8 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE SummerSlam 2023 (Results & Review)

4. Women Fight To Get Fans Back

Asuka Charlotte Flair
WWE.com

The second-to-last match on the card often is considered being in the “death slot,” when fans are coming down a bit before ramping back up for the main event.

That’s exactly what happened during the WWE Women’s Championship match pitting champion Asuka, Bianca Belair and Charlotte Flair against each other. Fans seemed to be worn out after a chaotic finish to the WWE World Championship match moments early, sitting mostly silently throughout the early stages of the women’s title match, despite how well it was worked.

But the three women gradually pulled the fans back into the match with a series of near-falls and high-impact moves. They were buying into some of the close calls, and Belair’s injury that briefly took her out of the match really sucked the crowd in, especially when Bianca returned to hit a 450 splash on Charlotte while she had Asuka in the Figure-8.

Give full credit to the women for not taking their collective feet off the pedal and persevering, because seeing what followed, it was critical to get the fans to buy in on the action.

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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.