7 Ups And 5 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (August 24th)
1. Return Of The Bathroom Break Match
Man, that didnt take long, did it? Throw all the lip service you want at it, group the women together with nice, neat Team _____ names and ready-made hashtags and fans still will sniff out BS and prefer the real deal. Thats exactly what happened Monday night when fans turned on the Divas match. It would be easy to blame the Bellas for forcing PCB to come down to their level, but that wouldnt be entirely fair. There were a couple nice moments in the match, but the problem can be summed up by Nikki Bella during Miz TV: Wins and losses, who cares? Thats right, Nikki only cares about breaking that precious record of AJ Lees for holding the Divas Championship, even though shes 10 days away from her second 60-day span without actually defending her pride and joy. Things got worse when Miz said PCB fights like a bunch of girls. Now, if he had gotten his comeuppance and put in the figure-eight and Dis-arm-her simultaneously, then it would have been a decent payoff. But instead, it devolved into cattiness with the Bellas jumping them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfhNcxW9naE Contrast this with NXT, where Sasha Banks and Bayley verbally sparred because Sasha didnt think Bayley was worthy. Bayley responded by defeating several women in a row, including Charlotte and Becky Lynch, en route to winning the title from Banks. That is how you make fans care about womens wrestling again: not simply with longer matches, but with treating the women as three-dimensional characters and booking them logically. All the ingredients are there for success. Someone needs to put the recipe together properly and soon.
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.
