5 Ups & 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (May 10)

3. Making Matches Feel Less Special

Rhea Ripley Asuka
WWE.com

As if watching all three men in the WWE Championship triple threat wrestle in singles matches the past three weeks wasn’t enough, we got to see Asuka and Rhea Ripley wrestle for the third time in the past month on Monday night.

This WrestleMania 37 rematch (which also was fought the night after Mania) was prompted after Charlotte Flair (the other person in Sunday’s triple threat) convinced Sonya Deville to book the contest… because that’s what heels and heel authority figures do. So what was built up as a special match at Mania and is being held with an extra participant at WrestleMania Backlash was thrown out on free TV without any warning or buildup on Monday.

Worse, the match was plodding. There were no stakes to the match, no reason for it, and the announcers and wrestlers made that obvious in how they approached it. They would have been better off having Ripley wrestle a tune-up match against someone like Nikki Cross (remember her?) than this.

But hey, we got Deville some camera time for her heel authority figure character, so yay.

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Contributor
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.