WhiteTail Wrestling

For a few short years during the last decade TakeOver became the name synonymous with great in ring wrestling in North America. While New Japan Pro Wrestling reached its zenith Paul Levesque the artist formerly known as Triple H was developing his reputation as a booker with what was supposed to be WWE’s developmental brand NXT. TakeOver provided exciting wrestling matches far above the quality of most matches on the WWE main roster and in short shows that rarely went longer than 2 hours. While TakeOver is no longer Levesque has now become the head of creative of WWE as a whole and the promotion has reached its greatest level of popularity since at least the Ruthless Aggression Era and some may argue since the Attitude Era.

NXT TakeOver a new type of WWE PPV that wasn’t a PPV took place live on the new WWE Network on the 29th of May 2014 live from the then home of NXT Full Sail University. The show itself is good but is nowhere near the level that TakeOver would reach in later years.

The show doesn’t begin very well. Adam Rose and his silly gimmick wins a nothing match against Camacho (aka Tanga Loa one of the worst current wrestlers in NJPW). This is followed with a tag team title match as the Ascension retain their titles against the Lucha team of El Local and Kalisto. The Ascension were pretty dominant in this basic tag team match. The best wrestler in this match Kalisto is beaten up for most of the match and then tags in El Local who wasn’t the best wrestler in the match messing up most of his moves and then eating the pin.

Thankfully the show gets better from here. Tyler Breeze defeats Sami Zayn in a ***1/2 match soured slightly by a bad finish. The match starts slow a theme that would continue in future matches on this card before picking up nicely and if this match ended at the right time I would have thought better of it. But they went slightly too long and there were a couple of minor botches before a weird finish. Zayn goes for the Helluva kick but somehow is caught low and Breeze wins with the Beauty Shot.

Charlotte not yet Flair defeats Natalya not Neidhart to win the vacant NXT Women’s Championship. Charlotte is almost not recognizable before all the future surgeries and is managed by her father Ric Flair while Natalya is managed by her uncle Bret Hart. With the Nature Boy and the Hitman at ringside you can sense that this match actually means something a rarity for WWE Women’s matches prior to this. A match of importance is what you feel when watching the action also although this match stuck with the formula started in the previous match of a slow start the action steadily built up and was very good by the end but couldn’t quite reach the level of a truly great match ***1/2. Ric and Bret come into the ring after the match and there are handshakes and hugs all around.

Its time for the main event as Adrian Neville the man that gravity and the WWE forgot defended his NXT championship against Tyson Kidd. This was a good to very good match just reaching the ***1/2 level but was not really worthy of being a main event. Slow start once again and although the match got better it didn’t feature the drama and action sequences that we would come to expect from big time matches in future TakeOver shows as well as from the best of NJPW.

So overall the first TakeOver is a good start but it lacked the truly great matches that would become a fixture of future TakeOver shows. While much better than most of the rubbish that was featuring on the WWE main roster TakeOver and NXT as a whole was still developing its identity at this stage. A good show to go back and watch but if you want to experience the best of NXT TakeOver you won’t find it in the first TakeOver.