3 Ups & 10 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Sept. 6)

5. Tag Champs Look Like Chumps

Rhea Ripley Nikki A.S.H.
WWE.com

First off, can we get a “poor Rhea” for Rhea Ripley? The lass seemed destined for greatness a couple of years ago in NXT and leading into her angle with Charlotte Flair for WrestleMania 36.

On Monday, she was teaming with and trading bad jokes with a diminutive wrestler who calls herself “almost a superhero” and comes across as a bad motivational speaker. Ripley teamed with Nikki A.S.H. to battle the WWE Tag Team Champions Natalya & Tamina. The match itself was clunky and awkward, with Rhea and Nikki looking like they didn’t know how to work together.

But they still managed to topple the reigning tag champs in a non-title match, which says something about the tag champs since they couldn’t get it together. And so now maybe Ripley and Nikki are sort of maybe kind of in line for a possible opportunity to challenge for the tag titles at some indeterminate time in the future.

Literally no one looked good here, with the tag champs losing to a duo teaming for the third time, Ripley being relegated to the nonexistent tag division, and Nikki just doing her bad comedy.

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Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.