I attended the TNA tapings in Manchester on Friday 31st January. Considering I haven’t watched TNA for quite some time I was extremely excited to see if the live product came across better than what I was seeing on television. I tried extremely hard to enjoy what I saw that night but I spent most of the night questioning how much longer TNA will be in business. Here are some of the worrying points I picked up on during the 4-hour mess.
We arrived early and found our seats. Only half of the Phones 4 U arena was being used and plenty of the seats were empty. I expected the arena to fill up since we had arrived early, but it never really did. Plenty of people were commenting on how full the arena was last year in comparison. How can a company go from filling half the arena, to having 500-600 seats empty this year? These kinds of number drops cannot be ignored.
What was even more interesting was how passionately the fans in attendance supported the product. They were incredible all night and created an amazing atmosphere. It’s just a shame that they are being fed subpar storylines and thrown together matches.
TNA taped two editions of IMPACT at the Phones 4 U arena. The first one featured a ladder match, a casket match and a Knockouts street fight. If anybody can justify putting that many gimmick matches into one episode then send it on a postcard. I know everyone is down on WWE at the moment but they would never give that much away on a single episode of RAW. The icing on the cake came when they advertised an Ultimate X match for their London tapings in 2015. How can you advertise such a match a year in advance? It has no meaning without buildup.
The show had a lot of downtime and featured far too much Jeremy Borash. I couldn’t understand why TNA had to take 5-10 minute breaks between every segment. I respect Borash because he is extremely good at his job, I just don’t know if it actually needs to be a job for somebody. He was basically setting the crowd to be loud for every single segment of the show by throwing free stuff away and showing z-list celebrities in the crowd for a reaction. A crowd reaction doesn’t get much more fake than that.
The worst part of the current state of TNA and their booking is that it is a total waste of some of the best professional wrestling talent in the world. We saw Davey Richards and Eddie Edwards in a throwaway match, Austin Aries relegated to a match on Xplosion against Kazarian, Samoa Joe in a squash 3 on 1 match and MVP in a nothing match against Spud for his debut.
I went to the TNA taping to enjoy myself, but I came away worrying about their future. If they continue down this road I don’t know how they can survive much longer. They are booking week to week and just trying to shock the fans with ridiculous heel turns and shortsighted gimmick matches.
Tickets for TNA’s return to the UK go on sale in a few days, I’d wait till closer the time to book your tickets…just incase.
– By Michael Owen