6 Ups And 4 Downs From WWE Night Of Champions 2023

5. Ali’s Underdog Performance

Gunther Mustafa Ali
WWE.com

It’s really tough to rate Mustafa Ali and Gunther’s match over the Intercontinental Championship. On paper, it was no real competition, but Ali was going to have the Saudi Arabia fans firmly in his corner.

Still, the match vaulted past the low bar of Ricochet getting squashed by Brock Lesnar as the “never in doubt” match on the card, with Mustafa getting more than a couple hope spots against the dominant champion. Ali used his speed to keep Gunther off-balance and stay in the match a lot longer than you might have expected, but he ultimately was going to fall to the Austrian.

Gunther’s win made him an even bigger heel on the night, but he still remains impressive as IC champ. And Ali came out of this with an opportunity to go in any number of directions should WWE so desire to actually do something with him, so there’s that as well.

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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.