4 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Saturday Night's Main Event (12 July - Results & Review)

1. Screwy Finishes Galore

WWE Saturday Night's Main Event Jimmy Uso Solo Sikoa Talla Tonga
WWE

How hard is it to book a clean finish in 2025? Apparently, in WWE, it’s pretty damn tough.

Saturday Night’s Main Event’s four-match card went something like this: Jelly Roll distraction leading to an RKO, Talla Tonga interference and assist with a pin, changed finish due to injury, and ref bump.

Even the one match with technically a clean finish – LA Knight pinned Seth Rollins without any shenanigans – likely was going to have some outside interference from Rollins’ crew before his injury changed the ending. Knight would have lost, but likely wouldn’t have lost cleanly.

WWE has fallen into the trap of booking screwy finishes regularly, getting away from minimizing them so they mean something when they happen. Instead, it’s distraction finishes, outside interference, and ref bumps on every show. And this program had all three!

It’s lazy booking, and it has the unfortunate side-effect of training fans to not accept a possible finish until they see the interference, or they actively look for a ref bump rather than it being a surprise. When your fans are conditioned to expect shenanigans in every match, it becomes difficult to shock them, or even to just book a straightforward match with a simple finish.

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Contributor
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.