8 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Nov 28)

2. Hometown Loser

tony nese cedric
WWE.com

God bless WWE in all its all-too-predictable glory. Got a wrestler competing in his hometown? Let’s play it up to tug at fans’ heartstrings… and then piss them off.

WWE loves that trope. The victim Monday night was Cedric Alexander, who got a nice reaction from the fans, and he and Tony Nese started to put together a decent cruiserweight match… only for Drew Gulak to get involved and Nese to score the “upset” victory, sending the hometown boy to defeat.

Seriously, WTF WWE? You have a cruiserweight division that is dying on the vine, with no one besides Brian Kendrick, TJ Perkins and Rich Swann really making headway (and even that’s debatable) and you’re gifted an opportunity to showcase the talented Alexander in front of a crowd that will cheer him like crazy. To fans watching on TV, they see a really athletic superstar showing off his skills to a big reaction and maybe, just maybe, they latch onto him a little, and maybe the division gets a little shine.

Nope. WWE has to have the hometown guy slip on a banana peel as usual and lose to deflate the crowd, and thus no one and nothing makes progress.

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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.