Predicting The Raw Vs SmackDown WWE Survivor Series 2019 Card
RED! BLUE! Yellow? WWE goes to war with itself as a Fiend and a Beast collide.
Amidst all talk of a Wednesday Night War and the October 11th dual roster draft, there's been understandably little discussion on Vince McMahon's least-loved "Big Four" event hurtling towards us all alongside the crushing reminder than we will all soon be back in the roaring '20s.
Despite often being cast as the weakest of WWE's blockbusters, the final showpiece supercard of the decade carries a certain expectation after the reinvention of the event since the 2016 brand extension.
That year, the brands went to war in a blistering one-hour Raw Vs SmackDown elimination battle, whilst Goldberg shocked the world with a 1:26 annihilation of Brock Lesnar. 2017 and 2018 upped the ante, pitching all the respective titleholders against one another.
There were cases of bizarre brilliance as The Usos and The Bar fought for the first time, SmackDown stewards AJ Styles and Daniel Bryan took incredible runs at perennial Universal Champion Brock Lesnar, and Ronda Rousey's cancelled clash with Becky Lynch resulted in a banger replacement against Charlotte Flair and the likelihood of a women's WrestleMania main event finally coming to fruition.
The Survivor Series matters again. The roster split doesn't matter 11 months of the year, but once a year it does because the nearly-dead Thanksgiving tradition tells you so. Thankfully the card has done more for the gimmick than the lacklustre promotion...
7. AJ Styles Vs Shinsuke Nakamura
As a babyface battle, this was a chronic disappointment on WWE's grandest stage. In a hero-versus-villain combination, the matches slumped quicker than Shinsuke Nakamura dropped to his knees to punch AJ Styles square in the d*ck and b*lls. As two heels fighting over nothing, might...this...actually...work?
Consider the following possibilities; 'The Phenomenal One' has found brand new form as a heel since getting up to no good on Monday Night Raw with Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson. It's taken 'The King Of Strong Style' longer to land on his feet as a proper piece of sh*t, but a recent union with Sami Zayn has absolutely done the trick.
The pair are a delight together, with Zayn's infuriating schtick somehow lighting a fire underneath the former NJPW icon - a fire that has thus far set Shinsuke's babyface opponents ablaze via some of his nastier-looking Kinshasas.
Loaded with plenty of history, an arena floor full of sh*thouse sidekicks, and some potentially hilarious cheating on both sides, this could at long last be the match to rival the incredible effort they assembled at Wrestle Kingdom 10 ahead of their separate WWE/NXT debuts in 2016. To find that in WWE, in 2019, would be some achievement.