wrestling / News
Mansoor On Being Nervous Before His WWE Raw Debut, End Of His Winning Streak
Mansoor made the leap to Raw on this week’s show, and the WWE star weighed in on his Raw debut in a new interview. The Saudi Arabian star made his debut on the Raw brand as he signed a Raw contract, then faced Sheamus in a match that saw his winning streak end by DQ when Humberto Carrillo got involved. You can check out highlights from the interview below:
On the end of his losing streak by DQ: “I could ask for Humberto Carrillo to wait like five or ten minutes. If I was going to lose, I wanted to lose like a man. I wanted to have a decisive ending to that match to determine who was the better competitor … How anticlimactic is that? I’m trying not to get hot about it. I don’t want to get mad at Humberto. Like, I get it. He was mad at Sheamus. Sheamus has been punking him and attacking him backstage and doing all these things for the past few weeks. Like, I get it. But you really couldn’t have waited just a little longer?”
On his winning streak: “The whole streak thing was really crazy. Cause I didn’t even notice it until someone pointed it out around like 30. And that’s when it started to kind of change gears for me, because suddenly I had something that I was defending. Like, suddenly there were higher stakes to every one of my matches. On 205 Live. On Main Event. And it was like, ‘Okay, yeah. This is something that I can really build.’ And it brought the best out of my opponents too. Guys like Drew Gulak, and on 205, guys like August Grey, Curt Stallion, Ever-Rise. They wanted to break that streak and they wanted to be the guy who broke that streak. So they were bringing next level intensity and competitiveness that I really enjoyed.”
On making his Raw debut: “I was nervous. I had butterflies in my stomach. I felt like I was going to throw up the whole night. This is it. This is my first impression. If I don’t match the intensity… a guy like Sheamus, who is probably going to beat the tar out of me, he’s probably going to knock a tooth out. Probably the hardest hitting, toughest guy in the company. If I don’t match that aggression, I’m dead in the water. And I was behind the curtain and then my music hit and I walked out and it was gone. I got in the ring and the bell rang and it was like, ‘yeah, this is what I was meant to do.'”
On his goal on Raw: “I really want to prove is that I’m a guy who can come out there every single week and put on a hell of a show and put on a hell of a match. No matter what beatings I take, no matter how hard I get hit, I’m the guy that always comes back and finds a way to pull through. That’s the reputation that I’ve tried to establish for myself. And I want to be in that locker room on a roster full of guys… of legends, some of whom I was watching as early as when I was in high school, and prove that I belong and that I fit in. I would really like to show the world that I deserve to be a RAW Superstar.”
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