6 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (30 Jan - Review)

5. Little Guy Steals One

Baron Corbin Johnny Gargano
WWE.com

It doesn’t seem to matter who’s in charge of booking, WWE has its tropes that will seemingly always hang around.

One of those is the “little guy gets dominated by bigger guy but lucks out and wins with a rollup” trope. In Monday’s example, Johnny Gargano found himself battling Baron Corbin and holding on with a couple hope spots before Dexter Lumis provided a distraction by using his axe on JBL’s hat. (That’s a sentence no one ever expected to type.) Corbin went for End of Days, but Gargano reversed to a cradle for the pin.

It wasn’t a terrible match, but it was very bland and forgettable, and it did nothing to make Johnny Wrestling look like the superior athlete. He just looked lucky to get one over on the hapless Corbin. So no one wins.

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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.