9 Ups And 7 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (March 7th)

6. AJ€™s Coming Out Party

Granted, AJ Styles has been part of WWE for more than a month now, but Monday€™s Tag Team Championship match provided WWE fans with more of a display of the Phenomenal One than they€™d seen before.

Styles€™ match against Chris Jericho at Fastlane was a good one (as were the others on television), but it also was a more grounded match. Monday, we saw AJ debut the springboard 450 splash and hit the Phenomenal Stylin€™ DDT (moonsault into an inverted DDT) flawlessly (a previous attempt on Jericho was slightly botched), bringing fans to their feet. It was the kind of reaction you wanted from the fans, especially given what was coming later.

You get the feeling that even though wrestlers have to use €œWWE style€ in the ring, we still haven€™t seen the bulk of what AJ can and will bring to the table. Fans who have seen him in TNA and New Japan know what he€™s capable of. Monday might have been Styles kicking off the training wheels a little and taking off.

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.