RAW Review: 18th July

Hello! Well, we had RAW last night. I think that's the only thing that's really happening this week- so once you've read this Review feel free to go back to the real world and forget about Wrestling until next Monday. Come to think of it, we've got that little draft thing on tonight- but nobody really cares about that do they? In all seriousness, now is a great time to be a Wrestling fan. It's not such a good time to be a Wrestling Fan in the UK called Sam though, because fucking hell this heat is killing me. I sometimes joke about how I'd die in a hotter climate than the UK, and I think the fact this heat has rendered me barely able to function is a testament to that. Anyway, despite that- the Reviews can't stop for anything at the moment so lets jump straight into last night.

Shane & Stephanie announce the Smackdown and RAW GMs
In the interest of jumping straight into things, the RAW GM is Mick Foley and the Smackdown GM is Daniel Bryan. I don't think anyone would really have been shocked by Bryan, especially if you'd seen that thing where they accidentally spoiled that it was going to be Bryan on the App. Foley was an interesting one, because there were a lot of people (including myself) who was questioning why Stephanie would pick Foley within kayfabe.

The best I could come up with is Stephanie begrudingly respects Mick's knowledge of the business, while also acknowledging that she may cause some viewers to favour Smackdown because of how much of a bitch she's been over the years. Outside of kayfabe I'm over the moon with Mick being RAW GM, because as I said last week- chances are the two-tiered authority structure is to make it so Shane and Stephanie's appearances become a lot more spread out. This of course means we're not going to have a Heel authority figure on either show week-to-week. We can actually enjoy watching a show without being told our lives are meaningless!

The segment itself had varying degrees of success. The pop for Daniel Bryan was of course the highlight, and I just hope they book him as GM in such a way that means he doesn't outshine the active wrestlers. I'm fairly certain both Mick and Bryan forgot their lines at one point during this segment, with Bryan recovering it himself while Stephanie had to give Mick his. I actually liked Stephanie quite a bit in this segment and the night in general as well. So overall I liked this segment despite its flaws, and I'm looking forward to what is to come as a result of this segment.

Sami Zayn & Cesaro v Chris Jericho & Kevin Owens
With the Draft tomorrow, only the very bottom of the barrel guys were actually going to lose clean last night. As a result, I wasn't really expecting much out of this match beyond the standard "good match" that you're basically guaranteed. In that regard, my expectations were met- but they weren't exceeded by any means. Jericho was the most expendable of the four because Cesaro took a pin last week, so they did their best to protect all four guys while still having the Babyfaces go over.

Daniel Bryan & Stephanie Backstage Segment
The stuff with Stephanie was basically what you'd expect, what was actually noteworthy about this segment is that Bryan did a dab. Really.

Darren Young v Alberto Del Rio
What did I say about it being almost impossible for anyone to actually lose clean last night? It does have to be said that a dodgy finish for this match does sort of fit the angle I at least think they're going for with Darren Young. I say "think" because they've not put it over once on commentary. The angle I think they're going for with Darren is actually one they talked about on Wrestling Observer Radio last week, so rather than just describe the angle- I'll just link the video because frankly it's too hot.
https://youtu.be/U4-aJzh-f6M?t=181

John Cena, Enzo & Cass, New Day & The Club Promo Segment
This was perhaps the most fun I've had with a segment all year. They literally gave this segment and the subsequent match over 1/6th of the whole show, which would actually be an even bigger chunk if you take out the time taken up by Ad Breaks.

Cena was just absolutely great in this segment. It's actually funny, because I was talking about Scream (the TV Series) the other day and it brought me on to an angle I wanted them to do with the Scream Films where they had Sidney Prescott as the killer because she's desperate to stay relevant in this era of celebrity culture and famous people being famous for being famous.

This was not dissimilar to what we had with Cena in the sense that Cena was the "old timer" in this segment, because he was playing the out of touch uncle in this segment with New Day and Enzo & Cass while they did all of their up to date "pop culture" stuff. If I'm honest I'm surprised it took Xavier this long to work Pokemon Go into one his promos, and I had to laugh at him getting heat from the crowd for being in the Valor Club. Overall I just really liked this segment, and even though it was quite long- I actually wanted it to go longer in a way.

Why on earth would there be an easily 20+ Minute promo segment to set up a 12-Man Tag involving The Wyatts, and then not have Bray of all people talk. That didn't make sense to me, but on the whole this was a really fun segment.

John Cena, Enzo & Cass and New Day v The Club & The Wyatts
This was about as good as a 12-Man Tag match could be, so full credit to all of the guys involved. My thing from last night was, I wasn't expecting much in the way of storyline progression- so my only criteria was basically "was the match fun" and this match was fun. The one thing I was disappointed about was we didn't get Xavier playing Cena's theme on Francesca II, but that aside I really liked this match. I wasn't completely sold on the finish, for the simple reason that AJ's been beating Enzo a lot since this feud came to be- but they did a decent job of adding a new dimension to Sunday's match with Enzo hitting Cena at least.

Seth Rollins' "empty arena" Promo
The Promo wasn't absolutely "oh my god" amazing, but I just really liked the different presentation to the Promo than the standard backstage promo or video package we're fully accustomed to. More of this please, on both shows.

Shane McMahon & Mick Foley Backstage Segment
I liked this segment, and it was interesting to me- for the simple fact that even with Mick being announced at the start of the show I wasn't actually convinced Mick was going to last the night and we were going to end up with a Heel GM on RAW. So Shane trying to tease tension between Mick and Stephanie was perhaps more interesting to me than it should have been because of me having this in my head.

Baron Corbin v Sin Cara
So, the Lucha Dragons split up off TV- and then Sin Cara goes into his role of being a complete jobber all within about 48 Hours. It's not looking up for ol' Sin Cara. The match was fine as a squash match to put Corbin over, we had the Kalisto run-in to presumably set up the Pre-Show match on Sunday. This was a perfectly fine segment on the whole for me.

Sasha Banks & Becky Lynch v Charlotte & Dana Brooke
This was the one time on the whole show, apart from Foley where I was genuinely shocked by what happened. Sasha Banks didn't make Dana tap for the finish, and that's up there with Brock beating the streak levels of shocks in my book. The DQ finish made sense with Sunday in mind, both to build Nattie/Becky and the whole numbers game type thing with Sasha, Charlotte and Becky.

I'll be interested to see if they announce Sasha's tag partner tonight or on Sunday, because in my opinion if they don't announce it tonight then it's not Bayley. Bayley's first PPV match is something they know should be built up a bit. So in my mind if Bayley isn't announced tonight for the Tag match then it's going to be Paige, or worse Eva Marie. *shudders*

Dean Ambrose Backstage Promo
I really liked this Promo and the Seth one for the simple fact that the presentation wasn't what we were used to, and the presentation made sense for obvious Shield related reasons. The promo was like the Rollins one where it wasn't an outstanding promo, but the fact it was presented differently meant it was better than the same promo content would've been in a simple backstage interview setting.

Rusev & Sheamus v Zack Ryder & Dolph Ziggler
There was two people who lost clean on the show last night, Sin Cara and Dolph Ziggler. Just think about that for a second. This match was fine from a purely match perspective, but there was absolutely no reaction to anything in this match. The match basically just something that happened.

Daniel Bryan & Mick Foley Backstage Promo
I thought this segment was really good. These two did a really good job of teasing tension between the two while still keeping both as Babyfaces, so this was about as good as it could have been in that respect.

Dean Ambrose v Seth Rollins- WWE Title
Something about this match just felt a bit "off" for me. I don't know if it was the fact that this was a WWE Title match where the crowd was quite flat, and not really into much like you've come to expect with Title matches- but this just seemed in relation to what the match could've been quite "meh".

I didn't think this match was as good as Roman/Seth at Money in the Bank, even before we had the wacky finish- and then the wacky finish put it even further down in my estimation. However, the match was still really good but I say this a lot- were people really expecting anything less than a really good match given who was involved?

As I've already said, and you should know by now- there was a really wacky finish for this match that just pissed me off. I was expecting a fucked finish, but I thought we'd actually get a fucked finish and it would all be resolved on RAW last night. Nope, they went off the air with Rollins holding the Title- not once did Cole, JBL or Saxton say "go to the Network now". Instead, as I went up to bed I opened Twitter on my Phone just to see if I had any notifications and I just randomly saw the WWE tweeting about the show that was still going on on the Network. We'll likely never know, but I do wish we could find out how many people actually watched the Network part of this whole thing in comparison to how many people were watching on TV.

If the fact they had the resolution to the angle on the Network wasn't bad enough, on Twitter today in I believe the fairly early morning in the US- they've announced we're getting a Rematch tonight on Smackdown! Because why not?! I know there's some people who want WWE Title matches on RAW sometimes just for a bit more excitement- especially with how well the Roman/Sheamus matches went from a crowd reaction perspective. However, 3 WWE Title matches in a week including Battleground is complete overkill.

Overall I thought this was about as good a RAW as it could have been given the circumstances. Tonight should be fun in the sense that we're getting the actual Draft so it'll be something a bit different- and hopefully the crowd is hot for it throughout by virtue of it being an hour shorter. Then after Battleground is in the books my expectations of RAW (and Smackdown) are going to increase again. I've said numerous times in these Reviews Post-MITB that I'm giving them a lot of leeway because they couldn't really do much until the Draft. Now we've officially arrived at the Draft, that's not an excuse that can be used any more.

Thanks for reading as always, the Smackdown Reviews start tomorrow unless I die as a result of this heat- so hopefully you'll be back here tomorrow for the first of the weekly Smackdown Reviews. Thanks again for reading, it's Draft Time boys!

Bonus Round
With a lot of stuff happening this week and in the week just gone, I thought as with the Roman Reigns Wellness Violation that I should do an extra section on the end to discuss goings on beyond that of what happened on RAW last night. So here we are, and I'm just going to jump right in.

Brock Lesnar's Drug Test Failure
There's been a lot of talk about the negatives of Brock's failure, and I'll talk about them as well. However, what some people seem to be missing is that there is actually an upside for the WWE in this situation. Especially with the statement from the state of New York that came out yesterday basically saying that they won't stand in the way of Brock doing Summerslam, there's actually a bit of an upside to this whole thing for WWE.

My immediate reaction (and you can see this on Twitter) wasn't one of surprise, because to be blunt I think most people knew Brock was on something. I was more surprised that Brock got caught than by the fact that Brock was on something. The good things for WWE start with the fact that Brock's not been on WWE TV for around about 3 Months. So they can basically wash their hands of the situation and provided there's not an overwhelming amount of scrutiny on them and the Wellness Policy they'll get away relatively unscathed in my opinion.

The biggest positive for WWE, at least in my opinion is that a ban (which is about 99.9% likely to happen) all but ends Brock's MMA career. Depending on what Brock actually got caught for, the ban will either be for 6 Months or 2 Years. If it's 6 Months, Brock could fight again hypothetically but even if he tested positive for cough medicine there'll be a cloud over him because of his test failure that could make him "undesirable" to the UFC given how many of their guys are being caught at the moment. Then if it's 2 Years Brock's "done done", end of discussion.

With Brock's WWE Contract coming up in less than a year now, a ban for Brock massively weakens his bargaining power- because he can't use the threat of him going back to UFC as leverage. That is obviously dependent on Brock having the appetite to still continue in Wrestling, and given I'm not in Brock's head it's impossible for me to say one way or the other. From an outsiders perspective, it looks like Brock's got a pretty sweet gig. He shows up, throws guys around for a given length of time and gets paid millions of dollars to do it.

The biggest negative in my opinion is 2K17, and Brock being on the cover of 2K17. We've got the big "Suplex City" advert for the game and all of that stuff. That's one area where WWE will have some problems, however in the grand scheme of things- I definitely don't think it's as bad as it realistically could have been.

The Draft
Depending on when you're reading this, the Draft could be 7 Hours away from starting, 4 Hours, 1 Hour or it may have already happened. I'm so happy I held off on properly discussing the Draft, because I had a big blog thought out in my head that I was going to put up on Sunday- which would have been made completely moot within hours by the "official rules" for the Draft coming out.

I feel like the best way to do this is to simply go rule-by-rule so;

RAW has first overall pick
To me at least this makes sense. I'm not really sure what people were expecting, hypothetically they're putting Smackdown on the same level- but Vince even explicitly called RAW the "flagship" in his Promo last week. Therefore of course they'd be getting first pick.

RAW gets 3 picks for every 2 Smackdown do
I saw some complaints about this, which to be quite honest I mainly found stupid. Talking outside of kayfabe, RAW does need more people than Smackdown. I've made a specific point of talking about Roster Depth in almost every single on my Reviews since the split was announced. This may shock some of you, but Shane and Stephanie aren't actually drafting people. It's in fact not real, which now I've typed out is shocking to me. THEY ARE NOT GOING TO PUT ALL OF THE GOOD TALENTS ON RAW. The whole point of this split is that the USA Network were unhappy with the numbers Smackdown was doing so this was the response.

Then, within kayfabe they could explain it as Vince favouring Stephanie- do I need to explain why?

Tag Teams counts as one pick, unless a Commissioner/General Manager specifically only wants one member of the team
This can be viewed in too different ways, and it's entirely dependant on your "mindset" toward to the product. You can either see it as the member of the Tag Team who's picked individually being given a bit of a push right off the bat- or you can see it as the member "left behind" getting buried. I'll leave it entirely up to you folks to work out which side of that fence you're on.

Six draft picks will be made off the NXT roster
This is where I've seen most of the debate, as far as who people think will be called up. There will be NXT spoilers in this, so if you want to avoid them I'd advise this next section. To me, there's a few call-ups that are basically locked in. Those call-ups are;
- Finn Balor
- American Alpha
- Bayley

That's half of the picks gone, and I don't think I really need to explain any of them. The next three are bit more "up in the air", although the most likely of the ones not already mentioned is Samoa Joe. This is where the debate comes into play, because to me- I think Samoa Joe is called up tonight, drops the Title in Brooklyn to Nakamura and then becomes a full-time Main Roster guy. However, in this process, dropping the Title to Nakamura means Nakamura stays in NXT for a little while longer. So I'm not really sure how they can explain Nakamura NOT being called-up, but that's up to WWE to figure out.

Working on the basis of the 4th pick being Joe, we're left with two more- and there's a handful of people fighting it out for the two spots. Namely; Mojo Rawley, Austin Aries, Nia Jax, Alexa Bliss, Asuka and Tye Dillinger.

Nia Jax is the most likely, especially with them splitting the Women up- having someone like Nia in the mix as someone different to what every other women offers would be a smart move on WWE's part in my opinion. Mojo Rawley would be called up to get a run out of the Hype Bros, and I've had the thought that they're building Zack up a bit with this in mind. Bliss and Asuka are in the mix for obvious reasons, but similar to Nakamura- the fact Asuka's likely to have a Title coming out of Brooklyn means her chances go down a bit in my opinion. Then Tye Dillinger could be called up, simply because he's got an "easy" gimmick and is probably one of the most trusted wrestlers in the whole company given the fact that seemingly every injured guy works with him while they're recovering.

If I had to pick two in-terms of the likeliness of them happening it'd be;
- Nia Jax
- Tye Dillinger

So there you have my NXT pick predictions, so the only thing left is for me to give you two things to look out for and one prediction for tonight.
- Finn Balor ending up on the same show as Gallows and Anderson
- Where The Wyatts end up, what with them not being classed as a Faction/Tag Team
- Stephanie takes all three Shield guys to guarantee the WWE Title stays on RAW

In the meantime, thanks again for reading. I've got really high hopes for tonight, so hopefully it's not a complete letdown. Just remember, DRAFT D'LO!