5 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (June 28)

Someone on the Raw writing staff apparently has had an epiphany and decided to start doing his or her job. That person clearly isn’t writing the women’s segments, but they have managed to make Raw more bearable this past couple of weeks.

Raw featured an entertaining opening and solid closing, and included some nice action along the way. While far from a blowaway, Raw gave us three good to really good matches and a pretty damn good promo segment for the WWE Championship feud. That alone should merit pretty positive marks these days.

Unfortunately, Raw is three hours long, and its women’s wrestling segments have been so abysmal of late that it’s starting to feel like a plague on the show. Monday was no exception, with the six-woman tag match being a drab affair because you can’t pick the heroines out of a lineup. The Eva Marie/Doudrop stuff fell off a cliff with the three-week-old partnership already falling apart. Nikki Cross is a goof. And Asuka jobbed, and no one blinked.

And so, Raw once again was a couple of steps forward, and at least 1.5 steps back. The show can’t seem to put all the pieces together, leaving fans to dissect what they liked and what they couldn’t stand. No one is expecting them to hit everything out of the park, but the swing between one segment to another is sometimes dramatic.

With that said, let’s get to it…