WWE Battleground: The Prime Time Players vs. The New Day

MATCH: The Prime Time Players (Titus O’Neil & Darren Young) vs. The New Day (Kofi Kingston & Big E with Xavier Woods lurking outside) for the WWE Tag Team Championship
PROMOTION: World Wrestling Entertainment
EVENT: Battleground
YEAR: 2015
RATING: TV-PG for violence
GRADE: Pass


Ever since its inception in 2013, the Battleground pay-per-view has been cursed with negative reviews for one reason or another. For two years in a row, the Wrestling Observer Newsletter has given Battleground the award for Worst Major Show of 2013 and 2014. The event in 2014 received a lot of bad press because of two candidates for that year’s Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic that year: Lana’s offensive promo about the Malaysia Airways plane going down in The Ukraine and WWE false advertising Seth Rollins vs. Dean Ambrose.

While I haven’t seen the entirety of 2015’s Battleground pay-per-view due to the WWE Network’s incompetence with Roku devices, I knew this year had to have a stacked card from top to bottom in order to break their two year curse with the WON, which is a respectable publication, by the way. When it comes to Battleground’s Tag Team Championship match between The Prime Time Players and The New Day, it’s not a bad start on breaking that curse. The buildup to this match was particularly exciting for both teams since they’ve gone through serious gimmick and alignment changes over the past year.

In the case of The New Day, the three members Big E, Kofi Kingston, and Xavier Woods were mid-card baby-face talents who were just hanging around and not really going anywhere with their careers. And then in late 2014, the three of them adopted a new gimmick of being overly positive black gospel preachers who clapped, danced, and smiled their way into every match. This was intended to be a baby-face gimmick, but the WWE Universe thought they were too much of a racist joke to be taken seriously, so all three members of The New Day eventually turned heel by cheating in their matches and insulting the crowd during their preaching promos.

While The New Day preached positivity, both members of The Prime Time Players practiced it. In 2013, Darren Young was the recipient of the Most Inspirational Wrestler of the Year award from Pro-Wrestling Illustrated due to him publicly coming out as a gay man. The best part about that? The WWE didn’t make a stereotypical gimmick out of Young’s sexuality; they just let him be himself. Titus O’Neil is inspirational in a lot of ways too. In 2015, he won the Celebrity Mega Dad of the Year award and later on in that year received national attention for taking a group of homeless people out to dinner just out of the kindness of his heart. At the Money in the Bank pay-per-view prior to Battleground, O’Neil and Young actually won the Tag Team Championship from The New Day to start this feud. The championship win marks O’Neil and Young’s first major title reign in WWE since debuting on the main roster in 2010. Five years of hard work lead to all of this: hell yeah, gentlemen. Hell yeah.

And now for the actual match itself. In one corner, you’ve got The Prime Time Players in the form of the mega-muscle Titus O’Neil and the aggressive athlete Darren Young. In the other corner, you’ve got The New Day, which consists of high-flying Kofi Kingston, ultra-powerful Big E, and though he’s not an official participant of this match, Xavier Woods will make his presence known by screaming at the desk announcers and interfering on behalf of his team.

From beginning to end, this tag team match was marked with unrelenting aggression and hard-hitting stiff moves. We as the audience got to see things like Darren Young back suplexing Xavier Woods on the edge of the ring (which is the hardest part of the whole structure), Big E giving a belly-to-belly suplex on the outside of the damn ring, all five members of the match getting tossed into the barricade, and of course, where would a New Day match be without the constant corner stomping and tagging combinations from that team in order to restart the referee’s five count?

Darren Young found himself on the wrong end of a lot of these moves and wasn’t able to get to his tag team partner for the longest time. But when Titus O’Neil was tagged in, oh damn, you’d better get off the tracks when that train is coming through. Titus clotheslined, booted, and shoulder tackled his way through The New Day and even slung Kofi Kingston around like the Ghanaian superstar was a small child.

Like I said before, this match was above all else hard-hitting. There was not a single move in this match that didn’t hurt or was badly botched. Even something as simple as a shoulder tackle from Titus O’Neil or a big splash from Big E would feel like getting hit by a transcontinental bus. Hell, Kofi Kingston had been taking abuse in his midsection throughout the match and Darren Young didn’t make matters any better when he gave Kingston the Gut Check, which is a double knee rib breaker. It got worse for Kingston when Titus finished the match with a thunderous pump handle slam to retain the WWE Tag Team Championship.

While I don’t have any idea how the Battleground pay-per-view fared in the eyes of the critics (mostly because I couldn’t watch the damn thing on my Roku), I do know that this match in particular deserves high praise, both for the buildup and for the ultra-violent performance itself. In fact, I’d even dare say that this match would go a long way in breaking the two-year curse that Battleground pay-per-view events have with the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

Now that the brutally aggressive Prime Time Players are champions and more than willing to defend against anybody, the tag team division is wide open and goddamn there are a lot of teams. You’ve got a pair of wasteland barbarians in The Ascension, high-flying luchadors in The Lucha Dragons, high-flying matadors with a silly gimmick in Los Matadores, and The New Day is still hanging around, so don’t forget about them. Who’s going to step up and face the super-powerful and widely inspirational Prime Time Players? It’s going to take a lot to knock these two badasses off of their thrones. Then again, iron sharpens iron. The more teams they have to fight, the better they’ll become. I’m not against bringing up NXT tag teams to deal with these two warriors. You hear that, Buddy Murphy and Wesley Blake? Bring your A game, boys!