6 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Raw (8 December - Results & Review)

5. Tag Title Match Delivers The Fun

When AJ Styles and Dragon Lee announced last week that they wanted to face the War Raiders for the World Tag Team Championship this week, no one was buying that Erik and Ivar were going to recapture the titles Monday night. The match also wasn’t helped by the out-of-the-blue nature of the Raiders getting a title match despite not winning a televised straight tag match since April.

With those caveats in place, the champs and War Raiders put together a pretty good little match, full of several exchanges and counters as both teams struggled to maintain the advantage. The Raiders used their size and strength to their advantage – Erik caught Dragon’s leaping hurricanrana to the floor and turned it into a Viking Experience off the apron to Ivar on the floor – but Lee and Styles blitzed them with strikes and high-flying attacks to keep them off-balance.

The finish saw Erik and AJ trade volleys until both were loopy. Erik boosted AJ onto Ivar on the turnbuckle, presumably for a powerbomb or powerslam, but Styles instead hit a Frankensteiner that shot Ivar into Erik. One Dragon Lee dive and Phenomenal Forearm later, and the tag champs had defended their titles.

This was a perfectly fine match that won’t make any year-end lists, but it was another in a series of perfectly acceptable wrestling matches.