Coming to you out of Nashville, Tennessee, the cleverly named WWE Smackville is in the books. A sudden special that’s seemingly came and went as swiftly as it was announced. Eh, no, that’s not truly a big enough introduction, this is a massive Network special after all right? Lemme try that again…
WE JUST WITNESSED WWE SMACKVILLE!
Lovely. First up, we have a match that had to be changed… Finn Balor was intended to be challenging Shinsuke Nakamura for the Intercontinental Championship, a chance at reclaiming the gold. Unfortunately, due to an undisclosed illness (per PWInsider) he was pulled from this match, seemingly at the last minute. Instead, Ali made his surprise return, after previously insinuating an interest in Shinsuke’s title. He went ahead and made the challenge here and now, but came up short.
Shinsuke Nakamura defeats Ali to retain the WWE Intercontinental Championship.
#YeahOh. #AndStill. #SMACKVILLE.@ShinsukeN pic.twitter.com/rY6fG3wn77
— WWE Universe (@WWEUniverse) July 28, 2019
Up next, Elias made his way out for his schedule concert. As usual he messed with the crowd and stirred up some hatred, before the inevitable interruption came. This time, Kevin Owens appeared to confront him. After some discourse, a match was made and Owens took him down.
Kevin Owens defeats Elias.
.@IAmEliasWWE gave a beautiful musical performance, but it was @FightOwensFight who left #Elias and the entire @WWEUniverse STUNNED! #SMACKVILLE pic.twitter.com/El7tT1lB11
— WWE (@WWE) July 28, 2019
A match was originally scheduled to take place, in which Bayley would’ve defended her SmackDown Women’s Championship against Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross in a triple threat match. One the day of the show it was pulled from the card with no mention. Frankly it was a little silly to give either of them a shot in the first place, considering Bayley just destroyed the both of them in a handicap match.My assumption is that this was mostly done for time constraints, as this was a much shorter show than WWE is accustomed to doing these days at just over an hour.
Thus, next up we had our main event. Kofi Kingston defending the WWE Championship in a triple threat of his own against the last two men he retained against, Dolph Ziggler and Samoa Joe. The two heels attempted to form an alliance against the champion, but unsurprisingly it didn’t last and even less surprisingly, Kingston retained once more.
Kofi Kingston defeats Samoa Joe and Dolph Ziggler to retain the WWE Championship.
Send in #TheViper next… #SummerSlam #SMACKVILLE @TrueKofi @RandyOrton pic.twitter.com/UlVgy8xWFL
— WWE Universe (@WWEUniverse) July 28, 2019
All in all, WWE Smackville wasn’t exactly a very newsworthy show, and will likely be forgotten to the sands of time very soon. But it was never meant to be anything special on it’s own. It’s more of a proof of concept, for WWE to demonstrate to themselves that they can run a show at short notice at anytime. So in the event they want to suddenly counter program something AEW is doing, they can go for it at the drop of a hat.
A match had to be altered and another cancelled outright so from that perspective, it could’ve gone better. The production side was the more important thing they were trying to test however and that much seems to have gone fairly well. Odds are good we’ll be seeing more extremely minor specials like this going forward.
