3 Ups And 8 Downs From WWE Raw (Dec 21)

Ups...

3. Well, They’re Trying

Mandy Rose Shayna Baszler
WWE.com

The tag match between former champs Nia Jax & Shayna Baszler and Mandy Rose & Dana Brooke isn’t going to win any end-of-year awards, but we’ll still give it positive marks here.

Brooke & Rose hung with the bruising duo, making it much more of a competitive match than it had been when they faced off more than a month ago in a 3-minute bout. Jax & Baszler still won, with Shayna kicking out of a few rollups and flipping one into a Kirafuda Clutch.

The goal here – with new WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions Charlotte Flair & Asuka on commentary – clearly seemed to be twofold: keep the former champs strong, but also make the women’s tag division look stronger by having another team look good. And while you can argue that Mandy & Dana still aren’t as fluid as other wrestlers, having more competent challengers out there only helps things, so mission accomplished.

Hopefully, WWE remembers that the women’s tag titles can be defended on all three brands – they mentioned this on commentary, and the new champs are defending on SmackDown this week – considering they seemed to forget this during Nia & Shayna’s reign. That would help increase the competition in the tag division.

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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.