Raw July 14th: Flair, Sting in WWE2K15 and Battleground Go-Home Show

Tonight’s WWE Raw was the go-home show for this upcoming Sunday’s WWE Battleground event, which will feature a fatal four way for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship between Randy Orton, Kane, Roman Reigns and WWE World Heavyweight Champion John Cena. If it feels like they just tossed stuff together for an in between PPV before Summerslam then you are probably absolutely correct!

The big rumor swirling around about tonight’s Raw was that former WCW superstar Sting would make his big WWE debut, although, let’s be real here, the timing made absolutely zero sense for Sting to come to the WWE. Sting is getting up there in age and Wrestlemania makes the most sense for him to come back, or at least build up to that. This isn’t “Wrestlemania Season” just yet. Instead what we got was an announcement that Sting will be featured in WWE2K15, which we all kind of figured anyway! Still, that’s pretty cool. It’ll be “Classic” and “Modern” Sting, which I have no clue about. Maybe I guess they mean short-haired, blonde Sting and “Crow” Sting, which is cool. Still, they dropped a pretty awesome promo video for it and people seemed really amped up about it.

Anyway, onto the highlights of Raw:

Dean Ambrose is Amazing

The show opened with John Cena coming out to cut a really awful, goofy, John Cena promo about how you need to have the WWE Network to watch Battleground. I guess someone has to do it, might as well be him. Then Roman Reigns came out and they both friendly bickered about being top babyfaces before Dean Ambrose cut in via the Titantron (seriously, why do we still call it that? Titan Sports has been gone for so long.) to tell them that they are gonna have to be friends tonight for their big six-man tag match. Then Kane, Seth Rollins and Randy Orton show up and beat the ever-living snot out of Dean Ambrose. Like I mean they beat the piss out of him. The best part is that he’s Dean Ambrose and he’s amazing, so he looks up at them and says, “Is that all you guys got?” More of a beating follows with Rollins jumping off of a crate to curb stomp Ambrose to put him into the “hospital.” Awesome stuff.

Dean Ambrose is a man that is great at professional wrestling. 

Damian Sandow’s Identity Crisis is Hilarious

Ads placed inside of programming are awful. They are just the worst. Everyone hates product placement and WWE does it a lot and it can sometimes be unbearable. Ah-ha, but this is where Adam Rose has come in the past few weeks; to be the guy shilling their products for them. It was hard lemonade before, now it’s Sonic. But how to make it not crappy? Damian Sandow, who has portrayed a wide range of weird, hilarious characters of late, decides to be a dude who works at Sonic delivering food to people’s cars. I’m not kidding.

Stardust Exists

My wife was watching this week with me and was confused as hell as to why there were two dudes with black and gold facepaint on TV doing whatever the hell that they were doing. This gimmick could be a death sentence for Cody Rhodes, but he’s embracing it and working this whole incredible David Bowie Ziggy Stardust-level character and it’s hard to hate.

We Didn’t Have to See the Usos Wrestle

Something about the Usos’s gimmick is so grating, so obnoxious, so awful that it’s hard to explain. They can wrestle just fine and have been exciting at times. Hell, they’ve even had good matches now and then, but I just want to see them get beaten up. So Harper and Rowan jumping them on the ramp while they are doing their whole “When I say Oos You Say Oooh” thing was just great. Luke Harper is a great big man and deserves every second of television he gets. Maybe I think that because he looks like and wrestles kind of like Bruiser Brody and Necro Butcher? I don’t know, but I’m okay with this. Maybe the Wyatts finally take the tag straps on Sunday?

Then that’s about it. The actual wrestling on this show was just kind of there. Two women’s matches that were throwaways, a lot of focus on the upcoming Interncontinental Battle Royal, which meant RVD vs. Alberto Del Rio, Ziggler vs. Fandango, Big E vs. Cesaro and Miz vs. Sheamus with none of them being that great. Cesaro working this dumb “get DQ’d” gimmick is just awful and we want it to stop already. 

The main event was just one big shmoz as well, with Ambrose not in the equation. I swore that he’d run down but it looked like Rollins might have tweaked his knee late in the match and he was mysteriously off-camera after that, with the match degrading into a DQ with finishers exchanged all around like they were akin to do. In my perfect world Ambrose ran down covered in medical tape and beat the crap out of Rollins, which seemed like the original plan, but who knows?

Also, man, what a waste of Ric Flair on TV.

Published on July 15, 2014 at 3:16 am
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