7 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE NXT: New Year's Evil (Results & Review - 2 Jan)

3. No Messing About

Lyra Valkyria Blair Davenport
WWE.com

Maybe it was the jam-packed card, but the NXT Women’s Championship match didn’t waste much time in getting going and hitting high gear.

After a brief opening of mat work, Blair Davenport and Lyra Valkyria were sent right into the heavy artillery, with Blair nailing a diving stomp to Lyra’s head, then continuing the attack. Valkyria would come back with palm strikes and a running crossbody before Davenport wiped her out with an avalanche Falcon Arrow.

Blair drove her knee through the announce desk, leaving both women wounded and stumbling around for the remainder of the match. The war of attrition ended shortly thereafter when Valkyria hit a Landslide for the win.

What worked nicely with this match was seeing NXT not do a 15-20 minute back-and-forth struggle with 10 chinlocks and extended selling for drama. Instead, they worked a crisp 8-minute match where both women got rocked, playing into each going for knockout shots before the other could land a KO blow on them.

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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.