Match Of The Week: 01.13.07.

January 16th, 2007.
ECW On Sci-Fi.
Monty Brown vs. Cassidy Riley.

As much as this match may not have been the best overall, it was at least the best in my eyes for several reasons.

First off, most everything else within the week left something to be desired. WWE RAW was the same old predictable stuff they just can't seem to come back from since the Rosie/Trump incident.

The rest of this ECW show was pretty forgettable because it was mainly building toward Test vs. Lashley.

And even TNA did an all right job but still failed to capture the win this week because I expected a decent A.J. Styles vs. Kurt Angle match before an awesome PPV encounter. But their match was just so-so. TNA really needs to step things like this up a notch if they want to compete with WWE more.

And WWE Friday Night Smack Down! just furthered the Batista/Ken Kennedy feud. It's funny because some years ago, Brock Lesnar was a heel champion and he was defending the title at the Royal Rumble against a face Hardcore Holly. Literally no one wanted Hardcore Holly to win. Now I'm starting to feel like more people are cheering for Kennedy to win than Batista. Ugh. Anything but Batista.

While this may not have been the best match because Monty Brown got a silly name change and wasn't allowed to yell out "POUNCE!" and had to do an arm bar afterwards, well, you know... This is WWE after all. But the thing is, they also could have used someone like Shannon Moore or Stevie Richards for Brown to squash, because this just made Riley look like a flat out jobber, whereas he could otherwise have a pretty decent WWE career.

I picked this match for one reason and one main reason only though: The novelty of it.

Okay, we're all used to seeing two ex-WWE wrestlers fighting in TNA. Recently, Christian fought Kurt Angle in an Impact main event and it's going to be a title match now coming up as well. That's something that we could have seen on WWE a few years back. Fine. That's cool. But the thing is, like... ex-WWE wrestlers are always everywhere. I bet you could go to some small rinky dink show somewhere and see something like King Kong Bundy vs. Doink the Clown, which was possible as a WWE match in the 1990s.

So, honestly, having two ex-WWE stars fighting each other outside of WWE is not that uncommon. But having two ex-TNA stars fighting on WWE television? Now that's pretty cool. It'd be like seeing Samoa Joe vs. C.M Punk in an ROH style match in WWE.

And, mostly, I think the novelty of it is that it's almost like WWE saying in a way, "Hey, if we want to start having some decent television matches, let's put two former TNA stars together". It's almost like WWE admitting in a way that TNA is having better television matches than them or something. I don't know. It just seems like the world flipped upside down for this match, and for that, I loved it.