6 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Dec 12)

4. Toned-Down, Slowed-Down Cruiserweights

Brian Kendrick TJ Perkins
WWE.com

When WWE announced it was bringing back the cruiserweight division, you couldn’t help but get excited, harking back to the days of Rey Mysterio Jr., Juventud Guerrera, La Parka, Billy Kidman and a very young Chris Jericho and Eddie Guerrero.

And while the Cruiserweight Classic was outstanding, what we’ve seen so far on Raw is a vastly toned-down, slowed-down style to more closely resembles the action we’ve been seeing in WWE for the past few years, albeit with smaller wrestlers. This complaint has been lodged before, but it needs to continue to be raised as long as WWE bills itself as offering something different and it doesn’t deliver.

There was nothing technically wrong with the TJ Perkins/Brian Kendrick match Monday night, but there also wasn’t anything special to it. We could have seen literally the same match with the same moveset from Sami Zayn and Seth Rollins.

And that’s really the point here. Fans are being asked to get invested in a new division of wrestlers that aside from purple ring ropes, smaller stature and a few flashier moves, isn’t all that different from the regular roster. What worked in the CWC were styles, speed and moves that you didn’t see on Monday nights. It doesn’t need to be 100 kph all the time, but Cesaro shouldn’t be running laps around you either.

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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.