10th August Edition Of The Monday Night Raw & Wrestling News

Samoa Joe opened the episode moderating a contract signing between Seth Rollins and Dominic - which saw Dom sign on the dotted line to become an official WWE superstar. Psyche, it was actually Rey’s contract extension, no takey-backeys! Dom was really good here, but he felt wooden compared to the brilliant promos from Joe and Seth - which is the match I really want. Seth made it a hardcore match at SummerSlam, where Dominic could use all the kendo sticks he wants - a stipulation that came to whip Dom across the back just one match later.

Following an inconsequential Seth squash of Humberto Carillo - thanks for coming Humberto! - Buddy and Rollins attacked Dominic, tying him up in the rops crucifix style for a game of Dom-tennis: whacking him brutally over and over again with the kendo stick while Seth yelled into the camera - hey Rey! It seemed legit too, as Dominic’s body was covered in welts afterwards. This was a great angle for the feuds and characters, with heavy Messiah symbolism - smartly casting Dominic in the Jesus role, with Seth as the devil, in a subtle show of character hypocrisy. The only problem is that this storyline constantly sees babyfaces run down for the rescue. So where was Kevin Owens? And, far more awkwardly, Samoa Joe, who was just sitting on commentary. He was all ready to fight last week after Seth said some nasty things to Tom Phillips, but he did nothing to stop Dominic get turned into Lucha ham.

We got a trailer for the Netflix Expanded Universe crossover which will see all the Big Shows cross over into the Biggest Big Big Show Show, starring the star of the Big Show Show Big Show.

Angelo Dawkins beat Andrade, and Bianca BelAir beat Zelina Vega - giving them revenge victories now instead of actually building heat for their SummerSlam tag match.

Despite declaring themselves leaders of Raw Underground at the end of last week’s show, the Hurt Business just went back to their US title feud here, almost like there’s no real plan for what’s happening. In more ineffective babyface booking, Shelton Benjamin beat US Champion Apollo Crews. Then those Retribution rascals kept still at it with technical interference like… chucking a cinder block through a window and… turning over a car. That’ll sure stop the microphones from working. I like to picture one of the Retribution members is just stood by the dimmer switch for the house lights all night.

Ooooo! It’s all remarkably uncool. Mostly the way they all yelp and woop like the Spirit Squad in masks, or teenage versions of the minions from Despicable Me. And then we got all the returning Raw women standing in a row! Mickie James, Lana and Natalya all then returned to Monday nights in a backstage interview segment, with the latter two picking up Nattie’s delusional locker-room leader storyline that was dropped around the same time the Performance Center had an outbreak of Coronavirus.

The Viking Raiders, Cedric Alexander and Ricochet then quickly beat Akira Tozawa and his ninjas - letting R-Truth reveal himself as one and roll up Tozawa to win his 38th 24/7 title. It was a segment.

Liv Morgan and Ruby Riott are back together again - yay! But they’re still playing up dissension between them - not so yay. Morgan lost to Peyton Royce in a pretty good match for the two minutes they got, because Ruby accidentally distracted Liv. Where is this storyline going?

It doesn’t matter because here’s Shane McMahon to show you all the new toys he got while he was away. Look, he got a Riddick Moss who’s just returned after not wanting to work during lockdown. He got a new Jiu-Jitsu fighter called Arturo Ruas. And his biggest birthday present: Dabbo-Kato winning via technical Cock Out.

Vince even let him play with one of his main roster toys, as Shayna Baszler beat up three opponents at the same time. Getting rid of the sexy dancers does make Raw Underground feel less desperate. But not having the Hurt Business storyline also robs it of all substance - flattening out the whole concept to just there, with no real meaning.

In an awkward gear change back to ‘normal wrestling’ - normal wrestling being a woman who spits poisonous green mist - Bayley took on Asuka in easily the match of the night. I say this every week, WWE are presenting their women’s division better than any major promotion in the world right now. The dynamic and driving forces behind them both was really well done - with Asuka hell bent on revenge. Whereas Bayley didn’t really want to have the match, and will likely take an easy way out rather than fight to the death for her supposed best friend. Asuka made Bayley tap, meaning she’ll go onto face Sasha Banks at SummerSlam.

And the main event was KO vs RKO. Kevin Owens got a lot in before Randy started working over his shoulder. And the neatly mirrored finishing moves was well done, as KO’s stunner was reversed into the very similar RKO. But the match was never the big plan here. It was the excellent angle that followed. Randy cut a promo saying he should be angry at Ric Flair for booking him in this unnecessary match. This was about Ric’s ego. He’s a spotlight junkie still even after all these years. And that Flair wanted Orton to be the son he never had - a brutal reference to David Flair’s suicide. It was a typically great promo from Randy, who’s easily on the best promo run of form in his whole career. So then Flair reminded us all what he can do.

The Nature Boy cut an incredible, heart wrenching promo - talking about how he was on life support not long ago, and when he came out of it, he just wanted to tell people he loved them. He wanted to be a father to Charlotte, and he wanted to help his protegee Orton break his world title reign record - not Cena’s record, Ric’s record (which was actually the line I popped hardest for). They hugged, but you can never trust a viper. And we got another Technical Cock Out as Randy hit the low blow, and then a punt - smartly getting round the impact by having Retribution play with the dimmer switch again. Drew McIntyre then chased Randy away for a very long staredown to close the show.

Wrestling News

Last week saw WWE debut its latest attempt to stop their massively declining ratings: Shane McMahon’s Raw Underground - a shoot Fight Club sub-promotion where wrestlers go to have real fights, rather than in the Raw ring where they have fake fights, I guess. But don’t think about that LOOK AT THE SEXY DANCERS. The sexy dancers who, tragically, weren’t on last night’s episode and appear to have been dropped. To the dancers. But while we know the reason behind Shane McMahon returning to WWE, which is reportedly an attempt to get viewers back, we don’t know why he’s come back with the Raw Underground concept. Until now. Tom Colohue of Sportskeeda is reporting that the idea is 100% from the mind of Shane. And not only that, but “people in the WWE are really quite high on some of Shane’s ideas recently.” This isn’t the first time Shane O Mac has tried to bring an MMA flavour to WWE. When the company brought back the ECW brand in the mid-2000s, Shane pitched that it should be an online-only show made for hardcore fans - which is what NXT would become almost a decade later - and that it would have legit shoot fights throughout. And back in 2009, it was even reported that Shane met with Dana White to purchase the UFC, but Vince turned down the idea as WWE were the bigger product at the time. MVP has seemingly backed this report up, telling Newsweek that, “Shane McMahon explained to us the concept of what they wanted to do and I thought, "Wow, that's pretty cool”. What’s not working out as cool, though, is WWE’s other ratings-grabbing plot they debuted last week: Retribution! The new anonymous WWE faction has appeared on both Raw and SmackDown over the last week, somehow making such cool-on-paper actions like cinder blocks through windows, overturning cars and chainsawing ring ropes come across as a bit lame. Dave Meltzer has said the people under the masks currently aren’t the actual wrestlers who will eventually be revealed making up the stable. It’s been speculated that one of them is Vanessa Bourne after fans recognised her hair on SmackDown, and there are rumours that NXT’s Tommaso Ciampa and Dominik Dijavoic will be part of the group after they both blacked out their Twitter profiles and posted cryptic messages. And Dijavoik has just chucked a molotov cocktail onto his speculation fire - posting another image, tagging in Vince McMahon with the hidden message of “control”. The tweet has since been deleted. Someone who won’t be part of the group, though, is former WWE star Jordan Myles, who’s returned to his previous name ACH - who left the company last year under very controversial conditions, accusing WWE of racism. He signed with MLW last December, but then posted on Twitter that he was quitting wrestling. And just like Terry Funk before him, he un-quit and wrestled for GCW and won DDT’s Ironman Heavymetalweight title. And he’s now been announced for a return to New Japan, where he’ll be part of a six-man tag this Friday at NJPW Strong, where he teams with TJP what's more, Alex Zayne to take on PJ Black, Misterioso and Blake Christian. The card also sees New Japan USA semi-final matches between David Finlay vs. Tama Tonga, and Jeff Cobb vs. KENTA.