4 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (Nov 16)

2. Tag Team Warfare

Xavier Woods Cedric Alexander
WWE.com

For all the criticism levied against Raw throughout 2020, one that has gone underreported has been the lack of outstanding wrestling. Oh sure, we’ve seen plenty of acceptable wrestling, and some pretty good matches, but the really good ones have been few and far between.

On Monday, we got a really good tag match for the Raw Tag Team Championship. New Day successfully fended off a challenge from the Hurt Business, but it wasn’t for lack of Shelton Benjamin & Cedric Alexander trying. The match started off following a basic, but reliable formula and would have slotted in as “perfectly acceptable,” but then it hit a different gear.

The two teams exchanged a flurry of offense at the end, with Shelton nailing an Angle Slam as a tribute to his former stable Team Angle, but it was the New Day hitting Daybreak for the win to retain the titles and head to Survivor Series as champs.

It wasn’t a classic, but we got to see a good, hard-fought tag title match, and it had been a good while since we got that on Raw.

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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.