4 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (June 6)

4. Ripley Gets Title Shot

Rhea ripley Bianca Belair
WWE.com

Hats off to Rhea Ripley, who has gone from a going-nowhere tag team to Raw Women’s Championship #1 contender in the span of a couple months.

Ripley won a fatal four-way match Monday night by hitting Doudrop with a Riptide, earning the title shot at Money in the Bank. While Rhea versus Bianca Belair should be a banger, and this gives Judgment Day some needed focus and purpose for the next few weeks, this item still gets negative marks.

The match itself was pretty paint-by-numbers, with two women spending a ton of time on the outside “selling” while the other two wrestled in the ring. Things plodded along slowly, which really didn’t fit for a main event. On top of that, it would have had more impact had Ripley not lost just last week, but that’s that long-term booking from WWE once again. They’re so good at telling stories!

So while Ripley/Belair is a solid match, we can’t give positive marks to something that disappointed in the ring and clearly had little forethought.

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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.