WWE Crown Jewel 2018: Retro 3 Things We Hated And 3 Things We Loved

Welcome friends to another edition of Wrestling Inc.'s retro review, where we journey through wrestling history and shine a spotlight on some of the most noteworthy events to ever take place. As always, we will be highlighting three things that we loved and three things that we hated, and for today's selection, the word loved might need to be put in quotation marks because the show we're looking back on is WWE Crown Jewel 2018.

Younger fans who have only started watching WWE over the past few years know that the company taking a couple of trips to Saudi Arabia every year is common. The company established a 10 year partnership with the Saudi Ministry of Sport back in 2018 and since then WWE has held some of the biggest events of the year in Saudi Arabia, with the country becoming the first outside of North America to host the Royal Rumble earlier this year, and will play host to WrestleMania 43 in April 2027. The WWE shows in Saudi Arabia these days are not only canon, but extremely important to the overall WWE calendar. However, that wasn't always the case.

When the partnership between WWE and Saudi Arabia first started, the shows in places like Riyadh and Jeddah were essentially glorified house shows akin to what UK fans had with Insurrextion and Rebellion in the early 2000s. This led to the shows feeling inconsequential and meaningless because they didn't really play into the wider WWE storylines, but Crown Jewel 2018 had a different problem which is that the event happened in the wake of one of the most heinous acts in recent memory.

The execution of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi led to many people ordering for WWE to call off the event. Both democratic and republican figures agreed that the show shouldn't take place, with the republican side of things being Linda McMahon being in Donald Trump's cabinet, making the Saudi/WWE deal a grey area that they couldn't really criticize. Obviously, WWE went ahead with the event, with Stephanie McMahon calling it a business decision, while other performers defended the event by saying it was a way to promote change in Saudi Arabia, but that didn't stop big names like John Cena, Roman Reigns (who would miss the show due to his Leukemia diagnosis anyway) and Daniel Bryan all refusing to work the show.

Combine all of that controversy with the fact that the entire WWE women's roster still weren't allowed to compete in the country, and the fact that Hulk Hogan was welcomed back with open arms after the racism scandal of 2015, and you don't exactly have a show a lot of people were looking forward to. NEVERTHELESS, it is my duty to try and find some good in this abomination, so here are three things we loved and hated about WWE Crown Jewel 2018.

To prove how much of a challenge it was to find three things on this show that I could genuinely say I found somewhat enjoyable, I had to venture outside of the realm of Netflix, I had to venture to something that WWE have left in the past, I had to turn to the kick-off show match.

Kick-off shows now are two, or sometimes three, hour panel shows where nothing interesting gets said and everyone repeats themselves, but there was a time where the kick-off show was used as a way to heat up the crowd before the main show went live. For WWE Crown Jewel 2018, the match that got people in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia going was a WWE United States Championship match between Shinsuke Nakamura and Rusev.

To this day I still don't know how WWE got the Rusev Day gimmick so wrong. At the 2018 Royal Rumble you could argue that Rusev was the most over performer in the entire company, and he did it through the power of just being great in the ring and having a fun gimmick. Speaking of the 2018 Royal Rumble, we were less than year removed from Nakamura winning the annual 30 man bout and to see him relegated to the pre-show as a the WWE United States Champion is a sorry sight, plus he's saddled with the gimmick of "The Artist" who also happens to have an obsession with low blows.

Both of these guys should have really been in the WWE World Cup that also takes place on this show to give the tournament some actual international flavor, but instead we get a fairly standard TV match between the two that does try and go places. Thanks to it being the only match on the pre-show, Rusev and Nakamura are allowed to tell a bit more of a story, which is Nakamura is the heel trying to outsmart the brutishness of the babyface Rusev.

The fans are still filing into the building while this match is going down, but for those who were there from the opening bell, they actually got invested to the point where the Thrust Kick Rusev lands on a diving Nakamura gets a very audible pop from the crowd as they thought that would be the end of things. Rusev goes for The Accolade and does the traditional pulling the opponent away from the ropes to give fans hope, but Nakamura lands an "accidental" low blow while escaping the hold, allowing him to hit the Kinshasa for the win. It's not the best match on the show, but for a pre-show bout, it did what it needed to do.

One of the biggest selling points of WWE Crown Jewel 2018 was the first-ever WWE World Cup, an eight-man tournament featuring four men from "WWE Raw" and four men from "WWE SmackDown Live" to determine who could crown themselves the "Best in the World."

The competition has naturally been made fun of over the years as the eight men involved were all from the United States of America, with Rey Mysterio being the only man who had a case of representing a different country. WWE had the opportunity to have wrestlers from Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, Bulgaria, Canada, Samoa, Canada, England, and many more to make it an actual World Cup, but the USA has to reign supreme somehow and the only way to guarantee that is if every competitor is from the "Land of the Free."

Don't get me wrong, this tournament is not great. The quarter-finals and semi-finals taking place on the same show as the final make the entire pay-per-view feel about eight hours long due to the fact that you're cramming a minimum of six matches in the first two hours of the show. With that said, the matches that did happen weren't bad either. They were all short enough to not fall into the category of "a waste of time," they all served their purpose much like the Nakamura/Rusev match on the pre-show, and didn't stick around long enough for people to get sick of them.

The six tournament matches (yes I'm grouping them all together because none of them deserve their own spotlights) gave off big house show energy. Straight forward face/heel dynamics that were easy enough for the crowd to get into, with generational babyfaces Rey Mysterio and Jeff Hardy getting huge responses for their matches. Hardy's quarter-final match with The Miz even got a "This is Awesome" chant (it wasn't awesome), but Hardy did pull out the old running across the guardrail Clothesline for the love of the game.

Mysterio being beaten down by Randy Orton after their match played into the finish of Mysterio's semi-final with The Miz as Mysterio couldn't handle the pain in his ribs allowing The Miz to get the win. Seth Rollins and Dolph Ziggler got past Bobby Lashley and Kurt Angle respectively to meet in the final four, rekindling their rivalry from earlier that year in what was probably the best match of the tournament. Putting Ziggler over Rollins in the semis was certainly a choice as it set up a heel vs. heel final with The Miz, but if you know how this show plays out, we'll get to that whole thing in a little bit.

A match that was impacted by the controversy surrounding the show as AJ Styles was meant to defend the WWE Championship against Daniel Bryan at WWE Crown Jewel 2018. However, Bryan backed out of the event and opted for his title match to take place on the episode of "WWE SmackDown Live" before Crown Jewel, which gave Samoa Joe one final chance to snatch away the glory from one of his oldest rivals. Styles and Joe had feuded over the WWE Championship throughout the summer of 2018 to mixed results, mainly because the feud centered around Joe looking in the camera and shouting "WENDY!" but you know that whenever these two step in the ring, something special could potentially occur.

Truth be told, this wasn't anything exceptional, and the two men are capable of so much more (just look at their TNA work for example), but they did tell a neat little story here. Joe was carrying a light knee injury coming into the match, and because Styles wanted this whole thing with the "Samoan Submission Machine" to end, he knew exactly where to target in the early going. By targeting Joe's knees, Styles effectively takes the Muscle Buster out of Joe's arsenal and chops the big tree down to a much more manageable size, which didn't run through the whole match as Joe was able to move around freely, but it was good to see a body part being worked over in order to gain the advantage.

I know I've brought this up a lot already, but this was really the touring version of Styles vs. Joe. The type of match where the guys are allowed to play the hits of their more famous matches on the house show circuit, providing an enjoyable experience while not breaking any new ground. We've seen both guys do unimaginable things to each other over the years, both in TNA and WWE as their feud was certainly heated, so seeing Styles win with one Phenomenal Forearm was a bit of let down. Having said that, for the crowd being as quiet as they were at times, Styles and Joe put on the best in-ring match of the entire night while also putting on their worst televised singles match, which is some sort of achievement.

The funniest thing about this match is that if you turned the pay-per-view off after Styles heads to the back, you would walk away from Crown Jewel 2018 thinking that the show wasn't as bad as everyone says it is, and maybe people are giving it a hard time. But unfortunately, the show didn't here.

The WWE Championship match between AJ Styles and Samoa Joe was a foregone conclusion to a lot of people given that Daniel Bryan was meant to be "The Phenomenal One's" challenger, meaning that Joe didn't really stand much of a chance of leaving Saudi Arabia with the WWE Championship. The same can't be said for the WWE Universal Championship match though as we were guaranteed to crown a new champion as Roman Reigns vacated the title in October 2018 to battle Leukemia, leaving Brock Lesnar and Braun Strowman to fight over the vacant strap.

Due to the situation with Reigns, WWE were obviously put in a bit of a tough spot, but the way they went about this match was one of the most pointless things I've ever seen. Acting "WWE Raw" General Manager Baron Corbin decides to make life a lot easier for the "Beast Incarnate" by hitting Strowman in the back of the head with the title belt before the match begins, because that was definitely a feud people wanted to see at this time. Lesnar thinks he's got an easy win on his hands and hits an F5 but Strowman kicks out, leading to Lesnar hitting two more F5's for two more near falls. A fourth F5 sees Strowman thrown to the outside, who gets back in and gets a brief hope spot but Lesnar, who has taken his gloves off by this point, hits a fifth F5 for the win. That's it, that's the whole match.

You could have gone in so many more different directions with this match, but WWE decided that a glorified squash match of someone who was white hot at one point in time was best. This was one of the biggest wastes of a world title match I have ever seen, truly just bafflingly awful stuff here. Lesnar had soured massively in the eyes of the fans during this period, but he was still capable of having a good match here and there, just look at the match he has with Daniel Bryan two weeks after this show, that's one of the best matches of 2018, but this was just not it at all.

It was an angle that no one cared about disguised as a match that no one cared about and everyone involved came off worse than they did before entering. Strowman was never the same, Lesnar was even more hated than before, and Corbin would fall so far down the pecking order in people's minds that he had a midlife crisis on-screen the year after. But it's okay, because this show can't possibly get any worse can it?

Remember earlier when I said that the WWE World Cup wasn't actually that bad? Well the final of the tournament completely changes that because what on earth was that?

You really should have seen some sort of swerve coming when WWE decided to book a heel vs. heel final between Dolph Ziggler and The Miz, especially when the referee took about 10 years to tell Drew McIntyre to leave the ring. I don't know if he just forgot how to speak English since he was in a different country, but McIntyre just wouldn't move. Once he did, The Miz decides to rush Ziggler in the corner to start the match, but the bell doesn't ring because the referee wants an even playing field for a contest with so much on the line. The Miz thinks that's a terrible idea and throws Ziggler to the floor, but when he jumps off the apron, The Miz "blows his knee out" and is now operating on one good leg.

This is where WWE could have actually done something interesting, because The Miz was going to be turning face shortly after this match anyway, this match could have been the way to make that turn. Have The Miz valiantly fight against the odds and win the WWE World Cup, saving his job on "WWE SmackDown Live" in the process and forming the partnership with Shane McMahon that would eventually lead to them turning on each other and having a match at WrestleMania 35. I'm not saying that would have been any good, but it would have been better than what we got here.

Shane McMahon, a prize fighter in his own mind, decides that he will take The Miz's place since his "SmackDown Live" representative can't compete, and oh dear. McMahon starts sweating, throwing those little digs that he calls punches, sweating some more, making Ziggler look like an absolute amateur, continues to sweat, hits the Coast To Coast for a "This is Awesome" chant (starting to get a bit suspicious about those chants) and sweats all over Ziggler while he pins and wins the WWE World Cup. Shane McMahon is now the best wrestler in the world.

Admittedly, it is funny seeing McMahon running round with the trophy as if he has just beaten the entire field with one arm tied behind his back, but overbooking doesn't even come close to how stupid this match was. The WWE World Cup, featuring eight Americans, was won by a non-wrestler who wasn't even in the tournament to begin with. BUT IT'S FINE BECAUSE THIS SHOW CANNOT POSSIBLY GET ANY WORSE NOW CAN IT?

Good lord this is bad, like it's really bad. It's not even comically bad to where you can say that it's so bad that it comes full circle to being sort of good, and if anyone you know tries to tell you that this match isn't that bad, call the police on them because they can't be trusted.

Where to start with The Brothers of Destruction vs. D-Generation X from WWE Crown Jewel 2018? Well for what it's worth, the crowd are actually fully awake for this match, and yes you guessed it, this match got a few "This is Awesome" chants, proving that the people in attendance either had no taste or no eyesight. Are there any redeeming qualities to it? Surprisingly yes because Shawn Michaels, the man who hadn't wrestled in eight years going into it, was the MVP of the match and looked like he had only lost maybe half a step. He was still doing the kip up with ease, the Sweet Chin Music looks as clean as it did when he retired, and outside of him looking very weird with no hair, "The Heartbreak Kid" genuinely looked like he was having the time of his life.

As for the other three men involved, it was far from their best night. The Undertaker was in the midst of the longest retirement tour known to man, a tour that revolved around him wanting one more good match that just wouldn't happen until the world broke down and WWE had to make his retirement match cinematic. Kane looked like Glen Jacobs ate the actual Kane and was still bloated from how much he ate, and Triple H tore his pec about five minutes in, which relegated him down to Double H status. 

This match is a slow moving disaster that no one attempts to stop. From Triple H getting hurt, to Kane's mask and hair being punched off his head, to The Brothers of Destruction not even attempting to catch Michaels performing a Moonsault to the outside, mainly because Taker couldn't move quicker than a slug and Kane was still looking for his mask. Triple H also gets chokeslammed on the announce table while the monitors are still there, which actually looks pretty ugly, but not as ugly as the Pedigree he gives Kane to end the match.

With a combined age of 206, DX and The Brothers of Destruction put on a "disasterclass" in what not to do inside a wrestling ring. But there is a silver lining, this show would get better after the conclusion of the main event, because it ended. Never watch this show.