5 Ups & 9 Downs From WWE Raw (Feb. 22)

6. New Day Easy Pickings?

RETRIBUTION Kofi Kingston
WWE.com

We’ll get into the utter failure that is RETRIBUTION in a bit, but first, a quick observation from the New Day/RETRIBUTION match…

Was New Day really in a position to job to T-Bar and Mace in under 2 minutes on Monday night? The duo hit Kofi Kingston with their High Justice finisher in short order, but rather than pin him, they listened to Mustafa Ali and picked him up to hit the move again, only for Kofi to manage to put both men down with Trouble in Paradise for the win.

But overlooked in that is the fact that Kingston, a former WWE Champion, was all but laid out by a team that has been the modern-day JOB Squad for months now. It would be like Shawn Michaels getting laid out by Val Venis & Viscera in 90 seconds during a D-Generation X tag match in 2006. (OK, not quite like that, but you get the point.)

The idea was to make RETRIBUTION look incompetent, but it also made New Day look very, very fortunate to survive with the win on Monday night, which couldn’t have been the intention.

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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.