4 Ups & 9 Downs From WWE Raw (Nov 2)

2. A Meaningful Victory

The New Day Hurt Business
WWE.com

Typically, “beating the champ to earn a title shot” is a WWE trope that automatically earns a “down” here.

However, the Hurt Business toppling New Day in a hard-fought tag team match actually worked really well. Cedric Alexander & Shelton Benjamin are a duo that works well, but honestly haven’t teamed together a ton. They needed a big win to score credibility, and without a roster of credible tag teams on Raw, beating the most established tag champs in all of WWE (and hence a team that could lose without losing credibility) was a good way to go.

The victory was about as clean as it gets for a heel team, which sets them up for a Raw tag title shot, which also was part of a follow-through for the Hurt Business taking the fight to RETRIBUTION. This was a nice piece of business overall.

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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.