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 11.09.15:
QUICK MATCH RESULTS:
* WWE Championship Tournament Round of 16 Match: Roman Reigns d. The Big Show (** ½)
* WWE Championship Tournament Round of 16 Match: Kevin Owens d. Titus O’Neil (* ¼)
* Becky Lynch d. Paige (* ¼)
* WWE Championship Tournament Round of 16 Match: Dolph Ziggler d. The Miz (* ½)
* Natalya d. Naomi (N/R)
* WWE Championship Tournament Round of 16 Match: Cesaro d. Sheamus (*** ½)
* WWE Championship Tournament Round of 16 Match: Dean Ambrose d. Tyler Breeze (**)
* The New Day d. Neville & The Usos (** ½)

THE Right:
Cesaro vs. Sheamus: Even if this match hadn’t rocked to a rather large extent (which it did), it would have been a worthwhile endeavour just for the result- Cesaro defeated Sheamus with a nifty little pinning combination to advance into the quarter finals of the title tournament, where he’ll face none other than Roman Reigns! I think we can all agree that Reigns vs. Cesaro sounds pretty fucking tasty. Of course, it would be wrong to overlook this match, which was comfortably the best thing on the show. It was noticeably slow in a couple of places, but on the whole it was two treble tough Europeans hammering the shit out of each other with nasty uppercuts and dumping each other hard into the mat with wince-inducing power moves. Going forward, Sheamus should only be able to wrestle within the gravitational field of people who are willing to let him hit them very hard and reciprocate in kind, because against the likes of Cesaro he looks a completely different wrestler to the man that sleepwalks through midcard matches and tries to get Dolph Ziggler to kiss his posterior. The former Sheamus is one of the best on the roster. The latter Sheamus is not. All the Cesaros are complete kings- his counter to the Brogue Kick, leaning back and then just guiding Sheamus into a sharpshooter, was absolutely sublime. This was a great match. Also, credit to WWE for the Wayne Rooney cameo, as he’s essentially the most talked about figure in all of sports here in Britain and his altercation with Barrett got massive mainstream publicity.

puRgatoRy:
The Pains of Being Roman Reigns: At the beginning of the year I didn’t like Roman Reigns, and now I think Roman Reigns is terrific. I was so opposed to him at the beginning of the year for the same reason everyone else was- WWE were crashingly unsubtle about informing us that he was the man we all loved and wanted to have plastered all over our TV screens for the next decade, and nobody likes being pressured into making that kind of commitment, especially when Daniel Bryan hadn’t yet snapped his neck again and seemed a much more organic, appealing alternative. As a result of this backlash, Reigns got the heck beaten out of him in a magnificent Wrestlemania main event and lost, he lost his next WWE Championship match at Payback, and then he was denied the Money in the Bank briefcase by Bray Wyatt. He was no longer the Chosen One. in fact, he was dangerously close to becoming just another guy. But of course, he’s not just another guy, he’s Roman Reigns; he oozes machismo, he has terrific matches, he has a friendship with Dean Ambrose that seems properly human and quite sweet. It is very easy to like this man, and slowly, more and more people did, to the point where I don’t think many had serious objections to him winning the WWE Championship from Seth Rollins at Survivor Series or TLC. However, with Seth Rollins having to vacate the WWE Championship and disappear from WWE TV, Roman doesn’t seem like the challenger anymore, he seems like the champion elect. He is so obviously above everyone else in this title tournament in the pecking order that it seems like the whole thing is a desperate attempt to pull the wool over our eyes, to try and pretend that Reigns might actually be seriously threatened by Cesaro or Kevin Owens or even Dean Ambrose. He may have rejected the chance to take a bye straight to the finals, but Roman’s path to glory all of a sudden seems pre-ordained. WWE seem to think that Reigns’ catastrophic road to Wrestlemania was simply a case of him being in the wrong place at the wrong time, when in fact, he was the right man, very much in the right place, very much at the right time, but backed by people with a completely wrong headed approach to creating sympathetic, likeable wrestlers. I strongly suspected that Reigns would beat Rollins within the next couple of months to win the title, but I was thoroughly OK with that in part because it didn’t feel like WWE were artificially trying to make it a big deal. Rollins had a good run, and it seemed now like it was Reigns’ time. By putting together a sixteen man tournament with the sole intention of adding more lustre to Reigns’ championship victory, it now seems like WWE are over hyping him again, in the manner they did earlier in the year where he wasn’t just a very good wrestler, but a very good wrestler who was destined to slay the monstrous Brock Lesnar and win the WWE Championship in the most prestigious circumstances possible. I quite enjoyed Reigns’ match this week with the Big Show, it wasn’t a thrill a minute but there were some nice spots spread evenly across the course of the match. What I don’t enjoy is know, categorically, that he will beat Cesaro next week. There is literally no chance that Cesaro wins. I don’t want to determine the tournament, or Reigns winning the tournament, to be absolutely wrong, but I really hope something happens to make me doubt myself and worry that this has all just been premature complaining. Reigns needs a bigger obstacle than The Big Show to be the champion that WWE want him to be.

Some Middling Tournament Matches with Nice Individual Moments In Them: Kevin Owens vs. Titus O’Neil, Dean Ambrose vs. Tyler Breeze and Dolph Ziggler vs. The Miz were too short or one sided or short and one sided to get their own write-ups, but there were tiny moments in each of them that I liked. From the first, it was Owens shrieking like a child as O’Neil picked him up for some kind of quirky slam thing, a reminder that underneath all his wit and grouchiness, KO is just a bit of a pathetic little boy in a perpetual temper tantrum. From the second, it was a passionate youngster howling “THAT’S WHAT YOU GET FOR MESSING WITH DOLPH ZIGGLER” at the top of his voice as Ambrose sent Breeze tumbling out to the floor. From the latter, it was just the abruptness of the finish; no overblown near falls or melodrama, just a well placed superkick and Ziggler was through. Sometimes, it’s the little things.

THE wRong:
Divas Disappointment: It is a definite positive that the Divas’ division is now deep enough to sustain two distinct feuds (Paige vs. Charlotte/Becky and Natalya vs. Team B.A.D) without even relying on the Bella Twins, but we still aren’t at a stage where crowds react on a consistent basis to what’s going on. Maybe it was just a side effect of WWE’s editing software, but it seemed that Manchester was just silent for Paige-Becky Lynch, and as such the match felt lifeless, from the goofy opening lock-up that spilled all the way to the floor to the half hearted finishing sequence of roll-up reversals. It’s all a bit of a drag.

Bray Wyatt is lame: Just deeply lame. Last week I expressed cautious optimism about a curious development in which Bray had somehow absorbed the Undertaker’s powers and could throw lightning bolts around and nonsense like that. It was one of those wrestling angles that is obviously completely ludicrous but is delivered with straight faces by everyone, and those kind of stories are often really, really fun. This week, however, the wheels came tumbling off, and considering they were only affixed a week ago you’d have to say that this was a poorly made vehicle. Wyatt came out at the end of the show to cut a promo that essentially recapped what happened last week, and then threatened to bring about the apocalypse. This is where he lost me. As daft as these angles are permitted and indeed encouraged to be, they need a kind of internal coherence to them in order to be satisfying, and I’m sorry but I’m not buying that Bray Wyatt, the man that earlier this year was floundering against Ryback, a man who has done almost nothing of note since debuting, actually, no championships, no character development, no nothing, is suddenly capable of bringing about the end of the world. Even with the assistance of magic. Of course, he might not have meant it literally. Bray very rarely means things literally, in fairness. But if that’s the case, then it was just same old, same old. Wyatt has acquired the ability to shoot lightning from his fingers and command armies of demons, and he’s still out here doing the same stuff he always does. It’s just too frustrating to care about. And then of course all of this was rendered moot because the Brothers of Destruction returned, supernatural powers intact, and took out the entire Wyatt Family on their own. So there. I don’t know precisely what tantalizing Survivor Series match this is meant to be building to, but the Wyatts are going to have to pull out all the stops next week not to go into it looking like utter losers. Whatever the combination ends up being, it’ll probably be a slow and sludgy brawl unless Luke Harper somehow does 95% of the match, so the match really needs all the storyline intrigue it can get to sustain itself. Right now, it has very, very little.

THE Ridiculous:
NOTHING

The 411:
Most of the actual title tournament matches were lopsided and disposable, and I have my concerns as to the way the whole thing’s been put together, with too many obvious tomato cans paving the way for a Roman Reigns victory. Nonetheless, there is nothing that lends focus to a show like a good, lengthy tournament, and so it proved here. Matches like Ambrose-Breeze and Owens-O’Neil would have been complete time wasters ordinarily, but with a chance at the WWE Championship looming they felt filled with purpose and hope. Cesaro-Sheamus, meanwhile, was just top notch wrestling. On the whole, I thought this show was greater than the sum of its parts- lots of brief, forgettable bouts, a dead crowd, a dumb ending with Bray Wyatt and the Brothers of Destruction, but the show chugged along merrily nonetheless and I was quite happy watching it.

Show Rating: 6.5

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 1041st edition is over…