6 Ups And 5 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Aug 14)

3. Crickets

Emma Mickie James
WWE.com

You would think a match involving a six-time women’s champion would get some reaction from a hot crowd, but you’d be wrong.

Mickie James versus Emma was met largely with silence, as the two accomplished wrestlers tangled in a short, forgettable match. Emma and Mickie are perfectly capable of having a good match, and nothing they did Monday was “wrong,” but the lack of reaction is more of a result of how the women’s division has been portrayed than anything else.

WWE has conditioned fans to view the women’s division as a top and a bottom, with Sasha Banks, Bayley, Alexa Bliss and Nia Jax at the top, and Mickie, Emma and Dana Brooke at the bottom. So when you had a match involving two women in the lower tier, the fans just instinctively sat on their hands.

It’s really a shame that fans have been conditioned to not care about two talented performers. Thankfully, this is fixable, but it still was disappointing Monday night.

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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.