NXT Takeover will overshadow SummerSlam again

Judging by this week’s episode of NXT we know what the card for NXT Takeover Brooklyn 4 is going to look like.

All signs point to the main event being Tommaso Ciampa defending the NXT Championship against Johnny Gargano and Aleister Black in a triple threat. As announced on this week’s episode EC3 will face Velveteen Dream and Adam Cole will defend the NXT North American Championship against Richocet. Also on the card Moustache Mountain will get their rematch for the NXT Tag Team Titles against the Undisputed Era and Shayna Baszler will defend the NXT Woman’s Championship against Kairi Sane.

Now that is one hell of a card.

Traditionally these take place the night before a main roster PPV and in the eyes of many fans overshadow the main roster. Looking at this card I think we’re going to have a repeat of this. It’s not that SummerSlam doesn’t have some good matches announced so far like Daniel Bryan vs The Miz, AJ vs Samoa Joe and Dolph Ziggler vs Seth Rollins. The advantage NXT has over the main roster is that they have fewer matches and a shorter show.

The show’s are just over two and a half hours meaning only the best of the best get’s on the card. While there will be good matches on SummerSlam they will be apart of a show that will be 6 hours including the kick off. This makes the show more difficult to sit through which won’t be helped by the main event of Brock Lesnar vs Roman Regins for the thousandth time.

It’s not just the difference in show length but just the quality of the wrestlers on the NXT card.

Gargano and Ciampa have had 2 of the best matches of 2018 so far and Black vs Ciampa was one of the best TV main events in NXT history. So the combination of all three of these men in one match in my mind spells match of the year candidate. The tag title match is guaranteed to be great as the six man these teams were involved in at the UK tournament as well as the tag title match the following night were the best matches of the weekend. Then their was the rematch on TV recently which received 5 stars from the Wrestling Observer. While I’ve said Sane shouldn’t win the title I know she and Baszler will have good match. They had one in the Mae Young Classic finals that was only hampered by the amount of time it was given as it was right after SmackDown. This time they’ll be given sufficient time and in front of a crowd that knows the story so will be into the match. The face heel dynamic in the Dream EC3 match is a bit off Dream has a track record of putting on classic matches at Takeover(with the exception of the Ohno match). Cole vs Richocet has the least amount of build of all the matches but I can see the match itself making up for that.

Hopefully my high expectations won’t hinder my enjoyment of the show but given the quality of NXT recently can you blame me for having such high exceptions.