As per usual these days, my Raw post is a few days late, but better late than never I suppose. Here we go:
The Good...
The opening standoff between CM Punk and Chris Jericho got the shot off to a sprinting start and, to me, stole the show. I love how their building the "No BS, no gimmicks, no pyro, just go out and put on a spectacular wrestling match" stance on things. The wonderful thing is that those 2 can pull off that kind of show-stealing performance. Some of the one-liners they exchanged in the kurfuffle were also quite amusing, especially Punk's "Did you invent Canada?" line. Hilarious.
The John Cena/Rock faceoff was also very good, but in a different way. Rock was all about chants, catch phrases twitter trends and reading speech notes off his arm. What made it better than just another promo was the fact that Cena called The Rock out for having his script on his arm and for hiding behind catch phrases. It is true that The Rock has more charisma than Cena and usually pulls off a better speech than his adversary, but ol' John Boy verbally kicked his ass on this night.
The CM Punk/Daniel Bryan match was a classic wrestling match. There were changes in momentum, patented moves, counter-moves, outside involvment and the crowd was emotionally invested in the contest. Add to that the fact that John Laurinitis and Teddy Long continued their feud and Jericho added fire to his WWE Title match vs. Punk by attacking him from behind and you have a hell of a powder keg on your hands. Granted this segment was a tad overbooked, but it furthered storylines and the crowd ate it up.
The Bad...
The Miz lost to John Cena in a 4-minute match. He had about 12 seconds of offence and has been reduced to the role of jobber for CM Punk and Cena. This matchup was the headlining match of Wrestlemania last year and thus it is criminal to give these guys just 4 minutes in the ring. Apparently Miz has fallen out of favour with Vince McMahon and people in the locker room , but he can still wrestle and the WWE could do themselves a favour by allowing him to have a proper match with John Cena, which he can still lose to put Cena over. This waste of talent killed the crowd and momentum of the show.
The tag-team match featuring Big Show and Sheamus vs. Cody Rhodes and Mark Henry featured a good promo by Cody Rhodes about Big Show's failings at Wrestlemanias past. As for wrestling, there was about 40 seconds of that, making it a terrible match. Big Show speared Mark Henry and then Sheamus hit him with a brogue kick for the win. That's it. Well, Mark Henry's career is now 6 feet under ground, which is consistent with the rumors that he is on his way out of WWE.
The Meh...
Kelly Kelly defeated Nikki Bella in an ok match that included 2 or 3 wrestling moves and lasted more than a minute at least. There wasn't brilliant execution on the moves and there wasn't much of a story told in the ring though. Not a bad match, but not much there to make it memorable. At least it wasn't a tag match and at least it went more than 90 seconds.
The crowd was hot for the triple-threat tag team title match and the match was ok, but nothing special stood out in it. As well, what's with the tag teams that are put together out of nowhere? Tag teams need months of practice and winning matches together before they should be put in a tag title match. R-Truth and Kofi Kingston haven't been teaming together long enough to be in a match like this. The tag team titles already have very little prestige or meaning left and just throwing tag teams together out of nowhere to compete for the championships makes them even less valuable. This is not a new problem, but time for me to start publicly rail against it.
Eve has generated a whole lot of heat for herself in a very short time for using sex to get what she wants, but her speech on Raw lacked punch. Props to her for the heat, but her mic skills need work.
Overall... 73/100
The promos between the top superstars were excellent and the CM Punk/Daniel Bryan match was very good; however, the rest of the wrestling on the show was short and lacking in storytelling or anything to get spectators emotionally involved in it.
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