6 Ups And 5 Downs From WWE Crown Jewel 2023

UPS…

6. Sami Gets The Duke

WWE Crown Jewel 2023 Sami Zayn JD McDonagh
WWE.com

By the end of this weekend, no one is going to remember intimate details of the Crown Jewel kickoff show match between Sami Zayn and JD McDonagh. But that wasn’t the point of the bout, as everyone saw later.

Zayn’s stated purpose as a solo act is to bring down the Judgment Day, no matter how long it takes. He vowed to end the purple-clad group, so why not start with the guy who’s been a hanger-on to the stable for the past several months?

It goes without saying that Zayn and McDonagh are probably incapable of having a bad match, though there was a near-disaster on an attempted monkey flip early on where JD went crashing into the ropes awkwardly. Thankfully, he recovered and they strung together a pretty basic opener that warmed the fans up and let Sami get his first pelt.

As an added bonus, Zayn put McDonagh away with the Blue Thunder Bomb, a rarity these days, but a smart move to try to establish it as a potential killshot. Perfectly fine wrestling and a perfectly acceptable kickoff show match that established Sami’s modus operandi for later in the show.

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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.