4 Ups And 7 Downs From WWE Raw (Dec 28)

6. To Arms!

This might not even register to some, and it might not be a big deal, but it was noticeable. Typically when agents are laying out matches, they try to avoid repeating spots in multiple matches too much. For example, you don’t want four matches on the card ending with a rollup finish or a powerbomb, or something like that.

Monday night, we saw four matches where the heel targeted the left arm of their opponent. Four of seven matches saw wrestlers pick the same body part to attack throughout the bouts.

Sheamus targeted Keith Lee’s arm in the opener, with the wounded wing factoring into some moves. Then Shayna Baszler zeroed in on Dana Brooke’s arm, hyper-extending it on the apron and trying to stomp her elbow as she normally does. Elias spent a good portion of his match attacking AJ Styles’ left arm. And Nia Jax went after Charlotte Flair’s arm – which she had “broken” six months ago.

And that probably is the crux of this “down”: Charlotte/Nia was the one match where targeting the left arm actually made a lot of sense, since Jax had injured Flair’s arm several months earlier. But after seeing arms attacked in three of the previous five matches, it lost some of its impact.

That’s the sort of thing that is easily avoidable, and yet it happened Monday night.