Latest RAW and ECW Thoughts
WWE TV over the past two days has been pretty strong, as the company continues to fight the backlash of the Chris Benoit tragedy all over the place, they are doing what they can to put a good product on television. RAW on Monday night from the CajunDome was a solid show, with basic matches, but good build towards the PPV in two weeks in San Jose. They didn't have John Cena to rely on, so they had to do the show with Bobby Lashley as the main face, and overall I thought it was passable. I am torn on what will happen at the Bash, as I can see a WWE Title change coming for some reason. Almost as if it's time again to get the belt off of Cena, and make him the hunter instead of the hunted. Last year at this time he had already dropped the belt to RVD, who then lost it to Edge, who then dropped it again to Cena.
This type of situation with a Lashley clean win at the Bash could set up an obvious rematch for SummerSlam with the two, or they could just use Lashley as a stepping stone to something bigger (Ugh - Snitsky?) for SummeSlam. The way that Lashley has been used though over the course of the last year, with the ECW title win, then the semi-main event at WrestleMania, then on-going McMahon feud, makes me think they are going to protect him as much as possible here. The other thought is that Kennedy gets involved, and he and Cena then move on to a program that takes them to a title match at SummerSlam.
Back to RAW though, it consisted of 8 overall matches, which included Lashley over King Booker via DQ, Umaga in a squash over Santino Marella, Cade and Murdoch over the Highlanders, Paul London over Shelton Benjamin, Candice Michelle and Mickie James beat Jillian Hall and Beth Phoenix, William Regal over Sandman via DQ, and the main of Lashley and Jeff Hardy over Kennedy and King Booker. The show also had a face to face with Dusty Rhodes and Randy Orton, and they made a Texas Bullrope match between the two at GAB.
The show seemed pretty fast paced, and despite the crowd being sort of dead most of the night, I thought they did a good job of what they had. I hate to say that there still is a black cloud over what happened two weeks ago in Atlatna, but for some reason there is just a lot of what seems to be a lull right now. They are pushing HHH hard on his comeback, and show 1-2 commericals per show for it. Same goes for Rey Mysterio on the SmackDown side. I wouldn't be shocked to see some commericals come Spetember-October for Shawn Michaels and Undertaker as well.
Last night I thought that ECW was one of the stronger shows we've seen in quite awhile. They again focused on the two main guys, C.M. Punk and Johnny Nitro, as both wrestled, and won. Punk in a very good match beat Stevie Richards, and Nitro won an extreme rules match vs Tommy Dreamer. Both Tazz and Joey Styles made a big deal of Nitro beating Dreamer in an extreme match, as if it proved he could hang with an ECW guy who wins 1 of every 15 matches. As for Punk and Richards, that match should show the ECW powers that be that Stevie can hang with the best of them.
Elijah Burke beat Balls Mahoney in an okay match with his two high knees, The Miz in his debut beat Nunzio, the sluts danced, and and Matt Striker had a "classroom" session with the Boogeyman, and in his ECW debut, with some of the biggst man boobs I have ever seen, Viscera, now being called Big Daddy "V" (a rip on Kevin Nash?) came out and laid out Boogeyman. Effective use of Vis, who has the size to contiue to be a mid-level moster who they will push as they did Snitsky for awhile.
So two more hours of WWE TV left for the week. There are plenty of TV shows still focused on Benoit, as tomorrow Linda McMahon will be on Bill O'Riley's show, which could be very interesting. As for in the ring, they have done a solid job over the last three hours of TV making me interested in the upcoming PPV.
