7 Ups And 5 Downs For Last Night's WWE Raw (New Year's Eve)

3. Crews Falls Short

apollo crews dean ambrose
WWE.com

Not for one minute should this suggest that Apollo Crews should have won the Intercontinental Championship on Raw Monday night.

But his match with Dean Ambrose showed that while they took a nice step forward with Crews in the battle royal (more on that later), there’s more work to be done. Unless the sound on the TV was messed up, the crowd was mostly quiet for Crews as he tried to come back against Ambrose until he started firing off eye-popping moves. The standing Shooting Star Press got fans going and continued from there.

And while Crews got a fair amount of offense, he couldn’t put the champ away, but one missed frogsplash and a Dirty Deeds DDT later, he was on the losing end of the match. It was just too easy for Ambrose to put Apollo away, with one DDT.

Again, that’s not to say that Crews should have kicked out of his finisher, but Dean was on defense for a good portion of the match and then suddenly won with one move. It didn’t make Crews look as good as he could have. It still represented a step forward for Apollo, but still gets a down mark here.

Advertisement
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.