5 Ups And 1 Down From Last Night's NXT

1. Back In Black(heart)

I've read quite a lot of snark and shoulder-shrugging at the Blackheart/Ripley vs Aliyah/Martinez match but, sincerely now friends, I thought it was fine. Aggressively fine, in fact.

It's quite the year this, that by the latter stages of August we find that both Aliyah (the brand's greenest regular feature) has now had the exact same number of televised matches as Rhea Ripley (a woman so highly thought of that she beat Baszler, Charlotte, and Sasha Banks in the space of a weekend and got a WrestleMania match) but, here we are. 12 each, in case you're wondering.

While this match didn't exactly set the pulses racing - precisely because it required the aforementioned greenest woman in the ring to do the bulk of the heavy-lifting - it worked on a number of levels. Blackheart gets a win back after a ropey few weeks, Ripley scores one over the Robert Stone Brand, and Martinez took a brutal bump that's escalate her personal beef even further.

It's a shame it'll not happen in time for TakeOver, but we've now got genuine heat between Ripley and Martinez, and if we get a Very Violent Match out of it then it's worth any number of C+ tag matches.