• Potential Spoiler For John Cena vs. Dominik Mysterio At Survivor Series Tonight
John Cena is hours away from stepping into what will be the final PPV/PLE match of his legendary career, as he walks into Survivor Series: WarGames for his first-ever Intercontinental Championship defense. The event takes place at Petco Park in San Diego, California, where Cena will defend the gold against “Dirty” Dominik Mysterio in the latter’s hometown in front of 41,000+ fans.
According to Bryan Alvarez of the Wrestling Observer, John Cena is slated to retain the Intercontinental Championship tonight, marking back-to-back victories over Dominik Mysterio.
This outcome would keep The GOAT’s historic first Intercontinental Title reign alive just a bit longer and will likely lead to him defending it against the winner of The Last Time Is Now Tournament at Saturday Night’s Main Event in two weeks, which will be his final match.
• Aleister Black Says WWE Made The Right Call With New PLE Format
WWE Premium Live Events used to regularly feature 7 or 8 matches under Vince McMahon’s creative direction. But since Triple H took over as Chief Content Officer, the company has shifted to a tighter format, typically 5 matches per PLE.
According to WWE SmackDown’s Aleister Black, that change is necessary. Speaking with WrestleRant, he explained why shorter match cards make for a better show.
“I think having less matches on PLEs – especially because they’re a lot more frequent – makes a lot more sense. Even back when I worked in Japan a lot, that was kind of like the given. Five, six matches a night because it keeps everything a lot more special.
The second you go above – in my personal opinion – the level of seven or eight matches, you’re going to wear out the crowd a lot. And we live in an age where attention spans are very limited. Everything is a lot of gratification, so the longer you let something go for the sake of having people on the card, that might be at the detriment of the product or the perceived experience by fans.”
While acknowledging that some fans enjoy longer events, Black stressed that oversized cards ultimately hurt the overall show.
“I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing because there will always be people that are absolutely enjoying it from start to finish. But, I think that I can say that having match cards that are excessively big will eventually work in the detriment of the experience itself.
I think that WWE made the right call with limiting the matches a little bit because it just makes it easier to digest. Gives you more time to divide your attention on the things that you want to pay attention to in terms of storytelling and match quality.”
