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

2. El Grande Disappointment

WWE Raw El Grande Americano Dragon Lee Ludwig Kaiser
WWE

The ongoing gag involving El Grande Americano – with Ludwig Kaiser inexplicably replacing an injured Chad Gable – is actually a pretty good one, especially when you have Corey Graves making Giant Machine and Midnight Rider references on commentary.

But Americano’s match against Dragon Lee was a disappointing affair. The match was a lot of nothing, with El Grande doing the “victory pose” taunt about 47 times between trading some rudimentary lucha-lite moves. The action was about as standard of a lucha libre-style match as you could get, which might have been the point, but it also meant Dragon Lee had to wrestle at about 70% effectiveness.

Dragon picking up the loss here after wrestling just a touch above half-capability was a huge letdown and an indictment of WWE booking. Since coming over to Raw in the 2024 draft, Lee’s run has been nothing short of a gigantic waste. He has exclusively wrestled members of the Judgment Day or American Made in all of his singles matches on Raw, and he has not won a singles bout since November 2024. That’s inexcusable.

Putting Dragon Lee in this match to once again lose to this masked character is simply a way to geek him out, and the match wasn’t even that entertaining, so there wasn’t a good counter-argument to make. The story isn’t “Dragon Lee will get his revenge,” it’s focused more on the Americano character and what will happen next while Gable is out.

Advertisement
In this post: 
WWE Raw
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
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.