6 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE Raw (Dec 12 - Review)

1. A ‘WWE Crowd’

Crowds at WWE events are a weird bunch. They pop for ring entrances and come alive for big moments and the finishing sequences of matches, but they are mostly silent otherwise.

It’s really disconcerting and makes it difficult to judge how a match is received by fans, as they are sitting on their hands at moments where you would expect them to be following along and living and dying by the action in front of them.

Raw Monday night was the latest example of this weird selective apathy, with the crowd going silent for large parts of several matches, most notably the opening bout, which immediately followed Becky Lynch’s surprise attack and Bianca Belair’s entrance. Seconds later, they fell quiet for a while. This continued throughout the night.

It’s unclear what WWE needs to do to rectify this – or if they even have identified it as a problem – but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, especially when you have a wrestling show on Wednesday where a normally smaller but far more vocal fanbase is amped for large parts of that program. Even NXT on Tuesdays has a more active – though performative – crowd.