Wrestling’s 4Rs: The Right, Wrong and Ridiculous of WWE Raw

How the 4Rs of wRestling Work!
Here is a quick explanation of the 4R’s. The column will run TWO times a week. We will group our feelings on the shows in various categories: The Right, the wRong and the Ridiculous. The Right is stuff that worked very well: a great promo, a great match and so on. PuRgatoRy is a section between the right and wrong. It shows equal traits from both sides that cannot be ignored and needs discussed. It is not a bad place per say, as things can get remedied or go the wrong way the very next week. The wRong is what it sounds like: bad matches, bad or boring promos and so on. The Ridiculous is stuff that had no right on TV: Stupid angles and so on. And there is always a possibility of a 5th R, which is as bad as they come. This column is supposed to be analytical, and at the right time very critical of the shows, it was the whole reason it was created. This is not a “mark” column, nor a “smark” column, our goal is to analyze the show from many different fronts, reward the good and call out the bad. We will not apologize for our opinions, they are as they are, whether positive or negative.

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By: Jack Stevenson

Raw 9.07.15:
QUICK MATCH RESULTS:
* Sasha Banks d. Paige
* Roman Reigns & Dean Ambrose d. The Ascension
* Ryback d. Seth Rollins
* Randy Orton d. Sheamus
* The Dudley Boyz d. Los Matadores
* Cesaro vs. The Miz ended in a double count-out
* John Cena & The Prime Time Players d. Seth Rollins & The New Day

THE Right:
John Cena & The Prime Time Players vs. Seth Rollins & The New Day: In between howling impotently at videos of Sting gurning next to his beloved statue, Seth Rollins found the time to wrestle two matches, as the Authority tried to get him prepared for the sizeable challenge awaiting him at Night of Champions. The second of these, in which he teamed with the New Day to face John Cena and the Prime Time Players in the main event, was the most worthwhile thing to occur on the show and delivered exactly what you’d want from that kind of match; a good pace, plenty of exciting near falls, and Xavier Woods in excellent heckling form at ringside. I know this is rapidly becoming an over expressed opinion among the internet wrestling commentariat, but the New Day are just terrific. I’m not a big gamer, but I love that Xavier Woods apparently made a reference to Final Fantasy during his backstage confrontation with Edge, Christian and the Dudleys. It displays a self confidence that too many members of the WWE roster lack- he’ll make obscure, proudly geeky references if he wants to, because he knows he’s good and can get away with it. Woods then proceeded to soundtrack his stablemates’ beatdown of John Cena during the six man tag with some seriously nifty trombone playing, and both Kofi and Big. E looked right on the level of the biggest wrestling star of the last decade, for a little while at least. Titus O’Neil was typically electrifying off the hot tag, and as I’ve said the near falls were good fun, and it was just a rock solid, smoothly executed main event on the whole. It wasn’t worth sitting through the lackluster bulk of Raw for, but if you had made it all the way to the end it was a neat reward, and left a pleasant taste in your mouth as the show went off the air.

puRgatoRy:
Ryback vs. Seth Rollins: A Clash of the Champions. as Intercontinental Title holder Ryback went toe to toe with the ‘Architect’ in Rollins’ first match of the evening. This was a decent bout, with a fairly interesting clash in styles between The Big Guy’s power and Seth’s crafty weaseling. Annoyingly, though, the finish saw Rollins, sigh, forget how to kick out of a pin because he was just so distracted by Sting popping up on the titantron. Ryback rolled him up and Rollins couldn’t kick out. The lame ending to the match made all the action preceding it seem largely pointless.

Some Dominant Tag Team Performances: I quite liked Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose steamrollering the Ascension and the Dudleyz doing the same to Los Matadores. Ever since the Monday Night Wars WWE hasn’t had the courage to ask its audience to accept squash matches again on a regular basis, but both these bouts at least toyed with the idea of becoming completely one sided, and actually provided a nice change of pace from the aimless, back and forth huffing and puffing that characterizes so many Raw midcard matches. There was a strange angle in the latter match where Los Matadores suddenly got all frustrated with El Torito and beat him up. Maybe they’ve been teasing dissension on Smackdown or something, but I’d not noticed any discord in the team on Raw. In the end, the Dudleys came back to rescue the undersized bull and put either Diego or Fernando (who could possibly say which one it was?) through a table. I have literally no idea where El Torito goes from here, since ‘vertically challenged wrestling bull’ works only within a very specific context, which he has now been ripped out of. I suppose Hornswoggle had a decent career without Finlay, though, and Torito’s a much better wrestler, not that that really matters. Hmmm.

Divas Antics: The Bella Twins and Alicia Fox came out to the ring because Nikki Bella wanted to brag about being only a week away from breaking AJ Lee’s record for the longest running Divas’ Champion. I don’t want to dislike the Bellas because expressing dislike of any woman on the internet automatically puts you in the same camp as some really unpleasant people, but sometimes its hard not to look at Nikki and see someone with a vastly inflated sense of her own self worth, who lives under the delusion that she is God’s gift to the Divas’ division, and who is not ordinarily a convincing enough actor that you could give her the benefit of the doubt and say that she is just inhabiting her character. As it happened, her ramblings were swiftly curtailed by Team P.C.B, with Charlotte keen to remind Nikki that before she could celebrate breaking the record, she has to make one more title defense against this Charlotte character. This served its purpose, reminding everyone of the Divas’ Championship match taking place next week, which in fairness will be properly tense and interesting, even if it is because, for reasons largely unrelated to onscreen events, very few people want Nikki to break AJ’s record. In other ‘so called Divas so called Revolution’ news, Sasha Banks edged out Paige in singles competition after Naomi and Tamina rushed the ring to cause a distraction. This allowed The Boss to roll up her foe and of course there was no way Paige could possibly kick out of that with all those thoughts swirling in her head, “why are Naomi and Tamina in the ring?” and such. It is too much to ask of any wrestler to perform a basic task without devoting the entirety of their concentration to the successful completion of said task. The match was decent, but undeserving of the “this is awesome!” chant the Baltimore fans awarded it. Still, it shows that there is still enthusiasm out there for even unremarkable women’s wrestling, especially if it has Sasha gosh darn Banks in it.

THE wRong:
Seth Rollins loses his statue: Perhaps the strongest evidence yet that we’ve reached the stage of the year where WWE stops really caring about stuff came when Sting cheerfully shoved Seth Rollins’ stolen statue into a garbage truck and watched it get crushed. Sting is a genuine icon of professional wrestling, one of the most magnetic, charismatic performers in history, and he’s preparing for his first ever WWE Championship match, which will also be only his second match in WWE history. Sting vs. Seth Rollins for the WWE Championship is a remarkable, remarkable match to be taking place, which makes it rather annoying that the build up is so bland. “Fan favorite destroys heel’s prized possession’ is an angle that would have worked if the main event of Night of Champions was Ryback vs. Sheamus, or Dolph Ziggler vs. Konnor from the Ascension, or Paige vs. The Big Show. Hooray! Curtis Axel has got a hold of loads of copies of the Miz’s latest movie on Blu-Ray, and he’s snapping all the discs! The Miz is irate! I’m not saying Sting-Rollins has to reinvent the wheel. So much wrestling has trod over so much ground that it’s extremely hard for any rivalry to do something genuinely new. But it can absolutely do better than goofy clichés like ‘heel gets possession broken,’ and at the very least it can avoid making the potential for a heel to get his possession broken the focal point of Raw for two weeks.

Randy Orton vs. Sheamus: This was not so great. Of course, Orton and Sheamus’ whole overarching feud has not been so great either, but their last two televised singles matches have been largely unaffected by this because they took place as opening matches of pay-per-views. In that position you’re all but guaranteed an enthusiastic, fired up crowd, and the energy generated by the audience made both bouts seem more likeable than they probably deserved. This week, though, they met in the midst of a pretty flat Raw, and their match stumbled out the blocks and never recovered. At times during the earlier stages you could have heard a pin drop, and though the usual near falls weren’t bad at all, it was too little, too late. It’s a real shame that this is what Orton and Sheamus have ended up doing for much of the year, because both of them are really really good in their own way and seemed to have plenty of momentum on their side in the aftermath of WrestleMania. Randy held a pinfall victory over new WWE Champion Seth Rollins and was a natural choice to be his first challenger, while Sheamus received a much needed heel turn and seemed highly motivated in battling the likes of Daniel Bryan. Then they bumped into each other and have been locked in a deathly embrace ever since. After Orton put Sheamus away with the RKO, we even got a cruel glimpse of what he could be doing if he wasn’t fruitlessly pummeling away at the Celtic Warrior. Earlier in the evening, he’d been caught having a brief conversation with Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose- we couldn’t hear what was being said, but Bray Wyatt clearly assumed the trio were discussing a potential alliance, and so unleashed Harper and Strowman on the Viper as a pre-emptive strike. The moment where Orton suddenly realized he was surrounded by Wyatts reminded me of what he does so well as a fan favorite- as a heel, he can throw tantrums with the best of them, but as a face, he’s completely unflappable. You could sense fear in his body language, but he was determined not to display any vulnerability and keep his composure, even in the face of imminent annihilation. In short, he looked cool as fuck. I would be well up for this beatdown convincing him to side with the remnants of the Shield and tear into the Wyatts with vengeance and rage, but rumor has it that role is going to Erick Rowan instead, which is a cute idea that I think will just seem a bit odd in reality.

Cesaro vs. The Miz: Cesaro lost again. Bah. Well, technically he didn’t, it was a double count-out with the Miz, but it was a moral defeat for sure. The Swiss supposed Superman seemed in real trouble on the floor until the Big Show came out to distract the self proclaimed Hollywood A-Lister. Miz fled into the crowd before Show could get his hands on him, so the Giant took out his frustrations on Cesaro instead, collapsing him with a big right hand. Cesaro has lost frequently throughout the summer but there was admirable valor in his defeats to the like of John Cena and Kevin Owens. There was no dignity in this draw though, it really does seem like he’s lower on the pecking order than the Big Show and the Miz.

Dolph defends himself: Dolph Ziggler, Rusev and Summer Rae continued their shit soap opera. Is it just me, or do all the twists and turns in this storyline lead in the same direction? The latest plot point is that Summer claimed Ziggler sexually harassed her and she may or may not be lying, and this led to an in ring segment this week where Ziggler and Rusev shouted at each other and Ziggler hit a superkick and Rusev fled the ring and they shouted at each other some more. It’s all very familiar. I feel like I’ve nine or ten different shouty arguments between Ziggler and Rusev in the middle of the ring, and they always end with someone getting superkicked, or dropped with another, similarly speedy maneuver. Usually Lana and Summer Rae put an exclamation point on things with a brawl, but Lana wasn’t here this week due to a wrist injury and will be out a while. This puts the kibosh on the expected mixed tag match, which would surely have put this angle out of its misery. Reports suggest Lana will now be out for months. Let’s hope her absence allows everyone involved to move on with their lives!

THE Ridiculous:
NOTHING

The 411:
We are 135 days away from the 2016 Royal Rumble. It doesn’t sound that much on paper, really, but it’s probably going to feel like a very long time indeed. As we move further into September, as the evenings and nights start to encroach further and further into the personal space of the afternoon, and the leaves quietly wilt from the trees, WWE becomes almost unwatchably tedious. Maybe the end of the summer sunshine induces a kind of lethargy in the creative team and many of the wrestlers. Maybe they’re all too preoccupied planning Halloween and Christmas parties. Maybe the absence of a big four pay-per-view on the horizon (since its inception, Money in the Bank has been a far more significant event than Survivor Series) leads to a lack of motivation en masse. Whatever the reason, the Fall Slump and the Winter of Discontent have become annual features of the WWE calendar, the only inconsistency being how soon after Summerslam the decline begins. We’re now three weeks removed from Summerslam, and the malaise has very much set in. This week’s Raw was a lazy effort, with precious few redeeming features. I enjoyed the main event, but no more than I’ve enjoyed a gazillion other matches, many of which you won’t have to sit through three hours of bad but just about competent enough to not be entertainingly bad wrestling to see.

Show Rating: 4.5

As a reminder, I will be going by the 411 scale…

0 – 0.9: Torture
1 – 1.9: Extremely Horrendous
2 – 2.9: Very Bad
3 – 3.9: Bad
4 – 4.9: Poor
5 – 5.9: Not So Good
6 – 6.9: Average
7 – 7.9: Good
8 – 8.9:Very Good
9 – 9.9: Amazing
10: Virtually Perfect

The 1023rd edition is over…