8 Ups And 5 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Sept 23)

3. Banks, Cross Drag On

Nikki Cross Sasha Banks
WWE.com

If we were grading on a curve, it would be easier to give Sasha Banks versus Nikki Cross passing marks. The ending of the match was pretty solid with a good amount of action.

But 80% of the match was a slow, plodding affair that played out largely to silence. It was a dull slog, which isn’t the kind of thing you want your #1 contender for the Raw Women’s Championship to have two weeks before a PPV. Sasha returned to Raw a month ago in a hot angle, pitting herself against the top woman on the roster, and she went out and had a snoozer of a match against Cross.

It wasn’t like Banks cheated like crazy and showed this hugely vicious side throughout. She had moments of aggression – especially when attacking Nikki’s leg – but you could have skipped to the final two minutes and been just fine.

Did Rusev and EC3 run short and they told Banks and Cross to kill an extra 10 minutes?

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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.