7 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Raw (2 Sept - Results & Review)

Ups…

7. Dom Flees, Match Soars

WWE Raw Dragon Lee Ilja Dragunov
WWE

The Intercontinental Championship tournament triple threat matches have not exactly set the world on fire, and the best one of the bunch actually made the case that these should have been straight singles matches.

Dominik Mysterio, Ilja Dragunov, and Dragon Lee faced off in the third bout in the tournament Monday night, and it soldiered along with all the usual tropes of a triple threat: heel bails to let babyfaces fight, heel gets ping-ponged between cooperating babyfaces, wrestlers break up pinfalls and try to pin both opponents one after the other, and so on.

The match was going decently when Carlito ran interference, which drew out Damian Priest, who chased off Mysterio, leaving Ilja and Dragon Lee to just go at it for the last several minutes. That’s when the match really took off, with both men teeing off on each other and going 100 kph. Sure, it got sloppy at a couple of points, but they pushed through a blown spot and continued to pop the fans, right up to Dragunov hitting Torpedo Moscow for the win.

Had this been a one-on-one match from the jump, it might have been a really, really outstanding contest. As it stood Monday night, it earned positive marks on the strength of its potential, with the second half leaving you wanting to see a full match between the two Dragons.

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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.