6 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE Raw (Results & Review - 15 Jan)

3. Celebrating After A Loss

Sarah Logan Ivar
WWE.com

WWE still has its tropes that refuse to die, and fans got to see a few of them in rapid succession during the Ivar/Akira Tozawa match.

On paper, Ivar should have squashed Tozawa like a bug, similar to how he did just a month ago. But Ivar got distracted by Maxxine Dupri (trope #1) and slipped on a banana peel when Tozawa hit a sunset bomb for the surprise pin (trope #2). The victorious babyface immediately fled the ring to celebrate (trope #3) before the heels attacked and laid out Dupri and Akira and celebrated getting their heat back (trope #4).

All of this was in service of setting up a match between Ivar and Chad Gable for next week, meaning they built up this match between the behemoth Viking… by having the diminutive goof Tozawa pin him clean. And Ivar looked like a geek getting distracted and pinned, then celebrating the post-match beatdown like nothing happened.

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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.