7 Ups & 5 Downs For WWE Raw (14 July - Results & Review)

4. Lyra Overcomes, Fights Way Back To Becky

In a perfect world, Lyra Valkyria’s path back to Becky Lynch and the Women’s Intercontinental Championship would have been a bit longer and windier, but Monday’s two-out-of-three-falls match against Bayley served as a great backdrop for the former IC champ.

Valkyria lost her IC title last month, then lost a triple threat for the title at Evolution. Monday’s bout with Bayley represented her last gasp at the title for the foreseeable future, and she started off at a deficit, getting rolled up just a couple of minutes into the match. The rollup was cheap, but it put Lyra into a sudden death situation where she had to win two straight falls. A corner whip injured her back, putting Valkyria in a deeper hole.

That’s when the match started to take off, with Lyra and Bayley gelling well and the Role Model playing the aggressor throughout. Lyra tried to match the intensity, but Bayley pulled out a sunset bomb into the ring steps, dropped a diving elbow, and then locked in the crossface. But when she tried to push off the ropes and roll through, Valkyria escaped, landed Nightwing, and punched her ticket to SummerSlam.

The conventional wisdom for Valkyria has been that she wins fans over in the ring, not with her promos or character work backstage. She does her character work in the body of her matches. That’s what this was, and Bayley brought out a bit more of that perseverance, intensity, and hunger, which makes this SummerSlam match with Lynch a potential show-stealer. Good stuff from both Lyra and Bayley here.