7 Ups And 8 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Feb 4)
The Man owns Raw, but exits early. EC3 disappoints, Ambrose spirals.
If Monday Night Raw was any indication of how the card will look at WrestleMania 35, then we got our first argument in favor of a women’s match closing out the show.
That could be in part because both competitors actually, you know, appeared on Raw, while neither male wrestler in the WWE Universal Championship match showed up. Regardless, Becky Lynch opened and owned the show, while Ronda Rousey’s virtuous champion act worked really well, whether intentional or not. This is looking more and more like a money match, and hopefully the men step up their game.
But WrestleMania is still a couple stops away. We have the Elimination Chamber PPV coming up first, with new titles on the line. We also presumably will have other matches, though not many were paid lip service Monday night. What we got outside Rousey and Lynch was a somewhat disappointing episode, with EC3, Dean Ambrose and Apollo Crews all getting lackluster turns in front of the camera.
We did get a really fun exchange involving Elias and Jeff Jarrett, as two guitar-wielding wrestlers did battle, but WWE has its work cut out to really ramp things up during the coming weeks. And with Lynch possibly on hiatus (in storyline), it could get trickier to do that.
With that said, let’s get to it…