A few years ago I commented on a four-bout bill where three matches finished as No Contests and the fourth was a DKO. It struck me that No Contest was an exotic result, a surprise, to be used sparingly to save a champion's blushes, for instance, in a lucky retention of the belt. Three NCs on a single evening would send fans home thinking that there's something wrong with the rules, at the very least.
The Newsletter trumps that with the below Croydon report where four championship matches in a single night all finished 2-1 - that scourge result for wrestling that the Knockers enjoyed using as evidence that is was all fixed.
My query is whether, if any, through-the-card planning took place to avoid this type of embarrassment?
Such planning would be necessary not only at the level of results, but also moves. For existence, you wouldn't be wanting a Boston Crab submission in each bout.
Do you agree this is an important point?
Do you have any views or evidence of such planning happening - or, as in my examples, being blatantly absent?
I believe that my two examples prove a total absence of through the card planning.
I agree that Lincoln would have been attentive to this.
But otherwise I think it's the other way round: a smaller promoter, like our Graham, would have conceived a rounded bill from posters right through to the final bell, and sculpted the whole show as an event.
I see Joint Promotions, in this respect, as too big for their boots; and this a rare detail that slipped through their net. They, especially the non-northern member, seem to be the main culprit.