5 Ups & 3 Downs From Last Night's WWE SmackDown (Oct 17)
Downs...
3. Wash, Rinse, Repeat
The SmackDown booking team's inability to book their talented women's division in anything other than faceless multi-person matches, feuds, and segments is becoming cliché. They'll throw the odd singles bout together every now and then, but for the most part, SD's women have been running in a hamster's wheel for much of 2017, and it's entirely down to offerings like this.
Natalya, Lana, and Tamina teamed to face Naomi, Charlotte Flair, and Becky Lynch last night. There's plenty of great workers in that group, but it's impossible to grab the spotlight when sharing it with six others. Thus, their match was a textbook SmackDown women's division clash. Not bad, not good: just forgettable.
We got a little story development with Nattie grabbing a chair after the match, but Charlotte ran her off, and that was all. There was no sign of them anywhere else on the show. They got one dull six-person tag match, a brief follow-up, and nothing more.
Isn't this supposed to be 'The Land Of Opportunity?'. Perhaps treating the women's division with a little more care would make that tagline seem like less of a farce.