WWE ECW Review - February 16, 2010

By Graham "GSM" Matthews

Unified WWE TAg Team Champions The Miz and Big Show def. Yoshi Tatsu and Goldust

I forgot what Tatsu and Goldust did to earn a shot at the straps, but they weren't considered threats to the tag titles at all. I guess WWE added Miz and Show to this last ECW episode to give it some "star power," but why not just bring in some old ECW legends instead? Would that have been too much to ask? At any rate, this was a decent little match, but the crowd couldn't have cared less and barely reacted to the finish.

Shelton Benjamin, Vance Archer, Trent Beretta, Caylen Croft and Vladimir Kozlov Crashed The Abraham Washington Show

Watching this reminded me just how unbearably bad The Abraham Washington Show was on WWE ECW. Good god, this was terrible! Washington was a talented dude, but I think most of the heat he elicited was go-away heat, and Tony Atlas laughing relentlessly in the background hardly helped matters. This was merely the company's way of getting a bunch of the newer ECW guys on the last show without any of it making the slightest bit of sense.

Ezekiel Jackson def. Christian in an Extreme Rules Match to Win the ECW Championship​

I actually thoroughly enjoyed the match Christian and Jackson had at the Royal Rumble a few weeks prior (largely because Christian carried him through it), and this was an equally entertaining encounter. No, it wasn't as "extreme" as the any of the old ECW matches from a decade and a half earlier, but by WWE standards, it was fun. Christian was heavily protected in defeat through interference from Zack Ryder, Rosa Mendes and William Regal, but why bother taking the title off him on the final show? Jackson didn't get much of a boost from it, and I had heard it was because Vince McMahon didn't want the typical "storybook ending" to ECW. Figures.

Overall Show

Anyone hoping for a classic ECW anniversary show with appearances from icons of the past was sorely disappointed with this effort. The main event was a treat, but everything else felt like filler and was a poor (albeit fitting) way of ending the ECW chapter. The focus was on the debuting NXT show the next week and announcing the pairings for that program, but we didn't get to know really anything about any of the rookies, so other than WWE claiming it was "the future," what reason did viewers have to care about it?