7 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Jan 16)

4. Neville Finding His Niche

neville rich swann
WWE.com

While we’ve given a down mark to all the angle advancement over in-ring quality for the cruiserweights, one person who has strongly benefited from these angles has been Neville.

The self-proclaimed King of the Cruiserweights has turned himself from a vanilla high-flyer into a sneering, aggressive jerk who won’t hesitate to dump on the fans as well his opponents. It’s a dramatic change in character, and it’s working really well.

Monday, Neville assaulted Cruiserweight Champion Rich Swann before his match with Tony Nese and during a video recap of their confrontation last week. Neville not only beat down Swann, he dispatched Nese when he wouldn’t get out of the way.

Neville is about 20 times more interesting now than he ever has been on the main roster, so kudos to whomever came up with this character change.

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.