WWE UK Championship & World of Sport Wrestling prove British wrestling needs bigger TV spotlight

[This article contains WWE UK Championship Spoilers. Because Stone Cold I Said So]

Living in Bristol I am lucky enough to have a couple of independant UK wrestling promotions active in the area with Pro Wrestling Chaos and 4 Front Wrestling, both promotions have been able to attract some of the big global names in Wrestling like Rey Mysterio and Jay Lethal and as well as some of UK wrestling’s most prodigious stars like Pete Dunne and Will Ospreay and have been a great source of quality entertainment to myself and my friends.

That’s why I was so excited to see that ITV were bring back World of Sport Wrestling in a one-off special on New Years Day featuring Grado, who is a pretty big deal and finished the episode as champion, and El Ligero who I had the pleasure of seeing in a bonkers falls count anywhere against Mike Bird for Pro Wrestling Chaos. The show also featured the legendary Jim Ross on commentary and ex-‘The Bill’ actor Max Beesely as the General Manager figure. It was an entertaining one-off show, and deserved more than the 1.25 million viewers it recieved.

Then I was even more excited when the WWE announced that they’d be televising a two day tournament in the UK to crown the first ever WWE UK Champion, in a move that they were hopeful would spark a regular WWE based UK series. Entrants would include Pete Dunne, Mark Andrews, Jordan Devlin and Tyler Bate amongst many others in an incredibly entertaining 16 man bracket tournament, with the ridiculously talented nineteen year old Bate winning the belt, but not before a suprise match between established WWE star Neville and top British talent Tommy End and an appearance from Finn Balor.

However, despite there being a huge market for British Wrestling both within our isles, and overseas the WOSW show and the WWE have yet to officially announce that they are taking their one off special and two day tournament any further and this is a massive shame. Whilst the UK does televise British wrestling to some extent it’s usually treated as a niche product and hidden away in obscure channels. We haven’t had a big wrestling promotion or televised series for a long, long time. This is part of the reason why there was such a buzz about the new spotlight being shown.

Whilst it seems unlikely that World of Sport Wrestling will be moving forward with a series given the fairly meagre audience it recieved, I have high hopes that the WWE will push forward with a British show now that it has a newly crowned champion and is recieving plaudits from all angles for putting on a superb two days of wrestling. British Wrestling may be back, but ideally we also need to keep it here! So if you haven’t seen either of these shows, check them out as soon as possible, tweet and post about them, do everything you can to get us the British Wrestling show that we deserve!