6 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE Raw (22 August - Results & Review)

4. Squashing Tag Competition

Piper Niven
WWE.com

The WWE women’s tag division is barely a division at all, so why not obliterate it in one night?

Raw provided fans with the first match for the new Women’s Tag Team Champions, Chelsea Green & Piper Niven, with Piper replacing the injured Sonya Deville. The pairing worked exactly how you’d expect and hope, with Green getting in over her head and Niven bailing her out with her brute force to secure the win for the team. She even carried the wounded Chelsea to the back afterwards.

But the tag champs literally squashed one of only three functional women’s tag teams on the roster, and the most experienced duo of the bunch, Kayden Carter & Katana Chance. It wasn’t even close, which means these two should be on mop-up duty on Main Event for a while.

At the same time, Rhea Ripley spent the last two weeks squashing another duo in singles action, Indi Hartwell (last week) and Candice LeRae (Monday). So WWE is now down to Damage CTRL or a new makeshift team to credibly challenge for the titles. It just feels like another short-sighted deal where they want to establish an act, so they sacrifice any semblance of planning.

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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.