John Cena And Brock Lesnar To Miss WWE Raw Tonight

With WWE SummerSlam taking place in two weeks on August 17 you would think tonight's Raw would be about building up the main event match between WWE World Heavyweight Champion John Cena and his challenger Brock Lesnar. They probably will address it, but they will have to do it without both men in attendance at tonight's show in Austin, Texas. Cena missed the July 21st episode of Raw due to filming the movie Trainwreck, but he returned to television last week to do a promo as well as have a match against Cesaro. Cena isn't expected to be on Raw tonight since he is filming Trainwreck again. We have noted several times in the past two months that Cena has worked less live events and has missed TVs due to his movie commitments. Since it's not a WWE produced film, they are not going to work around his schedule. Even though WWE knew of those commitments in advance they still put the WWE Title on him because they knew he would be able to appear on TV enough to promote SummerSlam. Brock Lesnar was at the July 21st episode of Raw with his manager Paul Heyman as he was announced as Cena's SummerSlam opponent, but he missed Raw last week. Lesnar isn't expected to be at Raw tonight because of his contract that calls for him to work a limited schedule. Speaking of Heyman, Dave Meltzer notes at F4WOnline.com that Heyman will be appearing on The MMA Hour today at 2:05 p.m. Eastern time in the New York studios with Ariel Helwani plugging his DVD. Since Raw is in Austin, Texas it's unlikely that he would fly there after doing an appearance. Since Heyman's DVD comes out on Tuesday it makes sense that he would be in a major market like New York to promote it. The positive aspect about Cena and Lesnar not meeting face to face until next week is that it will make people want to see the match more. A lot of main events are promoted in ways where one guy has the advantage one week and then the other guy gets it back the week later. In this case nobody has the advantage. We want to see them face to face next week on Raw and then in two weeks we'll see the epic match at SummerSlam. We don't know if WWE will address the fact that their SummerSlam main event will miss the show tonight. Most likely they will air some sort of video package on each guy. Maybe Heyman will do some interview via satellite to try to promote the match. Their absence will give more time to the other matches at SummerSlam too. Next week's Raw should be a big one with Cena, Lesnar and Heyman all in attendance. Hulk Hogan will be there as the special guest host on his birthday as well.