The one segment that stood out most to me from Monday Night Raw was the segment involving Roman Reigns and Samoa Joe, and Joe was the one who stood out. He pointed out that WWE fans allow themselves to indulge an awful lot in nostalgia, which is an irrefutable fact. But the only reason WWE obliges to this is because it proves to be a massive ratings draw and gets the crowd to pop, including me, every time they do it. Joe also looked good in what was a very high-profile match with Reigns. WWE may want to seriously look into orchestrating a meeting between Reigns and Joe at SummerSlam, because these two have obvious chemistry in the ring and they haven’t met in a one-on-one match in over a year (the last time they met was at Backlash in May 2018). This proposal is obviously made with the assumption that Roman Reigns is good-to-go for the match. The reason I say this is that, while it is great to see Roman back, he has still not been cleared to return to full-time action (this is the reason that he has been featured primarily in tag team matches; like Extreme Rules for example).
Another high-profile segment from Raw was Seth Rollins’ promo of his SummerSlam match against Brock Lesnar in which he will be challenging for the Universal Championship. Speaking of that, it was on Miz TV, and this reminds me that a match at SummerSlam between Dolph Ziggler and The Miz that I talked about last week is reported not to be in the cards. WWE does in fact have about five storylines repeating themselves currently because the landscape of WWE looked eerily similar about two years ago).
Seth makes it seem surprisingly believable that he may be able to pull off the seemingly impossible yet again and take the Universal Championship out of the bearpaws of Brock Lesnar. The reason as to why he was able to make this seem like such a believable scenario is because he pointed out the fact that Lesnar was simply a man like everyone else and that he could be beaten on any given day. By doing this, Seth made The Beast seem relatable.
One other notable thing that happened was Bray Wyatt attacking Mick Foley. WWE needed to give him something to do while Finn Balor took the night off. While Balor is in the midst of preparing to take time away from WWE, Wyatt is preparing for what seems like it may be a significant singles push. I figured that he might attack Stone Cold Steve Austin after a very heartfelt promo in which he referred to everyone affiliated with WWE (including the WWE universe) truly being a part of the WWE family. In order to advance the storyline and help cement Wyatt as a main event superstar (my original thought was that Austin might bring Kevin Owens out and give him a few pointers on how to improve his Stunner).
Becky Lynch and Natalya had another heated exchange which got physical and the spotlight was presently taken off Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross. The potential “inevitable” (Express) return of Ronda Rousey was also hinted at, with a few references of her being sprinkled in.
Sami Zayn also seems to be somewhat lost in the shuffle of Monday Night Raw as he took yet another loss to Ray Mysterio this past week and seems to be lacking direction at the moment. That’s okay, however, these things will happen. It’s all part of the grind and he has surely learned to accept and love the ups and downs he will experience in his WWE tenure.
Side Note:As always, it is incredibly exciting to see John Cena; The Club is officially being re-named the OC; The Usos will get one more Raw Tag Team Championship match with The Revival at SummerSlam, which is very smart considering how much Prestige they have in WWE. The Viking Raiders should be next in line to challenge for the titles; Eric Bischoff made a small appearance to let the on-screen audience know he is now running SmackDown Live; lastly, the events surrounding the 24/7 Championship turned out to be very entertaining, and the right guy walked away with the title at the end of the night – R-Truth.