahead of the coming fall television deal.
Unfortunately, this pay per view is going to be remembered for having one of the worst endings of all time. We'll get into that later.
Aside from WWE itself, who got the most and least out of this show?
Winner: Shinsuke Nakamura
Sucks for Finn Balor. He was a total afterthought during his Intercontinental Championship reign thanks to the noxious "wild card" rule, but Shinsuke Nakamura arguably gained even more than Finn Balor lost.
Invisible for months, even more so than Balor, Shinsuke Nakamura was fast on the road to nowhere in WWE, having been in a 50/50 feud with Rusev over the United States Championship before teaming with him in a jumbled together tag team and then disappearing entirely.
This is a dramatic rise back to relevance of some kind. Perhaps it's his reward for signing a new contract with the company.
Just how relevant Shinsuke Nakamura will be as Intercontinental Champion remains to be seen. Balor's reign took a backseat to "wild card" idiocy and we all remember Nakamura's reign last summer as United States Champion.
Still, compared to anything he was doing, this was a dramatic turnaround in fortune.