3 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE SmackDown (21 Nov - Results & Review)

1. US Title Open Challenge = Back On Track

Last week’s Ilja Dragunov vs. Axiom match was oddly lacklustre, but this was more like it.

JD McDonagh was in the house to lend moral support to Judgment Day stablemate Finn Bálor in his John Cena tournament match, so he answered the ‘Open Challenge’. Why not? These dudes wrestled a lot on the independent scene pre-WWE, and it showed. They also had a couple of NXT bouts in their back pockets, so chemistry was never going to be an issue.

As usual, Ilja’s selling was on point, and McDonagh worked well in the one-off challenger spot. Excellent stuff here. Of course, it’d be nice to see Dragunov get a PLE match at some point, because his hard work on TV richly deserves that kind of platform. If nothing else, at least he's guaranteed plenty of minutes on SmackDown every week as United States Champ.

Admittedly, there was a pretty silly spot that saw McDonagh seemingly being content with taking a countout, but that…wouldn’t have given him the US Title. Fair play to Michael Cole and Corey Graves on commentary for pointing that out rather than no-selling it. This avoidable brain fart didn’t kill the match though. There was enough great action elsewhere to compensate.

A near fall following JD's sweet moonsault was wonderful and tricked the live crowd into thinking they might see a title switch in their hometown. Some of the smiling/laughing faces in the front few rows suggested that they felt foolish for believing that was going to happen. You never know, Denver. You just never know.

Top match.

What did you think of this week's WWE SmackDown? For more wrestling, check out 11 MORE WWE Returns That IMMEDIATELY Backfired and 25 Things You Didn't Know About John Cena!