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Will Matt Hardy make his WWE return on the live Smackdown taping tomorrow night?

We here at Cageside Seats would like to thank Matt Hardy for driving our website traffic over the past month!  (Wikimedia Commons)
We here at Cageside Seats would like to thank Matt Hardy for driving our website traffic over the past month! (Wikimedia Commons)

The latest on Matt Hardy from the September 29th Wrestling Observer Radio show is the following:

  • Bryan Alvarez thinks that what's happening with Matt is "very weird" and that aspects of the story are "very real", otherwise WWE wouldn't have changed their Wellness policy.
  • He doesn't know what the deal is now or whether the rumours are true that Matt will make his WWE return on the live Smackdown taping tomorrow night, but wants to make it very clear that if Matt does return tomorrow, that no-one should say "see, it was all a work from the beginning", because it "absolutely was not".
  • People are suspicious because it's weird that he continues to break all the rules, but hasn't been fired yet.
  • Dave Meltzer thinks that Matt returning tomorrow "would honestly make no difference at all", just like Daniel Bryan's return at SummerSlam didn't, and that such a move would suggest that they're venturing into "WCW mentality".  Cue a discussion about how so few people within the business learnt from WCW's mistakes and a citation of Brian Pillman as the ultimate example of where WCW managed to work the boys and get people talking, but the promotion themselves didn't make a penny from it.
  • Meltzer also thinks that Matt's potential return would flop creatively, as Matt playing the rebellious outsider is too similar to the still ongoing Nexus angle.  When he first heard the rumours he thought "Oh God, this really sounds like a bad idea".
  • Alvarez and Meltzer both noted that such worked shoot angles are only great for driving their business, as people go to their site and buy their newsletters to find out what the hell is going on.
  • Meltzer on Matt Hardy's motivation for his Twitter and YouTube geekery: "However, if in fact at the end he ends up on TV, in his own mind he will have fooled people and therefore he will not be the geek, the other people he has fooled will be the geeks and that will make him superior".  Some people within the business still get off on fooling people for fooling people's sake, especially in TNA.

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