2nd November Edition Of The

Monday Night Raw & Wrestling News

After the WWE Championship was exclusively feuded between Randy Orton and Drew McIntyre for the last 12 years - what even is time anymore - WWE opened 2nd November Edition Of The Monday Night Raw show with a daring new concept: having multiple people fight over your top title at the same time. It’s actually a really neat use of Randy’s gimmick upon becoming champion. What happens when the Apex Predator becomes the Prey? As he’s now feuding with former champion McIntyre, Mr Money in the Bank The Miz and the looming background threat of The Fiend. But we can’t really build any of that properly because his next pay-per-view match is against SmackDown’s Roman Reigns at Survivor Series. Nevertheless, it’s suddenly made Raw’s main event scene multi-layered and exciting - as Orton’s opening promo was interrupted by a fake-out Fiend entrance, for Drew to lay Randy out with a Claymore, and then McIntyre stopping Miz from cashing in.

Presumably following NXT’s success with Halloween Havoc, we got another WCW throwback: a thing on a pole match. Jeff Hardy unhooked a guitar and whacked it on Elias to win their three week feud decisively in just 5 minutes. Yep, WWE really are pushing Elias as a main eventer on Raw.

Shayna Baslzer and Nia Jax then beat Mandy Rose and Dana Brooke to retain the Women’s tag team titles in just a few minutes, after Lana accidentally distracted the referee. I’m sure that won’t come back to haunt Lana later o-she was put through the announcer’s table after Nia Jax squashed her in a match again.

Bobby Lashley squashed R-Truth, and then Drew Gulak too, draping the latter’s body over Truth’s to get a 24/7 title change. In the opening three matches, the cumulative match time was under 10 minutes. Thankfully, that was about to change with all the big meaty men.

In a ‘you’re not the authority figure, no you’re not the authority figure’ set up promo, AJ Styles declared himself Team Raw’s captain for Survivor Series, and definitely not General Manager Adam Pearce made his suggestion official: Braun Strowman will get a place if he can beat Sheamus and Keith Lee in a Triple Threat right now. This was genuinely very exciting, mostly built around Sheamus and Lee clobbering each other, and then a Strowman Train sending them all through the barricade. There was a big tower of doom spot, and AJ’s stunned awe was really good at putting Lee over on commentary. Braun won by pinning Sheamus. How will they co-exist? Styles attempted to get them all to make up, but Sheamus brawled with Strowman, causing everyone to hit their finishers on each other, making Captain AJ do some of the best acting since The Room to display his anguish. Later on, Sheamus tried to convince McIntyre to be Team Raw’s final man - which would make for one hell of a Survivor Series line-up.

Angel Garza tried to chat up your mum. And then we got the latest evolution to Alexa Bliss’ fiendish new gimmick… This week’s Firefly Fun House was dedicated to the three most important words in the WWE - f*** Randy Orton. Sister Abigail said both Randy and Bliss should go f themselves - neatly using the Crucix as a censor bleep over her mouth - so Alexa got out the Fun House’s swear jar. Bray Wyatt got a bit of PTSD from Orton burning down his old compound - which led to Bliss unveiling her new trick: letting her tongue extend out of her mouth Pennywise-style from It. Even Bray was freaked out, doing a final swear punchline to end the episode. While this could just be some Fun House weirdness, this does have potential to cross over into Alexa’s in-ring wrestling character - using the creepy tongue spot in actual matches.

Possibly supporting that idea, Nikki Cross found Bliss backstage later on, who was unresponsive and had her possessed Fiend eyes in. A Cross vs Bliss feud spinning out of this would be a great way to establish Alexa’s new gimmick as a serious threat.

Because we finally know why WWE broke up beloved tag team the IIconics of Peyton and Billie Kay… to just put Peyton in another tag team with Lacey Evans. Luke is going to kick off about this in the Raw podcast.

The Hurt Business said it’s now time to collect their payment for ridding WWE of Retribution - they only went to another feud, MVP - the WWE tag team championships. This set up a really fun non-title match of Shelton Benjamin and Cedric Alexander against the New Day - which the Hurt Business won clean! This was a great way to elevate a new team in a very lacking division, and I’m very much looking forward to this feud.

And in the main event, we got Ricochet vs Tucker. Main Event, as in the WWE show, Main Event. Where we got the answer to the question who buries the buried? Retribution beat them all up afterwards. And in the actual main event, Drew beat both the Miz and John Morrison in a handicap match. McIntyre got RKO’d by Randy Orton from outta nowhere afterwards, who himself was then creepilyy laughed at by The Fiend from outta a paranormal dimension, I guess. Because it’s either paranormal dimension, or The Fiend on the PA system, which isn’t as scary.

What did you think of 2nd November Edition Of The Monday Night Raw? Let us know in the comments down below about 2nd November Edition Of The Monday Night Raw. I don’t know if my expectations have been lowered, but I really enjoyed the last two hours of this show. I love the tag title feud, Team Raw is shaping up very nicely, and the multiple challengers to Orton’s title feel genuinely threatening.

Wrestling News

Despite Vince McMahon being reportedly high on him backstage earlier this year - ‘high’ being the operative word there - like many others supposedly set for a push, Matt Riddle has now found himself drafted to a new brand, where he’s lost back to back matches, and didn’t even feature on this week’s show. But it might not just be management that has come down on Matt. Sean Ross Sapp is reporting that Riddle, “doesn’t have a ton of friends in the locker room”; which possibly translated to screen in his recent losses to Baron Corbin clean, and suffering defeats in his first two Raw matches against AJ Styles, and then in a Survivor Series qualifying match to Sheamus. But that last match might have turned things around for Matt Riddle, as it was reported last week Vince was so impressed with his performance, WWE decided to drop his first name to now simply be Riddle… one word, like Madonna. Or Shockmaster. Hey, it worked really well for Alexander Rusev. And Antonio Cesaro. And Andrade Almas. They’re always being pushed in WWE now. But Riddle didn’t just impress management. We thought he was just going to go out there and mope around but he didn’t, he made Sheamus look really great.’ Sheamus was thankful of that and, apparently when they came through, Vince McMahon was “very fired up about it.” In a good way, I hope. Usually you don’t want to hear Vince and ‘fire’ in the same sentence.

Save that stuff for those defying his Twitch ban! Paige and Zeline Vega have both announced they will continue to stream on Twitch and Cameo, despite WWE’s deadline for their contracted talent to stop using those platforms passing last week. Paige protested she will continue with her show, following her comments last week saying she “couldn’t deal with WWE anymore”. Vega, however, has found the sweetest of victories - a loophole. Because WWE may have banned Twitch, they may have banned Cameo, they may have banned YouTube, they may have banned The Young Bucks from The Thunderdome, but they haven’t banned OnlyFans - and Vega has set one up to sell photos of her cosplay photoshoots. Vega and Paige have been the most outspoken critics of WWE’s new ruling since news broke last month, publicly discussing unionisation of wrestlers on Twitter. WWE maintain that talent who don’t fall in line will be fined, suspended, or even fired.