SMACKDOWN HITS & MISSES 6/13: Jinder’s promo, neurotic Sami Zayn, Charlotte-Natalya, MITB six-man tag

SMACKDOWN HITS

Charlotte vs. Natalya: This is a Minor Hit for a fairly good match that wasn’t long enough to amount to much. I did like what we saw from Charlotte Flair and Natalya, and I sort of like the idea of showing the matches in the corner of the screen during the commercial break. However, I don’t understand why they do it for some matches, but not for others. I don’t think they have ever done it for a main event (they certainly didn’t for this week’s main event), which sends the signal that the main event isn’t important enough to do what you did earlier in the show for a rather meaningless match. But, on an otherwise very forgettable show where the majority of the segments were just “thumbs in the middle” where little stood out as a Hit or a Miss, at least this match was pretty good.

SMACKDOWN MISSES

Neurotic Sami Zayn: I’m sort of reminded of when WWE did everything in their power to undermine Daniel Bryan’s popularity by having him act weird and constantly pointing out that he looks like a goat and that he’s a vegan and that he’s a B+ player. Now they are giving Sami Zayn this neurotic annoying character which makes me think that they don’t want him to get over with the crowd. The difference is that Bryan had been around a lot longer and gotten over with a lot of the audience in a big way so that the fans saw through the bull that WWE was doing with him and continued to support him to the point where WWE had no choice but to give him the WWE Title. Zayn hasn’t been around nearly as long and isn’t nearly as over at a time when he’s being saddled with this terrible gimmick.

Mahal: I continue to not be sold on Jinder Mahal as the WWE Champion. I don’t see how the performer deserves to be in this spot. These bland boring promos with a bland boring anti-USA character don’t do anything to convince me otherwise. I am not looking forward to the involvement of Randy Orton’s family which Mahal strongly hinted at here. The RKO out of nowhere is fun, but I don’t believe Orton will win and I’m not even that high on Orton winning the Title again, so I don’t really care about this at all.

Main Event: This six man tag match went 16 minutes and did feature good wrestling action. However, Shinsuke Nakamura did the most selling in the match. He was forgettable here, not getting any offense in at all. WWE has managed to normalize Nakamura in a very short amount of time. I think they were working backwards where they wanted him to end up with the briefcase in the end, and based on 50-50 booking, he couldn’t look strong during the match itself, if he was going to look strong afterwards. That’s a stupid policy. And I’m not a big fan of having the wrestlers who will be trying to destroy each other with ladders on Sunday teaming up together on Tuesday. That doesn’t get me excited for Money in the Bank. I liked the ending where Zayn tried to get a hot tag, only to have Kevin Owens and Dolph Ziggler pull Nakamura and AJ Styles off the ring apron, only to have Zayn then avoid Corbin in the corner and hit the Helluva Kick for the win. But, while I did like that, it also felt over choreographed. The fact that Corbin lost here says to me that my suspicion that Corbin wins on Sunday is probably accurate.

NOW CHECK OUT LAST WEEK’S COLUMN: WWE SMACKDOWN HITS & MISSES 6/6: One of Worst Segments in Recent Memory, Nakamura vs. Owens, Fashion Files, Jinder Mahal

Jon Mezzera is PWTorch.com’s WWE Hits & Misses Specialist, providing his point of view for Raw and Smackdown each week. Email him at jmezz_torch@yahoo.com. Act now and become my 68th Twitter follower@JonMezzera (pretty clever handle right?). Just be aware that I don’t live tweet Raw, I don’t tweet much about wrestling, and I don’t tweet much at all.