The puns department of World Wrestling Entertainment must’ve worked overtime to come up with the dazzling "New Year’s Revolution" name. Sadly, they were unaware that "a sudden or momentous change in a situation" (dictionary.com’s definition of the word ‘revolution’) wasn’t in the creative team’s plans. But then ‘creative’ isn’t in their plans either if this show was anything to go by. Interestingly, it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve actually watched a WWE pay per view in one evening. There hasn’t been a "free" show for a couple of months and before that it was taking as long as three nights to get through it. But New Year’s Revolution was a train wreck of a show which simply compelled one to carry on just in case they managed to do something even worse in the next segment.

Match One – Regal & Eugene vs Christian & Tyson Tomko

This one took me by surprise as I’d not been paying enough attention to even know it was on the card. I didn’t even know Regal & Eugene were tag champions. It was a basic old school tag team match (which is not a bad thing at all as so much of the dross in wrestling in the past five years has come when people try to re-invent the wheel) with Regal getting beaten down and Eugene making the hot tag. Eugene was decked out in Hogan-esque gear but since WWE won’t say "Hulk Hogan" these days due to the Marvel lawsuit the joke wasn’t stressed. If you go to WWE.com and look at the title histories you’ll see that Hollywood Hogan beat the Iron Sheik in 1984. You’ll also, for similar legal rights reasons, see "Stone Cold" rather than "Stone Cold Steve Austin". But I digress. Heaven forefend I say something slightly interesting in a recap of this gosh-awful show.

Eugene went up for a drop kick, came down and clutched his knee. We’ve seen knee injury spots before and this smacked of being a "the retarded guy is smarter than we thought" gimmick, especially when the very next spot seemed to put him in a perfect position to cradle his opponent for a small package win. But when it became clear Eugene was really hurt everyone stood around for a moment and Eugene eventually rolled up Tomko for the least convincing pin since Steve Austin pinned Owen Hart in 1997 after breaking his neck.

Match Two – Lita vs Trish

I’d not seen Raw’s Trish vs Lita match from a few weeks ago so the recap of their feud was the first time I saw Lita’s insane dive onto Trish. I paused TiVo and it looked as if Lita’s heels all but bashed into the back of her head. Without wanting to sound mocking, Lita’s implants may well have cushioned her fall and prevented serious injury. Sadly, the PPV match had no such fortune and Lita blew out her knee inside the first minute. They stumbled through another couple of minutes before Trish kicked Lita and pinned her. Two serious knee injuries in two matches – this was looking jinxed.

Match Three – Maven vs Shelton Benjamin

My first though was that someone else was playing the role of Maven as I’d never seen him as a heel before. As a babyface he was always grinning so to lose the smile (and much of his Hood-ish eyebrows) made him look like a different person. The Spanish speaking crowd started chanting something at him and Maven left the ring to address them. He stood on a folding chair which was brave given the curse already affecting the show. He lambasted them for a good five minutes before finally getting back in the ring… and being pinned straight away. Huh? What the hell was that? Oh wait, Maven is taunting Shelton into giving him an instant rematch. That was just a pre-match angle… except the second match lasted five seconds and ended with a second Maven loss. And that was that. Dave Scherer says WWE management were unimpressed by Maven’s house show performances and didn’t trust him to work a PPV calibre match. Which begs three main questions – (1) why didn’t they change the match since no one was going to order the show to see Maven get a title shot, (2) why give Maven so much mic time to get himself over as a heel if you’re not going to let him wrestle and (3) how in the hell can Maven be considered so bad they won’t let him do a PPV match and yet GENE SNITSKY is given thirteen minutes on the same show? That’s like saying "Ed Wood" is a dreadful movie and yet paying money to watch "Plan 9 From Outer Space".

Match Four - Jerry Lawler vs. Muhammad Hassan

My lack of Raw watching means this was the first time I’d seen Hassan and his anti-American act. He did an interview before the match just to make sure the Puerto Rican crowd wouldn’t back him in a show of Anti-American sympathies. Like Simon Dean (who only appeared in a taped cameo on the show) WWE has invested a lot of TV time in a man who they seem to have no interest in making a star. Why waste time and money creating the next generation of Val Venis calibre enhancement talents if there are going to be no superstars to squash them? Jerry Lawler – whose body looks its age even if his lifted face does not – might have managed to make this match work in Memphis but it was so boring in part of the 99% of the world who doesn’t get the Lawler phenomenon. At one point Hassan gave Lawler six consecutive body slams. On almost any show you can think of this would’ve been the worst match of the night. Here it was the third best of the show. Really.

Match Five – Kane vs Snitsky

This took me back to the early 90s when Undertaker only ever faced big, slow, rubbish guys like Giant Gonzales, Kamala, Bundy and so on. ‘Taker’s name became synonymous with the worst match on the card. Undertaker matches were crap – fact. Except that when he was able to work with better guys like Austin, Rock, Foley, HHH and Angle he gave some damn good performances. Kane will be tarred with the same "crap" label if he has any more matches with Snitsky. Kane can be carried to decent bouts – he’s a good performer for such a big guy – but he absolutely cannot carry anyone. When Kane hears all the reviews of this dreadful, dreadful, dreadful match he should bear four words in mine – "it wasn’t my fault".

Match Six – The Elimination Chamber

Six guys battling for the world heavyweight title inside a steel cage. It’s a recipe for edge-of-your-seat excitement. Oh, wait, five guys and Chris Jericho who is only ever used to make up the numbers. Ok, five guys battling for the world heavyweight title…

…and Benoit hasn’t been treated seriously for a while. He got squashed by Batista on Raw last time I saw it.

Ok, four guys battling for the world heavyweight title…

…of which three are in the Kliq2005 and Edge isn’t.

Three guys battling for the world heavyweight title inside a steel cage. It can’t be merely a coincidence that Triple H’s dominance of Raw – his insistence on being at the heart of everything that matters and eliminating everything he’s not at the heart of – is so completely reminiscent of the 1996-98 camera hogging of Hollywood Hulk Hogan (his being even more of a spotlight-stealer as a heel than he was as a face because the boos of boredom were mistaken for heel heat which was an excuse he couldn’t use as a good guy). HHH and HHH – soul mates. So the show ended with Trips winning his millionth world title and the crowd were absolutely dead. They seemed to stick to shots of HHH through the cage wall so you couldn’t really see the seated and silent crowd so well. This is a Puerto Rican fan base who put up with thirty years of Carlos Colon (father of Carlito Caribbean Cool) as top star who won the "world" title about as often as Jerry Lawler did down in Memphis.

Overall, the show suffered from two bad injuries but so many bad decisions. Three of the six matches could be described as inexplicable. Put a thousand monkeys in a room full of typewriters and they would never produce a single reason why this card was booked the way it was. Vince McMahon likes big, muscular guys who have no real ability. Why can’t someone just buy him a subscription to a gay porn site so he can get it out of his system and maybe he’ll get over the fixation which has given us Nathan Jones, Heidenreich, Luther Reigns, Gene Snitsky and more guys who are so bad that most of the time they aren’t allowed to wrestle on television in case the viewers see how bad they are. One giant is an attraction, a dozen of them just makes them commonplace.