6 Ups & 3 Downs From Last Night's WWE SmackDown (Jun 26)

Downs...

3. As Dry As It Gets

Jeff Hardy and his wacky facepaint gimmick were back in town last night, but the planned match with Shinsuke Nakamura was shelved. Bitten by a sniffer dog earlier in the week, 'The King Of Strong Style' is out of action, and Hardy was left to wrestle an unannounced Sanity member instead.

While Killian Dain would've made an exciting opponent, WWE went for the dullest option: Eric Young, who has always been a serviceable worker, but never anything special. He lived up to his last night. The United States Title bout was as dry as cinder, with no heat, no urgency, and no real escalation. Boring in the extreme, all it accomplished was filling 10-12 minutes of airtime (including entrances), though the DQ finish allowed for an easy transition into the next segment.

Sanity invaded the ring, prompting The Usos out for a brawl. SmackDown then invoked the spirit of Teddy Long, with the match becoming a six-man tag. We'll get to that later, but the action preceding all this was tedious, with the combination of a pedestrian Young and a supposedly injured Jeff making for 2018's most skippable title fight.