5 Ups And 7 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Mar 2)
2. A Horribly Boring Debut
After being hyped as a killer, Shayna Baszler could have run through former rival Kairi Sane in seconds, and no one would have blinked. But in her first Raw match, the Queen of Spades had a very different match.
It was good for Sane – the first woman to defeat Shayna, beating her for the NXT Women’s Championship in 2018 – that she got some decent offense, but this match was everything it shouldn’t have been. It was slow, plodding, with Kairi being injured by Baszler early on and then hanging around for a long time before Shayna blocked an Insane Elbow and locked in the Kirafuda Clutch for the tap-out.
In reality, if the writers wanted more of a back-and-forth, Sane’s speed and Asuka’s presence could have given the Kabuki Warrior an early advantage before Baszler locked it down and dominated, injuring and then defeating Kairi convincingly. That would have worked much better.
Instead, we got a yawner that probably did more to hurt Shayna’s mystique than anything else.