6 Ups & 5 Downs For WWE Raw (7 July - Results & Review)

Downs…

5. Botch City

Since returning from injury, Kairi Sane has struggled to maintain any consistency inside the ring. She hasn’t looked great in her first few matches and seemed snakebit by seeing two opponents go down to injury (Zoey Stark and Liv Morgan).

Monday night, she battled Roxanne Perez in a match that had at least three or four head-scratching sequences where you could trick yourself into believing it was two wrestlers trying to artificially show a struggle in the ring, but in reality, it almost certainly was two wrestlers on different pages. Sloppy rollups, a botched leapfrog attempt, a botched neck snap on the ropes, a strange gutshot to stop a charge, and a sloppy headscissors all occurred during the first half of the match as it threatened to go completely off the rails.

Fortunately, Sane and Perez righted the ship and finished with a much stronger second half, though it still had a couple of iffy moments. Overall, this ended up being passable because the match got better as it wore on, rather than the other way around, but it’s impossible to ignore the awkward moments and sloppiness that proliferated the opening segment of the contest.

By comparison, look at Asuka when she ran down for the save from a two-on-one beatdown from Roxanne and Raquel Rodriguez. Her attacks looked crisp and impactful, as though she was bruising the hell out of the tag champs. Asuka’s worst strikes looked better than most of what occurred during the prior match. That’s never a good sign.