4 Ups & 8 Downs From WWE Raw (May 30)

3. 20 Minutes

Rhea ripley Liv Morgan
WWE.com

That’s not the length of one of the big matches on Raw Monday night. It’s how long Liv Morgan had to wait from her entrance until her match against Rhea Ripley actually started.

Morgan made her entrance leading into a commercial. When Raw came back, we cut to a backstage interview with Mustafa Ali, where Theory jumped him. We then got another commercial break, but when the show returned, the announcers threw to a video about Memorial Day. This finally gave way to the start of the match.

That’s just unconscionable, and there’s literally no reason for that sort of thing. How hard is it to format your show so your wrestlers aren’t standing in the ring for 20 minutes off-camera doing literally nothing?

Again, compared to a real sport, this would be a baseball player announced to come up to bat immediately after the top of the 7th inning is over and stand in the batter’s box through the 7th-inning stretch, the pitcher’s warm-up tosses, a new pitcher is brought in, and a fan getting loose on the field.

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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.