The Official UKFF RAW thread (part 2)...

[Loki]

With three hours of programming every week, Raw has always struggled to fill its time, hence all the long boring midcard matches, interminable tags, and endless repeats of previous matchups.

The random match generator does occasionally turn up something interesting though, if you happen to not sensibly skip most of Raw, and it did this week with Chad Gable v Ivar who put on a really fun match.  Gable is such an underrated wrestler, he really is the complete package and if he'd been a few inches taller surely he'd have been a long-term main eventer.  And him up against Ivar is the sort of freakshow that wrestling excels at.  They had the crowd absolutely into it too. Ivar has more upside as a singles wrestler than in a tag imo, he's the more talented of the two and is visually arresting, plus he can do a moonsault. 

[The King of Old School]

38 minutes ago, air_raid said:

If the match has to happen, surely you take the belt off Roman at the Rumble so there's some doubt as to who is going to win that massive match? Everyone on Earth knows Rock isn't winning the belt again.

You could do that.

It means the title plays second fiddle again though.

The title should be the main focus for me, and this match if it happens should be for the title. 

No idea how you get there though as i doubt Rock is winning the Rumble or EC!

[air_raid]

30 minutes ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

What worse, Roman losing the belts in a 4 way after the long reign. Roman losing the belts to a cash in from Priest after the 4 way, or everyone knowing that Roman is winning at Mania. None of those are palatable solutions. 

2 minutes ago, The King of Old School said:

You could do that.

It means the title plays second fiddle again though.

It's almost as if Roman vs Rock is a bad idea at worst, poorly timed at best. If only there was something else they could do which (a) doesn't cheapen the title, (b) doesn't have an absurdly obvious winner. What A Nightmare. Whoaaaa.

 

[BomberPat]

Roman vs. Rock absolutely doesn't need the title, the whole point of the "Head Of The Table"/"Tribal Chief" stuff is that it gives them a bragging rights claim to fight over without the belt being involved. But they've booked themselves into a corner in that, in order to get there, they would need to get the belt off Reigns in a way that isn't seen as underwhelming. 

I'm not convinced Reigns is losing until next year anyway, but as I've been saying since the last Wrestlemania, everything in the last year would make more sense if Reigns had lost then.

[Kfogg1991]

I fucking can't agree more with the comment above about priest. In the space of three hours they made Damian priest look like the fucking biggest Muppet on the roster.

He has teased cashing in for weeks now and pretty close after the opening segment you see priest backstage completely fucking oblivious that he and subsequently the judgment day have just missed the easiest cash in and title win they could ever imagine. What a genuine whopper

Then the main event happens and they get given twelve minutes from the bell to the end of the show and have priest on the go home episode of raw before the ROYAL RUMBLE throw truth through the middle rope not over the top to give him a last attempt at showing he's not a fucking moron and threw someone out the way it's needed on Saturday to win the match and get the mania main event.

It's mainly on priest but the entire team are also fucking stupid considering the entire world knew Seth was injured and coming to tell us what the future entails. Beyond stupid and that's a bold statement for the WWE 

[Chris B]

2 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

I think the holding back of (or on?) Punk is with a view to a fairly imminent heel turn. I get the feeling they're not interested in presenting AEW's version of Punk nor the Summer of Punk Punk, but one who obnoxiously believes the whole world even outside Chicago loves him and is about to be disappointed. He'll perhaps address the erasure of some of his history then. I think this was sewing those seeds well but who knows.

This was most of his run in AEW for me. Constantly trying to figure out if CM Punk is sewing seeds for being a heel or just a really weird and obnoxious face.

[Supremo]

For a while, I was clinging to the idea that the above promo proved Punk could be trusted to know what he’s doing and our patience would be rewarded.

His first few months in AEW, people were complaining it was all so safe and boring. But then in no time at all he was screaming down a camera lens, covered in blood, as the crescendo of one of my favourite feuds of all time. Money promos all over the shop. Storylines you could sit and watch supercuts of on YouTube, from start to finish. You could look back and appreciate how he cleverly laid a foundation on which he very quickly built a couple of masterpieces between Kingston and then MJF.

I’m starting to lose faith here though. It’s just not WWE’s style, is it? They don’t really do those types of big, seismic, character-defining angles. When was the last one? Sami turning on Roman? That was a year ago! They also don’t do blood. They also don’t do straight-down-the-lens promos. In WWE’s universe™ last night was their big moment. That was their Kingston-and-Punk-screaming-at-each-other or MJF-leaves-Punk-drenched-in-blood.

Maybe it’s just me and my biases are showing. There seems to be loads of praise online, so fair play if this rocked your world. I just don’t get it though. The whole thing felt flat as fuck.

Hopefully I’m wrong and this all turns into something amazing, but right now? CM Punk is starting to feel like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. An act built on being the edgy rebel who would say the unsayable. But then he went to a promotion where everyone else was being too edgy, saying things they shouldn’t be saying, so he lost his head and ended up back in the safe haven he once rebelled against.  I just can’t buy into his character anymore. The genie is out of the bottle. You’re no longer the underdog. You’re a dynasty. You’ve became everything you hated. You are the New York Yankees.

But yeah.  Now I’ve brought it up, remember how red hot Sami Zayn was this time last year? Remember how fucking amazing all that was? Absolute madness we’re twelve months removed, they turned him into a nobody again and they can’t capture even half of that magic with CM Punk and The Rock.

Justice for Sami Zayn.

[SuperBacon]

5 minutes ago, Kfogg1991 said:

What a genuine whopper

[BomberPat]

6 minutes ago, Chris B said:

This was most of his run in AEW for me. Constantly trying to figure out if CM Punk is sewing seeds for being a heel or just a really weird and obnoxious face.

funnily enough, you could say the same about most of Cody's AEW run too.

[Hannibal Scorch]

I actually woke up while this was going on so watched it. The praise it’s getting is insane. But that’s because I did see the stuff he was doing like Supremo posted above. And I think it’s the combination of what WWE wants and how it produces things as well as Punk trying to fit the WWE house style. I can understand if you saw none of Punks AEW run though you probably think “this is cinema”, but it’s pretty poor.

[DavidB6937]

1 minute ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

I actually woke up while this was going on so watched it. The praise it’s getting is insane. But that’s because I did see the stuff he was doing like Supremo posted above. And I think it’s the combination of what WWE wants and how it produces things as well as Punk trying to fit the WWE house style. I can understand if you saw none of Punks AEW run though you probably think “this is cinema”, but it’s pretty poor.

Or people just appreciate things differently? I mean to say it's 'insane' that someone enjoyed it is a bit OTT. We all have different preferences and I think it's okay if people enjoyed the Cody/Punk stuff. It wasn't awful.

[air_raid]

21 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I'm not convinced Reigns is losing until next year anyway,

Is this purely because they've got the horn for Roman "passing Hogan's record" even though it's not comparable since (a) not the same title and (b) Hogan was defending the WWF title 10-15 times a month throughout the bulk of his reign?

[Supremo]

If Sami Zayn didn’t win at Elimination Chamber 2023, and Cody Rhodes didn’t win at Wrestlemania 39, just for fucking AJ Styles, LA Knight or Randy Orton to finally be the one to beat Roman, in a random Four Way at the Royal Rumble? Just to free him up for a feud with The Rock?

There are not enough rubber chickens in the world.

[air_raid]

5 minutes ago, Supremo said:

If Cody Rhodes didn’t win at Wrestlemania 39, just for fucking The Rock?

There are not enough rubber chickens in the world.

Fixed.

[BomberPat]

8 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Is this purely because they've got the horn for Roman "passing Hogan's record" even though it's not comparable since (a) not the same title and (b) Hogan was defending the WWF title 10-15 times a month throughout the bulk of his reign?

Not purely, but certainly in part. The worry is that they will always find cause to second-guess themselves, because there's always maybe the prospect of a bigger match later down the line. The Rock has generally been that possibility, but he might not be the only one - and even then, The Rock's not beating Roman, so once that match is out of the way we're only ever going to be back to square one.

I wrote something about it after the last Wrestlemania, that if Cody Rhodes at that show wasn't the right man at the right time, then nobody ever will be. They passed over the opportunity to have a sympathetic babyface Sami Zayn win the belt in his hometown after months of critically beloved build, and rather than give Cody Rhodes the "you're not Daniel Bryan" treatment and turn on him, by and large the audience accepted that Cody was the next logical choice, and that him winning in the main event of Wrestlemania justified Sami's loss. But then that didn't happen either, and Roman Reigns has only defended the title twice on TV or PPV since then. 

My assumption at the time was that they got cold feet and backed down, because there was still the prospect of a match with The Rock, and that if that didn't come to fruition, they could always go back to Cody this year. And, to their credit, they seem to have managed to keep Cody a popular and credible babyface in the intervening year against all odds. But now, you have Cody, you have CM Punk, you have The Rock...are they going to take belt off of Roman for one of those guys, while leaving a title defence against the others on the table? If we assume that they are going with Roman/Rock at Wrestlemania, then Roman's winning that match. Which means we're back to "okay, now who beats Roman and when?". When he's only wrestling three or four times a year, and defending the title even less frequently, and when his title reign has already gone on this long, are they even going to consider ending his reign anywhere but Wrestlemania? So if he beats The Rock this time around, I'd say it's a safe bet we have at least another year of Reigns as champion to go. And then we get to next year's Wrestlemania, and who knows what other matches are on the table - maybe the bloom is off the Cody rose and he's not the guy any more, maybe they have a high profile signing like Okada, or they've talked Steve Austin into doing a match, there will always be something that will make them think "hang on, let's hold off until that match".