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WWE
After a hugely disappointing Clash in Italy, WWE was back at it 24 hours later with an episode of Raw that served as a modest improvement, bolstered mainly by a couple of promos and a smart decision to heavily promote a match that didn’t even take place on WWE programming.
Raw kicked off with Jacob Fatu doing the right thing and honoring the stipulation of Tribal Combat, making a point that he was following through to show his children that he was a man of his word, which oddly enough sets Fatu up to be the conscience of the new Bloodline. Look for Jey Uso to push buttons as the fully bought-in toady.
Oba Femi should never have lost at Clash, but if you can separate that from Monday’s King of the Ring tournament opening match, the Ruler had a very good night Monday. Unfortunately, the women did not have as strong of an opening in the Queen of the Ring tournament.
LA Knight surprisingly had a strong evening, berating Raw GM Adam Pearce for allegedly being a Bloodline sympathizer and enabler. It sounds crazy in writing, but the segment worked.
Perhaps the smartest move WWE made was to dedicate a decent amount of Raw to promote the AAA mask versus mask match between the two El Grande Americanos, finally giving proper context to the feud and then airing the full match (and pageantry and post-match unmasking) while informing fans that this was one of the best matches in a good while (which surprisingly was not typical WWE hyperbole).
Once again, a Raw main event involving the Vision was overly long, standard, and competently dull (or is it dully competent?).
Overall, this was a decent episode when compared to Clash in Italy, but the product remains in desperate need of a reinvigoration. Oba Femi is a wonderful jolt, but he even can’t electrify 10 segments a week.
Let’s get to it…
DOWNS…
4. She Knows She Sounds Like A Heel, Right?
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WWE
Someone desperately needs to get to Sol Ruca and work on her promo delivery if she’s going to continue to portray a babyface.
Ruca conducted an in-ring interview on Raw, during which she cut a promo that in parts gave strong “Liv Morgan vibes” – yelling “aaaallllllllll” at one point and speaking in that same wooden, grating voice that Liv uses to great effect to annoy fans.
The difference is that Sol was trying to tell the crowd how proud she was to hold the Women’s Intercontinental Championship and intended to be a fighting champion. Instead, she sounded like someone who either had the “good/evil” switch flipped to “evil” or just hasn’t figured out how to cut a babyface-style promo.
The message was fine. The delivery was terrible.
3. Moves Happening In Front Of Us
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WWE
Unlike the opening match of the King of the Ring tournament, the four-way bout kicking off the Queen of the Ring tournament did not flow nearly as well and just gave off “moves happening in front of everyone’s faces” vibes.
Giulia, Roxanne Perez, Iyo Sky, and Lash Legend battled in this match, stumbling at various points through several sequences that didn’t really have any cohesion or flow. A couple of parts of the match looked fine – typically when Iyo and Roxanne were involved – but whenever they tried stacking offense with all four women, something inevitably looked off and felt artificial.
Sky would pick up the win by disposing of Legend after she had laid out Perez and Giulia, finishing off Giulia (a bizarre move considering she was the fan favorite due to her Italian heritage) with a moonsault.
This was the right result with Sky advancing, but it certainly isn’t a match that will be replayed ever again.
2. Upon Further Review…
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WWE.com
… the booking of the Oba Femi versus Brock Lesnar match at Clash in Italystill was atrocious.
Less than 24 hours after Brock decimated Oba with seven F-5s, the Ruler went out on Raw and ran through three other men to win his first-round match in the King of the Ring tournament. While that was the right booking, having Femi bounce back like that meant that he was only “mostly dead” at Clash, and able to recover quickly – perhaps a bit too quickly, almost shrugging off the injuries.
But here’s the part that really rings hollow. Even if WWE wanted to do a trilogy all along, they had a great roadmap to follow in Cody Rhodes versus Seth Rollins, where Cody won all three matches in their initial series, and no one blinked. They could have easily booked Oba to win Sunday and have Lesnar attack him afterward to issue the “a**-whooping” that he promised.
Femi could have delivered the same post-match promo on Monday night, and it would have still rang true. The difference would have been that Oba still would have looked invincible heading into KOTR rather than being a wounded animal who needed the win to show he could shake off Sunday’s loss.
1. Long Match. Barricade Spot. Repeat.
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WWE
The crowd noise, table spot, barricade spot, and outside interference would tell you that a lot happened during the Raw main event, and you might be inclined to think that this was a really good match.
But Seth Rollins versus Bron Breakker was another of those overly long TV main events that just kept chugging along at 0.75 speed, making sure to hit every move in both wrestlers’ arsenals, including repeat signatures and finishers.
Throw in a run-in from “Stone Cold” Austin Theory, a save from Montez Ford, and a barricade spot (not another one!) that inexplicably took out Paul Heyman, and you’ve got this match in a nutshell.
As with most Rollins matches, this was pretty well worked, but it’s another in a long series of three-star specials that will fade into a mosaic of similar matches. There was a cute callback to Bret Hart and Goldberg in WCW, with Rollins (the babyface) using Breakker’s tag belt as a shield to knock out a charging Bron when he went for a spear. But otherwise, this was just another long main event that accomplished little.
The match also served to further neuter the Vision, an act well past its sell-by date, and knocked Breakker down a peg in the process, which is counterproductive for a company that desperately needs to start pushing its younger stars and try to build the next generation of talent.
UPS…
5. A Fun Tag Match
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WWE
The LWO might be defunct as a group, but that doesn’t mean that two of its former members can’t team up and have a rollicking tag match on Raw.
Rey Mysterio and Dragon Lee took on the allies-of-convenience Rusev and Ethan Page on Raw in a tag match that followed a very simple – yet effective – formula. The fans achingly wanted to see the WWE Hall-of-Famer in the match, so the heels naturally kept Rey on the apron, except for when Dragon lunged for the tag. That’s when Page yanked Mysterio to the floor.
Rusev and Page worked well together, but eventually, the natural chemistry between Rey and Dragon overcame the villains, as they ran into each other a couple times, allowing Mysterio to hit a 619 and Drop the Dime on All Ego to pick up the win.
This was light, simple fare that strung together good action with a crowd-pleasing result. While not weighty, it was perfectly acceptable wrestling.
4. Knight On The (Verbal) Warpath
The reunification of the Bloodline has rubbed LA Knight a certain way, and it isn’t good.
In recent weeks, Knight has been cautioning the Usos to not fall back into their old ways alongside Roman Reigns, but Monday night, he directed his venom at Raw GM Adam Pearce, lighting into the middle-manager after the show-opening Acknowledgement Ceremony.
Knight pointed out that Pearce has been awfully deferential to Reigns recently, including making a house call to his locker room. LA asked if the GM was “feeling Ucey” and offered to get Pearce an “Honorary Uce” T-shirt and suggested they go to the merch stand to buy an “ufa laffa” necklace. He continued to rant at Pearce, noting that the GM was giving the Megastar more energy than he had ever given Roman, warning that he wasn’t going to take that from him.
Just when it looked like Pearce was going to make his case, he gestured with an index finger at Knight, who raised it above the GM’s head to acknowledge the Tribal Chief.
At this stage, Knight has to feel like he’s taking crazy pills watching the Bloodline re-form and slowly sink back into its heelish routine while everyone just tries to placate Roman. He might seem a bit delusional right now, but LA as the guy sounding the alarm after fighting against them for years is the right call, and when he’s proven right, he might be in a position to help lead the resistance.
3. WWE Leans Into Lucha
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AAA
Even a company as notoriously obtuse as WWE had to recognize that they unwittingly were sitting on a serious match of the year contender from this past weekend, and they decided to play it up Monday night.
Unfortunately for Paul Levesque, the match in question occurred during AAA’s Noche de Los Grandes event on Saturday, with El Grande Americano facing “Original” El Grande Americano in a mask-versus-mask match. They delivered an absolutely stellar match that was the talk of the wrestling world.
Rather than allow this instant classic to hide in a promotion that mainly exists in the United States on YouTube, WWE aired it in full after Raw on Monday night, with the announcers talking it up in great detail during the program and airing a hype video for it as well.
It says a lot about the piss-poor booking in WWE proper that two main roster midcarders donned masks (along with four other under-utilized superstars) and turned out a feud and match like Saturday’s mask-versus-mask war in AAA in a show booked by the Undertaker.
As much as this deserves praise from WWE for incorporating it into Raw, this should serve as an indictment on the main roster’s creative team and their utter inability to do anything even remotely approaching this feud and match.
2. Fatu Acknowledges His Tribal Chief
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WWE
If the long-term goal of Jacob Fatu losing Tribal Combat and joining Roman Reigns’ troupe is to elevate the Samoan Werewolf ala Jey Uso, then Monday night was a good start to that journey.
Fatu walked out and spoke about understanding the repercussions of Tribal Combat and how he was there as a man, honoring the stipulation and keeping his word, serving as an example to his children. He acknowledged Reigns and took his place beside the Tribal Chief, which he had agreed to do if he lost on Sunday.
In doing so, Jacob showed dignity and respect, which likely will be tested in the coming weeks and months. If they book this properly, Fatu should be viewed as the conscience of the Bloodline 2.0 as it predictably descends back into its old ways. This was just a starting point for him, honoring the stip.
Jey coming full circle and going from the tormented, gaslit member of the Bloodline to the tormenter, jawing at Jacob and getting in his face, was a nice touch. Uso has gone from standing on his own to having guzzled a gallon of the Tribal Kool-Aid.
One gripe, however: to accept this storyline, you have to dismiss the entire “Jacob is a wild man, a danger to Raw and should be fired” shtick from the previous month. He can’t simultaneously be a man of conviction and honor, and also a crazed lunatic who can’t be controlled.
That’s a pretty big plot hole, and that knocks this down a couple pegs.
1. KOTR Kicks Off With All-Action Battle
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WWE
Setting aside the unconscionably bad booking of Brock Lesnar versus Oba Femi, if you look at the opening match of the King of the Ring tournament, it was a great showcase for the Ruler in what should be a big few weeks for him.
Penta, Solo Sikoa, and Carmelo Hayes recognized Femi as the universal threat in this match, trying to attack him at the outset – to no avail. They would occasionally get him out of the ring, and the remaining three would blitz through their best offense on each other to try to pick up the win before Oba could recover.
But Femi kept coming back into the match, which necessitated Talla Tonga getting involved to finally put Oba down for a period. Penta nearly picked up the win with the Penta Driver, but Oba rose up and tore through everyone, rapidly taking out everyone – including Tonga – before dropping Solo with a Fall from Grace to advance in the tournament.
Seeing the other three treat Femi as the threat that he was, and then wrestle with urgency every time he was briefly out of the picture, further illustrated how much of a game-changer he truly is. This is Oba’s tournament to lose; let’s just hope WWE isn’t dumb enough to somehow have Brock cost him the finals to set up their rubber match.
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