6 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Raw (Nov 14)

5. Corbin’s A Giver

Akira Tozawa Baron Corbin
WWE.com

Contrast the terrible casting of Mustafa Ali as an underdog babyface in his match against Bobby Lashley with Akira Tozawa’s clash with Baron Corbin.

Tozawa hadn’t been treated as a serious wrestler in forever, and yet he had Corbin off-balance for the entire match, running circles around the much bigger man and bouncing off him at top speed. Baron ate a missile dropkick, a hurricanrana, suicide dive and other speedy offense before catching a diving crossbody and turning it into the End of Days for the win.

In doing so, Corbin made Tozawa look more like a threat than Ali did in his match. To be fair, Lashley and Corbin are very different heels, but it’s evidence that there was a path to making Mustafa look better, as Tozawa came out of Raw looking good.

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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.