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-THREE 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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Raw 7.18.16:
QUICK MATCH RESULTS:
– Cesaro and Sami Zayn defeated Kevin Owens and Chris Jericho @ 13:08 via pin
– Darren Young defeated Alberto Del Rio @ 2:24 via pin
– The Wyatts and The Club defeated New Day, Enzo, Cass and Cena @ 19:06 via
– Baron Corbin defeated Sin Cara @ 1:15 via pin
– Sasha Banks and Becky Lynch defeated Charlotte and Dana Brooke @ 2:20 via DQ
– Rusev and Sheamus defeated Zack Ryder and Dolph Ziggler @ 3:45 via pin
– WWE Title Match: Champion Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins went to a DRAW @ 24:14

THE Right:
New general managers! Hooray!: Credit where credit’s due, WWE have made two really good choices for the Raw and Smackdown GM positions. Mick Foley and Daniel Bryan are both hugely well liked, have never been overexposed on WWE TV, and retain immense credibility from their in ring careers. It also helps that the Foley appointment is a genuine surprise, and the Bryan one would have been as well if the news hadn’t been accidentally all but confirmed in a premature WWE.com article. This doesn’t necessarily vindicate the decision to have two authority figures on each brand; Smackdown should be fine since Bryan and Shane McMahon are both fan favourites, and Shane’s on screen future is uncertain anyway, but Mick Foley and Stephanie McMahon seem destined for a clash of egos, despite the fact that non wrestlers bickering endlessly with each other has been one of the worst tropes in professional wrestling over the last 15 years. Still, that’s for the ‘wrong’ sections of future columns; on this particular episode, WWE got the introduction of the new General Managers just right. Both guys got super responses from the crowd, particularly Bryan, and their appearance got Raw off to a nice, positive start. One can only hope that the fact they both spent much of their career having their brain scrambled doesn’t impact on their decision making at all and we don’t get matches like ‘Baron Corbin vs. Baron Corbin vs. Baron Corbin’ and ‘Dolph Ziggler vs. I can’t remember due to short term memory loss.’

Cesaro & Sami Zayn vs. Kevin Owens & Chris Jericho: The sort of match that would have sounded like a wet dream if you’d proposed it five years ago, and now is the opening bout on Raw and no one bats an eyelid. We’ve come a long way, in some respects. Anyway, this was a nifty fifteen minutes of action, albeit with a first few minutes that were a bit throwaway. Once the hot tags had been completed there were some great stretches of action though; I will never get bored of Cesaro’s mad uppercut rampages and Owens and Zayn tore into each other with a venom and energy that bodes very well indeed for Battleground. It’s a shame we didn’t get fun, silly interactions between best frenemies (do people still use that word?) KO and Y2J, although there was an amusing spot involving Owens mugging to the camera while beating down Zayn. A fine way to kick off the in ring portion of the show.

Bunch of dudes crack jokes, do wrestling: I rather enjoyed this, by and large. Basically, the New Day, John Cena, Enzo & Cass and the Club were all sent out for a little while to throw some humorous barbs and kill some time, and for that remit they picked the right guys. Everyone involved has a good sense of humour, and the segment had a pleasant, relaxed feel to it. OK, maybe that’s not quite the tone they should have gone for on the final Raw before a PPV, but it was still a fun watch in its own right. Xavier Woods’ quip about Pokemon Go particularly made me laugh; it was an example of the sort of well placed geeky silliness that made the New Day so popular in the first place. The Wyatt Family turned up towards the end to make things more serious and complete the line up for a 12 man tag team match, The Club and the Wyatts vs. Cena, Enzo & Cass, and the New Day. I’m usually sceptical about any kind of non elimination tag match that exceeds eight men, but this one didn’t feel as sloppy and rushed and confused as similar bouts have done in the past- there was a coherent focus on building the relevant storylines going into Battleground, exemplified in the actually quite cathartic moment where Xavier Woods got some offense in on Bray Wyatt, a sliver of revenge for all the terror Bray has caused him over the last few weeks. Lots to like about these two segments put together; a good in ring promo segment led into a good match, and two separate Battleground rivalries got some breathing space and a chance to shine.

puRgatoRy:
Sasha Banks & Becky Lynch vs. Charlotte & Dana Brooke: While short and unmemorable, this was still one of the more effective women’s segments on Raw over the last few weeks, as Charlotte and Dana Brooke unleashed a fairly convincing beatdown on Sasha Banks and Becky Lynch, with a little help from Natalya. Both Charlotte and Dana have looked out of their depth in different ways recently, so it was nice to have an angle in which they were credible and dangerous. There’s also some real intrigue as to who Sasha’s partner is going to be at Battleground and whether it will in fact be Bayley. Almost anyone else would be an anti-climax, so fingers crossed we’ll get that pairing of good friends, better enemies. The whole division is in a dismal lull at the moment, but Banks winning the championship and Bayley being quickly positioned as her main challenger could give things a proper shot in the arm.

THE wRong:
Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins: This whole match just felt unnecessary. We’ve seen Ambrose vs. Rollins hundreds of times before; sometimes it’s been really good, but never has it reached such transcendent levels of excellence that it demands to be revisited every single year. I understand that building to the Shield triple threat without Roman Reigns is a challenge, and must have made doing a singles title match on Raw or Smackdown (or both of them, as it turned out) extremely tempting, but it didn’t really have anything to offer in terms of telling a good story. Ambrose was always going to retain the belt one way or another, because having him lose it would have been truly baffling, and so the match lacked genuine tension or drama. An attempt was made to circumvent this by having Stephanie McMahon actually award Rollins the title after a contentious double pin finish, only for her decision to be overturned later in the night on the WWE Network, setting up a Smackdown rematch. With the looming prospect of the draft though, this felt like a curious afterthought, a strange plot twist that no one really cared about. The actual in ring action was fine, starting slowly but bubbling up into a very decent Raw main event, but it wasn’t good enough to justify the frustration of the hesitant, inconclusive ending. It really is a pity that the build to what people generally assumed would be a Wrestlemania main event one day has been so underwhelming, overshadowed by Reigns’ suspension and the Draft. The Battleground main event should still be superb, but I’m less certain that it will be than I was when it was announced, which says something…

The Clogged up Midcard: There was a period in between the 12 man tag match and the Ambrose/Rollins main event where very little of consequence happened at all, and that’s a pretty hefty proportion of the show. In that vacuum, we got the aforementioned women’s tag match, which was OK, a Baron Corbin squash, a tag match pitting Dolph Ziggler and Zack Ryder against Rusev and Sheamus that didn’t have much to say for itself, and some scattered backstage skits involving the general managers which were of little consequence. I’ve come to accept these lulls as par for the course on Raw, but this one just felt particularly egregious to me for some reason. I was in a bad mood, I suppose, but it feels like maybe life’s too short to waste on full, unedited three hour Raws.

THE Ridiculous:
NOTHING

The 1104th edition is over…

6.5

The final score: review Average

The 411

A good rebound from last week's lifeless episode, with two good matches, the big announcement of the new General Managers, and a main event that, while not entirely satisfying, was at the very least noteworthy. It still had a fair few slow moments, especially with the proliferation of short and largely meaningless matches in the midcard, but that's almost to be expected with the three hour Raws. They're most enjoyable with judicious use of the fast forward button, and if you press play in the right places on this episode you'll find enough to enjoy.