3 Ups And 12 Downs From WWE Raw (Sept 21)

2. RETRIBUTION ‘Debuts’ And Fizzles

So after lame beatdowns, mild “takeovers” of Raw and SmackDown, crappy graphics, awful promos and a clear lack of direction, RETRIBUTION finally got in the ring Monday night. The group that has professed a desire to dismantle WWE because it’s diseased had its first match on Raw…

And they wrestled something awfully close to generic WWE style. The three goofs – now wearing Bane and Jason Voorhees-style masks and inexplicably renamed T-Bar, Mace and Slapjack – stomped and punched away, despite two of them – Shane Thorne and Dominik Dijakovic – being tremendous in-ring athletes. You have to assume they didn’t want Dijakovic using his dynamic offense, because it would give him away, so instead we got the most boring match possible.

Oh, and then the match against the Hurt Business ended in a DQ when T-Bar (Dijakovic) hit a man from the apron. Yes, one punch caused a DQ. So RETRIBUTION lost their first match on Raw. And then the locker room emptied out and they beat down the three named goofs and all the faceless goons that had shown up.

And then, just to bury the group further, everything gave way to Randy Orton hitting an RKO on Drew McIntyre in the ring, shoving RETRIBUTION’s big night to the back burner so we could focus on the WWE Championship match – which isn’t wrong, but it shows how misguided the company was to make this their debut night.