4 Ups & 11 Downs From WWE Raw (Jan 11)

3. An Abysmal Night For Wrestling

Jeff Hardy Elias
WWE.com

Looking at the match results on Monday night makes your head hurt.

The card included 10 matches (not including Triple H and Randy Orton’s time-wasting fight), seven of which failed to last more than four minutes. On top of that, six (SIX!) of them were directly related, with three matches leading straight into another bout: Jeff Hardy/Jaxson Ryker led to Hardy/Elias, Sheamus & Keith Lee’s tag victory gave way to a singles match between them, and Riddle/Bobby Lashley segued to Riddle/MVP.

Worse, none of these matches were any good, with the exception of the Lee/Sheamus stuff. Sure, Raw was apparently rewritten on the fly, but you’re telling us that they couldn’t just have booked a couple of 10-minute contests with all the talented wrestlers on the roster? Even just lengthening a couple of the existing matches (AJ Styles and Drew Gulak could have had a fun bout) would have worked well.

Instead, we got a horrible night for the in-ring product.

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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.