WWE Royal Rumble 2012: CM Punk vs. Dolph Ziggler
I'd put this a bit ahead of their RAW match from November. Laurinaitis was a ringside referee, so the match obviously had some shenanigans involving that stip, but they handled that whole thing well & it didn't go into fuckery levels. The best bit from the early going is Punk just manhandling Ziggler & throwing him to the ropes, resulting in Ziggler falling out of the ring, followed by CM Punk launching himself there w/ a great looking suicide dive. Really just loved Ziggler's all around ragdoll bumping & selling here, made all of Punk's offense look super lethal, especially both of those Go To Sleeps he dished out. That spinning sit-out powerbomb counter to Ziggler's Fameasser attempt was awesome as well. Good match. ***1/4
WWE RAW 01/30/12: CM Punk vs. Daniel Bryan
It's the first singles meeting between the two since 2005, and it's kinda cool that now they're the World Champions in the biggest wrestling company in the world facing off. It's a very neat little tease of what was about to come between them later on in the year, too. A helluva TV-match w/ compelling wrestling all the way through. Bryan is all kinds of awesome on the offense w/ terrific strikes, some Regal-esq work with those knee drops to the face and continuing working the hand & arm while having that knee on the face of Punk -- him twisting & bending Punk's arm all over the place was of course extremely enjoyable, and Punk's selling is really good, unsurprisingly. I really liked how he had to switch to the better arm in that signature move-combo of his in that running knee into the bulldog one. The finish w/ Jericho kinda comes just when the match was kicking into another gear, but hey, I can't really complain about it knowing that Bryan & Punk got to have those PPV matches later on in 2012. Like I said, this more than did its job as a teaser for those matches that would eventually happen. ***3/4
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