5 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Raw (Results & Review - 19 Oct)
Wild IC title match elevates show, while Roman puts on his working boots.
That certainly was one hell of a way to close out Monday Night Raw.
Heading into the final half-hour of Monday’s program, Raw was trending toward a middling-at-best grade, avoiding some of the pitfalls of recent weeks, but still not delivering a genuine “wow” moment.
Then came that final 30-plus minutes.
Chad Gable, Dragon Lee, and Rey Mysterio stole the show with an incredible triple threat for the Intercontinental Championship that was too fast to accurately recap. Suffice it to say, this was yet another match from Gable that wrestling fans should go out of their way to catch. He’s turning the IC Title back into the workhorse championship.
Then the Usos arrived and demanded a showdown with 946.
While much of this Gang Wars storyline between 946 and the Bloodline has been comically bad, they managed – for one night, at least – to land the plane by avoiding the campy dialogue and cartoonish violence, and by involving the one wrestler who really needed to acknowledge this angle and become part of it.
The rest of Raw was bang average at best, but the show really was elevated by that Intercontinental Championship triple threat. It’s becoming a cheat code for Paul Levesque when booking the program.
Let’s get to it…