Hear me out: I really, really enjoyed the mixed tag team match tonight, including the inter-gender action between the teams, but the pacing of this match was pretty awful, in my opinion. I thought Wrestlepalooza overall was a pretty inoffensive, solid show (opening match included, only because that was exactly what I expected to happen and had braced myself), so I don’t have too much to complain about, outside of how this otherwise awesome bout was terribly paced.

While I understand keeping AJ Lee out of the match for awhile to build to the crescendo where CM Punk got the hot tag for her to go face-to-face with Becky Lynch, I thought that part of the match took forever to get to. While I liked Lynch initially tagging herself in, then running around the ring like a chickens*** heel, it took too long to get to the point where Lee was in the match. I noticed the crowd didn’t seem to be chanting for her too much, until the pop when Punk actually tagged her in, of course.

After she did get tagged into the match, it was interesting that the referee no longer seemed to care who was legal. That was all well and good and made for an interesting match, but it was definitely something that stuck out as weird to me. It wouldn’t have been that noticeable until at one point, Punk had Rollins covered, then Lee immediately covered Lynch (or whichever way it went), and the ref counted both of those as attempted pins.

After Lee got into the action and everything broke down when it came to rules, the match also seemed to go on for too long. I thought the action could have been condensed a little bit, again, with me liking the entire match still in mind, and it would have been a little more effective. I thought it could have been tightened up a lot. The end also irked me just a little bit. Lynch sent Lee crashing through the announce desk along with both of the men and got her back into the ring to hit her with a Manhandle Slam to put her down, but Lee still had enough energy after crashing through the table, despite not experiencing something like that for 10 years, and easily countered into the Black Widow.

It was effective for Lynch to tap out, and now Lee has a good claim to challenge for the Women’s Intercontinental Championship, but it was still something I didn’t particularly like. If the match had been condensed just slightly, it could have been paced better for the end to make a bit more sense. This was a great match overall, but on a premium live event I didn’t find much fault with, a few things just stood out that could have easily been improved upon.

Written by Daisy Ruth