4 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (6 Jul - Results & Review)

3. Gunther Relieves Cody Of His Main Event Duties

It’s been a minute since Raw opened with a chaotic scene that wasn’t just a pull-apart brawl in the ring.

Monday night, Sami Zayn arrived in full celebration mode, waving his WWE Championship around and reveling in being the guy. He quickly ran into Cody Rhodes and couldn’t resist running him down in that backhanded manner that has become Sami's calling card.

Cody handled it deftly, but he quickly found himself on the receiving end of a Gunther sneak attack, with the Ring General quickly powerbombing him through a table. The Austrian got in Sami’s face, calling him a disgrace and a fluke of a champion before slamming a car door on Rhodes’ head to make sure he was taken out of action.

Just like that, Gunther re-established himself as a serious threat for the world title and threw the Raw main event into jeopardy. In reality, this was also a clever booking strategy, as it absolved WWE from delivering a Cody/Sami match where fans very well might have turned on both wrestlers because neither hails from Chicago.

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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.