4 Ups And 9 Downs From WWE Raw (Aug 17)

3. Women Get It Right. Again

Bayley Sasha Banks
WWE.com

Sure, you could gripe about SmackDown Women’s Champion Bayley tapping out, but we’re gonna have to give that a pass.

The team of Shayna Baszler & Asuka should terrify any other wrestling duo out there, with two of the most dominant women’s wrestlers in NXT history pairing up to take on the WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions Monday night. The match worked, not just because all four women can go, but because they slipped a nice little angle in there, with Nia Jax jumping the barricade and brawling with Shayna, pulling her out of the match. (We already dinged this for the non-DQ, so we’ll move on.)

Asuka is more than good enough to be believable hanging on against Bayley and Sasha Banks, getting some hope spots before finally tagging in a returning Baszler for a frenzied finish that saw action fly all over the place. After a series of false finishes, Shayna tapped Bayley out with the Kirafuda Clutch.

Really fun match on a night that did not have a lot of good wrestling.

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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.