7 Ups & 3 Downs From WWE Raw (3 Feb - Results & Review)

2. A ‘Fighting’ Champion

When Lyra Valkyria won the Women’s Intercontinental Championship last month, she pledged to be a fighting champion, taking on all comers, and at least one – Ivy Nile – has already lined up.

Since capturing the new IC title three weeks ago, Valkyria has had a video package and cut a backstage promo, but she’s only competed in the women’s Royal Rumble last weekend. And then Monday night, Lyra was announced for action next week on Raw… in an Elimination Chamber qualifying match.

This isn’t to say that Valkyria shouldn’t be positioning herself to compete for a world championship at WrestleMania, but it means that she certainly won’t be defending her IC title next week either, making the earliest she could defend it in mid-February, more than a month after winning it. However, there hasn’t been a ton of movement toward setting up that first title defense.

By comparison, Chelsea Green has defended her Women’s United States Championship on SmackDown twice in the past month. It’s entirely possible that Valkyria starts putting her title on the line regularly in the coming weeks, but the best way to establish a new title – created at a time when many fans already think there are too many championships – is to defend it. This is not the best start for the Women’s Intercontinental Championship.

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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.