Review for WWE Payback 2020

This PPV came too soon, only a week after Summerslam, it felt like a whiplash effect and if I am brutally honest most (if not everything) within this show could have been predicted. This is not to say it is bad, it was actually more entertaining than most of the WWE product recently, but it still felt like this was just too soon to be doing another big show and it suffers greatly because of it.

The start of the show was a little flat with three matches that could easily be skipped over/ Bobby Lashley against Apollo Crews for the US Championship was nothing special as is the match between Big E and Sheamus which just seemed a little by the numbers, considering the build of this being Big E's big singles push. The match between Matt Riddle and King Corbin was again just by the numbers and could easily have been on the Kickoff or any TV show.

Sasha Banks and Bayley defended their WWE Women's Tag Championship against Shayna Baszler and Nia Jax. This match was odd to say the least and I think they played too much on the fact that Baszler and Jax were not friends and did not get along. The match itself was pretty good and I enjoyed it for what it was.

With Randy Orton taking out WWE Champion Drew McIntyre he came face to face with former NXT Champion Keith Lee. He had been on fire for over a year in many amazing matches and this debut on the main roster was a fantastic start. Of course, this being his debut meant that we all know how this ended. A great match, but a little predictable.

The match between Rey and Dominik Mysterio against Seth Rollins and Murphy was (hopefully) the perfect way to end this feud and the match itself was pretty exciting, though I do wish they had given it a stipulation to make it even more exciting. All four work amazingly well and I am hugely impressed with Domink and hopefully we will be seeing more of him.

Finally, we ended with the second title change of this belt in a week. My head hurts that WWE could treat the Universal Championship like this. This is almost WCW 2000 Vince Russo level of booking. I get that Roman Reigns is the golden child, but this match was not the way to do this. The match was simply not given enough time to mean anything and this is a huge problem that I have with this whole PPV in general. This feels more like an episode of Raw or Smackdown and did not have enough moments to really prove it deserved to be a PPV.

Payback 2020 is a rushed PPV that simply does not have enough to recommend it. The Orton/Lee and Mysterios/Rollins and Murphy matches aside there is very little on this show that I will likely rewatch and even those are not something I would go out of my way to watch again.