WWE: Analyzing All The Falls In Dolph Ziggler vs. Seth Rollins

The First Fall

There’s no doubt that Ziggler and Rollins are two of the most accomplished grapplers in WWE, and that’s what the first five minutes of this match was based around. Both wrestlers were trying to get an early fall, basically pulling out every possible pinning combination in order to achieve this.

Bear in mind that every time someone kicks out, they expend energy to do so, and an Iron Man match is all about endurance. As the commentary team pointed out, Ziggler had never been in a 30-minute singles match, whereas Rollins outlasted John Cena and Roman Reigns in a Gauntlet Match earlier this year. Early on, we saw Ziggler roll to the outside to take a breather, with Rollins taunting him by doing jumping jacks inside the ring, further reenforcing the notion that the younger Rollins simply has more gas in the tank.

That’s important, because Ziggler didn’t have enough energy to out-grapple Rollins in the early going, which helps explain the first fall. But the other reason for the first fall comes down to Rollins’s brilliance and creativity in the ring, hence his billing as “The Architect”.

Rollins knew he wasn’t going to be able to pin Ziggler straight-up, so he decided to hit Dolph with a Turnbuckle Powerbomb first. That served to knock the wind out of Ziggler and weaken his back as the power source for kicking out of a pin. When Rollins rolled him up, he did so by pinning Ziggler’s arm into the mat, driving all of his force into Ziggler to pick up the first fall.

It’s amazing how such a simple first fall in the early moments of an Iron Man match can contain so many different layers of story-telling that aren’t necessarily difficult to ascertain but can easily slip past our awareness due to their elegant simplicity.