Following Elimination Chamber, Raw featured four big NXT call ups with NXT champion Tommaso Ciampa, North American champion Johnny Gargano, Ricochet and Aleister Black all wrestling on the show. Plus, Ronda Rousey defended her title in a rematch against Ruby Riott, “The Brock Lesnar Story” narrated by Paul Heyman, the first official inductees into the WWE’s Hall of Fame 2019 class & more. Grab your tickets for POST Wrestling Live in New York on Sunday, April 7th with a special Q&A show with John Pollock and Wai Ting at the Broadway Comedy Club. The Q&A will go from Noon – 1:30 pm with a special meet-and-greet after the show and lots of time to get to MetLife Stadium for WrestleMania. NEWS OF THE DAY:DX announced for the WWE Hall of Fame including Chyna, Paige gets pushback over the history of the WWE’s women’s division, Francis Ngannou knocks out Cain Velasquez, WrestleMania Week announcements.
The crowd isn’t to blame.
WWE didn’t deliver content that landed. Simple as that.
John and Wai already talked about this but a tiny fraction of WWE knows anything about NXT. These introductions were ‘fine’ but there’s no reason why these wrestlers would connect with people they don’t know and have seen the first time.
If you wanted the crowd to respond you would have to build up people through video packages building hype and bringing them into an angle.
I think the one thing I haven’t seen mentioned about the Paige thing is that TNA (regardless of their stupid name) were actually giving the women some character and giving the audience a reason to take the women seriously which worked and it was something they got credit for so the idea that fans were reluctant to see good wrestling from women is provable as false. Gail Kim got credit as a wrestler from her time there but when she went to WWE after that, look how they treated her. That’s on top of the fact that the rare occasions WWE would let the women do more than they’d usually do in matches in the WWE, they would get credit. And that’s on top of the fact that WWE decided to put them in situations where they weren’t supposed to be taken seriously and that’s on top of the fact that most of the time when the women asked to do more wrestling and push boundaries they were told to get back in their box.
I can see from her perspective why she’d be frustrated about fans not taking women’s wrestling in WWE seriously before but she probably should’ve looked at the reasons why before making an ignorant comment. Sexualising the women did work and continues to work but WWE made the decision that the women couldn’t offer anything more than that and that their matches where they wrestled weren’t important.
Basically, Paige made herself look stupid here and is deserving of the backlash she’s facing. I don’t know if she actually believes what she said or if she’s just protecting WWE because she, of all people, somehow got a movie made about her but whatever the reason behind her saying what she said, she’s just wrong.
I feel like this RAW was written specifically with the knowledge that Jim Cornette is going to be reviewing it on his podcast later this week (can’t wait for that).