5 Ups & 8 Downs From WWE Raw (May 17)
Kingston pins Lashley, Bliss uses Fiend magic, Asuka beats Flair.
WWE can't help but shoot itself in the foot at the moment.
WrestleMania Backlash was a broadly strong, well-received show highlighted by its WWE and Universal Title matches, which soared for different reasons. One was a big, beefy spotfest with enough heft to position it amongst WWE's most physically impressive matches of the year, and another a slower, classically-paced title fight where limb work was the key story. If not for the zombies, it would have been one of the best pay-per-views in years.
And how did the company follow it? With an episode as drab and inconsistent as the Raw brand has been for the past six months, throughout which good-to-great wrestling was continually sullied by bad booking.
Five of the night's eight matches didn't get a clean finish, the characters and their motivations were all over the place, and the lineup comprised almost entirely of rematches. Credit to those wrestlers who made the most of Raw's bad material by working out of their skins from bell-to-bell - they made this thing semi-watchable.
The night brought a twisted Bobby Lashley open challenge, a big Charlotte Flair vs. Asuka singles match, Fiend magic, stuffed roses, and a whole lot more.
Let's run through it...