6 Ups & 8 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Aug 29)

5. ‘Game’ Is The New ‘Tried Really Hard’

Chris Jericho Neville
WWE.com

Last week, Kevin Owens and Neville had a barn-burner of a match, battling back and forth and putting on a really good show in their qualifying bout for the WWE Universal Championship. In the end, Owens won with a little help from Chris Jericho.

Monday, Neville had a chance at revenge against Y2J and took the fight to the former world champion, but he ultimately fell prey to a Liontamer. Neville once again, as Michael Cole put it, was “very game” but ultimately lost. And let’s face it: Jericho is a six-time world champ. There’s no shame in losing to someone of his caliber. (Now losing to Fandango…)

But this also is part of the problem WWE is facing right now. Neville is one of several wrestlers stuck in a strange purgatory, where they never truly reach the top of the hill and feel like they’re more like Sisyphus than Sir Edmund Hillary.

There was a built-in storyline for Neville to want to get revenge on Jericho, and ample reason to turn this into something building to the Man That Gravity Forgot to get that measure of revenge and win a big match, possibly rallying fans behind him a little and climbing up a rung on the ladder rather than running on a hamster wheel. But does anyone believe that this issue will be brought up again next week?

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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 fortunately became a fan in time for WrestleMania III and came back as a fan after a long high school hiatus before WM XIV. Monday nights in the Carlson household are reserved for viewing Raw -- for better or worse.