Quote:
Originally Posted by [Phill]
I literally dont see how Punk vs Cena got that quarter star more than Dragon vs McGuinness in Unified as just the easiest example for me to draw. Again the Unified match was clearly better than MITB but it also had a hot crowd, sure you can make the argument it wasnt as hot as MITB had but i personally think the match there was as good as Joe vs Punk that got 5 stars and the crowd was equal imo*.
http://pwalmanac.blogspot.com/2011/0...and-above.html
*opinion is opinion, subjective is subjective etc ldo.
Of course the take away is its clear that Punk vs Cena isnt a 5 star match and its clear that having a single measure of quality out of 20 isnt wide enough in scope.
I don't disagree with a ton of what you say. I'd say that having a really hot 1,700 seat crowd (Unified) isn't nearly as good as having a really hot 14,815 seat crowd (MITB), and that in turn is not nearly as good as a really hot 67,678 seat crowd (WM6).
A really hot 1,700 seat crowd is nice, and it's better clearly than having 1,700 really hot fans in a crowd of 14,000 (and 12,300 idiots who interrupt their silence every few minutes to yell "what?"), but in the same way that you can't overlook less than perfect ringwork from Hogan/Warrior (I'd also argue that
expectation matters some here, which isn't entirely fair to the better technical guys -- but it's true in the same sense that if Kofi Kingston suddenly cut a really stellar promo, it would be "better" than Punk doing the same thing), we also can't overlook the other things that don't quite measure up on those "better" technical matches.
I'd argue that Cena/Punk hits most of the sweet spots on this, which makes it somewhat superior -- it was not only a very very good wrestling match, but a better wrestling match than expected, and everything about the match was just right. Hogan/Warrior was not as good a technical match as that, obviously, but it was farther above expectations (because lol Hogan and lol Warrior), and everything else was just as good, albeit in a different way, than Cena/Punk.
Part of the problem, unfair as it may be, for Unified (and for all these other really great technical matches that are being pulled out of the woodwork) is that unless you're already a ridiculous connoisseur of tinier promotions or Japanese wrestling or whatever, some of the "atmosphere" attendant to the match (expectations, storylines, etc) just gets lost in translation. That's not entirely "right" from an objective perspective, but it's just that