WATCH: SmackDown Match Completely Stops During Commercial

It’s a perk of the SmackDown location. Things are changing in a hurry in WWE due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus as their recent shows have had to take place at the Performance Center instead of in the usual arenas. This has caused a bit of a problem for the show, as there is no crowd to play to, which can change the dynamic of a show. There is however a benefit that you don’t get during a regular show.

One of the things that WWE teaches to its young wrestlers today is to play to the camera. As Lance Storm said, there are more people on the other side of the camera than there are in the arena and that means it makes more sense to worry about the camera than anything else. This time around though, since there are no fans in the arena, there was something else involving the camera.

Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful.com has posted a video to his Twitter account showing what happened when the cameras were off during a match at this week’s SmackDown. During the break in the match between the teams of Bayley and Sasha Banks vs. Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross, the match stopped and the wrestlers talked with the referee, who also adjusted a turnbuckle pad. They then waited until the show was about to come back on the air to begin wrestling again. It is not clear if this happened during every break, though a clip of Cesaro vs. Daniel Bryan was shown when their match returned from a commercial.

This is fascinating in a way: check out the satellite feed showing the lack of action:

Opinion: This is something that you could see back in the 90s via satellite feeds and it is still cool to see it today. That being said, it does take away a little bit of the magic, even though a lot of that magic is gone with no fans in attendance. Either way, it’s kind of fascinating that the match just stops and then they come back from commercial, though it isn’t something they could do all the time.

Does this make sense? What is your favorite behind the scenes surprise like this? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his- Amazon author page with 30 wrestling books. Get the latest and greatest in professional wrestling news by signing up for our daily email newsletter. Just look below for “GET EXCLUSIVE UPDATES” to sign up. Thank you for reading!