A Josh from Chicago
I attended this show live and it was one of the more memorable, for good and annoying reasons, shows I’ve been to.
Just to set the table a little bit here. When my friends and I attempted to get Wrestlemania travel packages they were all sold out almost instantly. So we were hemming and hawing about how we were going to do things after that fell through. We eventually decided to just get Wrestlemania tickets and figure everything else out afterwards. So, of course, by that time, tickets to Takeover were all gone. My two friends I was going with really wanted to go to Takeover but they didn’t want to spend what it was going to take on the secondary marker. But I knew that if I was in Dallas for Nakamura’s WWE debut and I didn’t go I was going to regret it. So I went to stubhub and ended up paying upwards of 400 US dollars for a ticket that had a face value of something like $25-30 and attended the show solo.
The opening tag team match is solid. I don’t think it’s on the level of some of the stuff we’d see later on in the NXT tag division, but it’s a good hot opener.
Austin Aeries vs Baron Corbin is fine. It’s got Baron Corbin so that’s all you really need to say.
But come on, this show is all about one match. The crowd for Nakamura vs Zayn is one of the more electric I’ve ever been in. You could just feel the electricity in the building as Sami made his entrance and we were waiting for Nakamura to come out. When the lights went down and he showed up the crowd absolutely went wild. And then the match lived up to my expectations and then some. It’s just 20 minutes of exciting hard hitting action and it’s one of my favorite matches I’ve ever seen in person.
But the real thing I want to say about this match, and the reason I was excited to hear you guys were doing this show, was the guy sitting next to me. I noticed him as the show was starting and I kept paying attention to him pretty much through the entire show. The whole show, no matter what happened, this dude sat there stone faced and arms crossed. Nothing on earth could get a reaction out of this guy. But the kicker with this dude was, right when Nakamura vs Zayn was getting going, HE GETS UP TO GO GET BEER. I paid $400 to be in that building for that match and this dude goes and gets beer during it! That’s seared into my brain and I’ll never forget it. I’m still mad at that guy.
I honestly don’t remember a whole lot about the women’s title match. I kind of feel like the crowd was coming down after the high of Nakamura vs Zayn and never got all the way into it. I do love the ending with Bayley getting choked out, though.
The main event is kind of weird with the massive amount of blood happening fairly early. I do think that Joe and Balor were able, intentionally or not, to work it into the match pretty well. Joe kept getting momentum going but every time he would get side tracked by the doctors attending to him.
My favorite moment of the entire night was actually something that happened after the show. I was meeting up with my friends after they had attended Kaiju Big Battel or something. They, of course, asked immediately asked me how Nakamura vs Zayn was, and I told them all about it. When I got to the part where the dude got up to get beer, someone in the car next to us, who overheard the conversation, yelled out “Fuck that guy!”
So yeah, I concur…
Fuck that guy.