2 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (20 Jul - Results & Review)
WWE's road to SummerSlam hit a brick wall during a lacklustre episode of Raw.
If WWE's SummerSlam build was a car, then it'd be one meandering along at 10mph but somehow still failing to avoid potholes on the road. The latest edition of flagship show Raw definitely struggled to get started. Then, just like that, it was over. No Roman Reigns, no proper hype for the World Heavyweight Title bout he has vs. Seth Rollins, but a heck of a lot of content that was just sort of...there.
This wasn't a banner night for team red, to be blunt.
A hot opening tag-team match and stirring main event did sandwich things nicely, but everything else? Oh boy. You know it's a poor night at the office when even Paul Heyman waxing lyrical and getting all poetic to sell a Hell In A Cell match between Brock Lesnar and Oba Femi can't get the blood pumping.
WWE's power players need to sit down and have a chat about where they're heading with things, because this just isn't it. The Bloodline stranglehold continues, and Triple H should be worried about how frankly all over the place that group is whether Roman is in the building or not. Again being blunt, they're listless when the 'OTC' is absent.
Fans shouldn't be able to skip the crown jewel weekly this close to a major PLE like SummerSlam, but most would get by with highlights from Raw. That speaks volumes about the phoned-in effort Detroit's crowd got, and it isn't exactly a compliment to the way creative has handled things lately. No wonder ticket sales are starting to sag.
Here's some good and far too much bad from WWE's latest.