by The Cynic on 28 November 2005 So, the story is that Nick Dinsmore, or Eugene as he will probably always be known, has allegedly been sent to rehab after he collapsed following a match in Manchester...

by The Cynic on 24 March 2005 So he’s gone. I didn’t cry. There was no rending of garments. Hell didn’t freeze over. The Rock left without a whimper. It seems that there was an administrative error that allowed his contract to reach its end, and the WWE didn’t bother to renew it. Let’s look at that again. It seems the WWE allowed the Rock to get away...

by The Cynic on 27 January 2005 So Triple H won the title again. Tiresome, entirely expected and really bad for the WWE. We know this. Figures won’t pick up until this obvious preferment ends, and not just in storyline either – watching Raw at the moment is like flicking to the last page of a book...

by The Cynic on 24 November 2004 Well, it happened. Just as we knew it would, really. It’s a plot twist you could see coming on page 5. The pink slips, P-45’s, brush offs, whichever euphemism you want to use for it. Sackings. 10 of them. Wrestlers and a writer. And more to come. People seem shocked. But why?

by The Cynic on 6 October 2004 Close your eyes and think back. It’s 1992. Ric Flair enters the Royal Rumble third, and takes bump after bump before winning the whole thing; it’s a brilliant performance. Now remember Flair leading the Four Horsemen in the mid to late eighties, the blueprint for all subsequent heel gangs in wrestling. And think back to the fantastic rivalry between Flair and Sting at the turn of the 90’s...

by The Cynic on 25 August 2004 They pout. They preen. They giggle. They wiggle. No-one cares. They gather together for warmth. And perhaps to avoid the tumbleweeds. At this point, they could all lie on their backs and fire ping-pong balls at Eric Bischoff, and we still wouldn’t care...

by The Cynic on 11 August 2004 It was good to see him on Raw – getting a good pop, trading barbs with revitalised big boy HHH, challenging him a match, getting a jump on him early on, blading and juicing like a geyser and taking both knucks and sledgehammer. It was quite clear – Regal is back and being pushed...

by The Cynic on 4 June 2004 You may remember that my first column for this website was called “Inches From The Mainstream”- if you missed it, it was recently rerun in the Newsletter as a “classic column”. And so it should be. In it I discussed Vince McMahon’s desire for the WWE to be taken seriously as a mainstream commercial/entertainment company in its own right, and suggested that he was thwarted in this by his own staff writers-the WWE’s racist, sexist, tasteless angles having no place in the modern corporate world...

by The Cynic on 29 March 2004 “I say it here, it comes out there”, to quote Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News”. In my last column, I suggested that there was a big change afoot in the WWE-the smaller men were about to take the Fed into a new era. I also urged the WWE to give Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero a chance with the big straps. And what do we see post-Wrestlemania? Chrissie and Eddie and legitimised champs. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if someone at Stamford was reading this column for ideas...

by The Cynic on 2 February 2004 I’ve just spent the last 2 months without wrestling. Of course I had access to the net, but no Sky! And in a four star hotel too! It’s terrible to have to live in sumptuous surroundings, with only my enormous bank balance and talent to keep me warm at night, but I survived. And just as I return, something extraordinary has happened...