WWE's very own "European Vacation" continued today, with "WWE Raw" coming to viewers live from Belfast, Ireland. Fittingly, some of the company's Irish talent were in action, though Lyra Valkyria was relegated to an admittedly-entertaining backstage segment. As always, our dutiful contingent of Wrestling Inc. writers had plenty of opinions to share on today's earlier-than-usual "Raw," and as we head into back-to-back weekends of Saturday Night's Main Event and the annual Royal Rumble, it's not all sunshine and roses.
Today's installment saw an unfortunate injury, a flurry of Rumble proclamations, and a pair of successful title defenses. Some of that will be covered below, complete with our take on it, but for a full breakdown of today's episode be sure to check out our "Raw" results page. With that out of the way, let's check in on our team's takes.
Watching, covering, or in any way enjoying professional wrestling requires certain commitments from one's personal life. Monday nights, Tuesday nights, Wednesday nights...Ok, even I can't admit to giving up my Thursday nights for TNA or my Friday nights for "SmackDown" but I think you get the point. So when WWE is abroad, and I get to watch "Raw" in the afternoon, it makes even the least-interesting episodes of "Raw" a little easier to swallow. There's something nice about knowing that I have most of a day left, as the Executive Producer credits roll over another house show disguised as a TV show.
Admittedly, I have a few more hours in my shift, but theoretically, I could go grocery shopping, go see a movie, do my laundry, or celebrate a local business that's having its grand opening. I have so much more time for activities when "Raw" is in the afternoon. The ability to finish "Raw" and still feel the sunlight on my face is cause enough to celebrate, as usually it ends in the bitter cold of a Chicago winter's night.
I know this is a very timezone-specific "Loved," but I'm assuming there's a handful of British fans who are happy to see the show before midnight, possibly even more. If WWE truly wants to be the global leader in sports and entertainment, then I say more international broadcasts, so that I can have another Monday night without my fiance coming home and saying, "Ah hell, we have to watch this again?"
Written by Ross W Berman IV
I hate to be the one to complain about Natalya finally getting screentime, but this was truly so bad.
On Monday's Dublin-based episode of "WWE Raw," Maxxine Dupri tried once more to dethrone current Women's Intercontinental Champion Becky Lynch. While Dupri ultimately came up short, it wasn't her inexperience that cost her, nor was it Lynch's heelish tactics. Betrayal forced Dupri's title ambitions to come undone, and who else was holding the knife in her back, other than her old friend and mentor, Natalya?
I wish the betrayal was as dramatic as I've described it to be. When Natalya put Lynch's foot on the ropes to force a break on Dupri's would-be-title-winning pinfall attempt, I'm sure WWE expected a huge gasp. I'm sure WWE expected people to cover their agape mouths with their hands in shock before unleashing a sea of boos onto the veteran Superstar. They must have: international crowds tend to be far more responsive to story beats than the typical American crowd. However, when Natalya, and WWE, pulled the trigger on a heel turn at the cost of the lovable Dupri, you could've heard a pin drop in that stadium. As Natalya went to beat Dupri again, a woman who everyone rallied behind to win the Women's Intercontinental Championship it was crickets. Absolutely nobody cared about this heel turn.
You should pin this on WWE. Natalya has not been seen on television in God knows how long, then all of a sudden she's going to come back and turn heel? How can you expect anyone to care about this change in behavior when there was little to no established behavior to refer back to in the first place? That little interaction Dupri and Natalya had backstage wasn't enough. I need Natalya to actually be present on "Raw" for me to care about it. I just don't care that she turned heel, because up until this moment, she wasn't doing anything!
Because Natalya has given us absolutely nothing to go off of, I can't even begin to parse out what her actual reasons for turning heel are. Sure, she's Dupri's mentor, but...if she wanted Dupri to fight her way to titles, why help out Lynch? Why screw over Dupri? Is she jealous? See, if we had gotten even just a week, two weeks, of build to this heel turn, then we would be in such a better position for it. On paper, this feud works: jealous mentor stabs their naive student in the back. This should've been bigger than it was, considering how underrated Natalya is and how over Dupri seems to be. It just wasn't, though. WWE thought Natalya would get heat? Paul, this is room temperature.
Written by Angeline Phu
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the Kabuki Warriors, but there are quite a few women's tag teams between "Raw" and "WWE SmackDown" and they're all gunning for the titles, soI don't necessarily think breaking one up, especially a team with two stars who can slot into the main event picture nicely after a solid feud of their own, is a bad thing. Tonight, Asuka and Kairi Sane seemed to tease a breakup during a backstage segment. Maybe "tease" is a strong word, but when Sane said she'd make sure Asuka won the Royal Rumble "no matter what," it certainly seems like the pair are headed toward a feud of their own.
Asuka started off the short segment in her usual way of yelling at poor Sane. She told her them losing the Women's Tag Team Championships was all Sane's fault, and she berated Sane for losing last week. She went as far as to say it hurt almost as bad as IYO SKY turning on them, which seemed to make sane panic further. I always feel bad for her, and this segment only strengthened that feeling.
It might not have meant anything, but Sane, when she said she would do "anything" had her first raised, like she was miming punching someone out to defend Asuka, but she held it up a little too long as she was watching her partner walk away. That's really what made me think we may be headed toward a Kabuki Warriors breakup on the Road to WrestleMania.
While I love these women as a tag team, it seems likely WWE will put them back together when they need them (if the time is right for it or not), but I want to see a feud between them. Giving the women's division a feud outside of the main title pictures, even the lackluster mid-card titles, would be a breath of fresh air right now. I think all of us have been hoping Sane would turn on Asuka and give her what she deserves after months of abusing her friend and tag team partner, and it seems like that may be happening sooner rather than later. It looks like Sane costs Asuka the Rumble match, and the feud can go from there, possibly with Sane attempting to take refuge with some of the tag teams, like RHIYO, that the Kabuki Warriors wronged in the past. This was a quick backstage segment that had a lot of impact tonight, and I really liked what they did with it.
Written by Daisy Ruth
Injuries happen and it's absolutely no one's fault that Je'Von Evans couldn't continue his match on Monday with El Grande Americano. But it did happen, and considering both the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania are quickly approaching, it could not have come at a worse time. Hopefully it's not something major and he doesn't have too long out of action.
Evans went down just as his match was getting started, with the cameras making a deliberate effort not to focus on him during the commercial break as he talked to the referee about his condition. EGA and Los Americanos did well to work the crowd and provide some form of distraction, but at the same time it was nigh-on impossible to ignore the fact that the ring was not being shown and the crowd was very clearly more attuned to that situation, naturally.
When the commercial break ended, so too did the match via stoppage, and it doesn't feel too far out to say that EGA may not have got the win on this occasion otherwise. It just sucks for Evans, mostly, considering he has just been brought up from "WWE NXT" with an immense potential that has yet to feel truly legitimized. It's not as though he was a front-runner to win the Rumble or main event WrestleMania, but he was adding depth to a mid-card that could use names being built towards the Intercontinental title.
I cannot stress this enough but I hope that, as injuries go, this isn't too significant and doesn't provide much of a speed bump this early in his career.
Written by Max Everett
Every week, I become more and more convinced that Paul "Triple H" Levesque actually reads our opinion columns.
Okay, maybe he's a bit too busy being WWE CFO for that, but surely, someone in the WWE writer's room is paying attention to what we're writing here. It's either that, or someone at WWE finally grew a third brain cell, and realized that they should really start shifting their focus to the Royal Rumble, which is let me check my calendar a week from Saturday. On Monday's episode of "WWE Raw," we got about 10 Royal Rumble declarations, and 9 of those were packed into the last hour of programming. It's a sin to delay Royal Rumble announcements to less than 14 days out from the show, but I'd argue it's an even worse to jam-pack a show so full of Royal Rumble announcements, that none of them feel particularly special.
Jey Uso's Royal Rumble announcement was told through the crowd, where he belongs, so I guess that's pretty cool. I wasn't even mad when Rhea Ripley and IYO SKY made their joint Royal Rumble declaration; RHIYO is one of WWE's hottest items right now, and it would've been idiotic for them not to capitalize on their power as a unit. I started raising my eyebrow when Liv Morgan and Roxanne Perez of the Judgement Day came out, and, in the midst of their trash-talk towards RHIYO ahead of their WWE Women's World Tag Team Championship match at Saturday Night's Main Event, declared not only themselves, but Raquel Rodriguez as well. Like, I guess it could be written off as a "while we're on the topic" situation, but still: six Royal Rumble declarations in one show is quite a bit.
There's more! Bayley, Lyra Valkyria, Kairi Sane, and Asuka also declared themselves for the Women's Royal Rumble match at least, they implied their participation through backstage segments. While these segments were very cute (especially the Bayley and Valkyria one, where Bayley told Valkyria to "hug [her] tighter"), their chaotic and confusing nature definitely added to the already packed-to-the-gills feeling of this year's Royal Rumble announcements.
Can WWE not find a happy medium? My colleagues' criticisms of the complete lack of Rumble hype less than a month out from the event are still valid, but the solution here is not to dump a bunch of Rumble declarations on us. Nearly a third of the women's Royal Rumble match has been announced in one night. That's a bit overwhelming, even for the most diehard of wrestling fans.
In the future, maybe try to plan better. In the future, plan better, so that you're not dumping all of your Rumble declarations into two weeks.
Written by Angeline Phu
Well it's finally happened: I actually liked a match that had both interference and involved The Vision as the queen of hating on both of those things.
Was this still yet another match in a long line of matches that ended with some kind of interference? Yes, but at least this time, it wasn't interference from the heels as is oftentimes the case on WWE programming. I appreciate that the company tried to do something a little bit different tonight with Pearce being at ringside for much of the bout and Rey turning things around by using the brass knuckles himself. While it can be argued that Rey didn't necessarily need the brass knuckles and the distraction of Heyman and Pearce probably would've been enough as is, it was refreshing to actually see a trio of babyfaces be able to manage to outsmart a trio of heels in a business where that tends not to be the case most of the time.
It was also a nice change of pace to see a General Manager in Pearce get directly involved in a match for people causing trouble on their brand and keep an eye on things right from the ringside area, as they generally tend to keep their distance from behind the scenes. All in all, it may not have been absolutely perfect but it was still pretty good and something different on a show where there tends to be lots of repetition week after week after week.
Written by Olivia Quinlan
