4 Ups & 10 Downs From WWE Raw (June 14)

7. No Notice Needed

You know, if you were going to have a match with retirement implications, you would think WWE would have given a week’s notice, or at least an hour.

But in the land of WWE, a commercial break is enough of a heads-up for a match where if Jeff Hardy lost, he would be forced to retire. And for that reason, it was impossible to take the match or stipulation seriously. Cedric Alexander berated Hardy and said he wished he had beaten him so badly last week that he put him in a retirement home (despite losing to Jeff last week), prompting Hardy to put his career on the line.

The smart thing to do would have been to announce the match for next week – or at least later in the show, then aired a couple of short videos about Hardy’s career. At least then you might have taken it half-seriously. Instead, we went to a commercial and came back to watch a crappy match where Alexander show-boated and lost again.

So even when WWE tries to add stakes to a match, they fail miserably.