8 Ups And 6 Downs From WWE Raw (April 20)
McIntyre dominates, Baszler Pillmanizes, Lashley flips tires.
We’re at the midpoint between WrestleMania 36 and Money in the Bank, and things are surprisingly lining up decently. Instead of simply having an authority figure name participants in the eponymous matches, we’ve had a series of qualifiers the past couple weeks, filling Raw and SmackDown with actual, you know, wrestling.
Raw Monday night saw the men’s three qualifying matches take place, as well as WWE Champion Drew McIntyre running roughshod over Zelina Vega’s stable. We also saw the final implosion (hopefully) of the Riott Squad and a vicious Shayna Baszler.
With 10 matches on the card, Raw was wrestling-heavy, but it was also squash-heavy: four matches involved enhancement talent from NXT, another had semi-retired MVP as a competitor, and another had recent NXT callup Austin Theory getting put through his paces.
None of that is necessarily a bad thing, but the lack of star power right now on Raw is apparent. We haven’t seen Randy Orton, Edge, AJ Styles or Kevin Owens since Mania. Becky Lynch also didn’t appear on Monday. As a result, we got multiple segments of Bobby Lashley flipping over tires (not a typo).
Raw was good enough for passing marks again this week, as they are making small tweaks here and there to improve the show.
With that said, let’s get to it…