WWE CHEAT Fans With Brock Lesnar Cash-In! More NXT Call-Ups?! | WrestleTalk News June 2019

SCRIPT

Brock Lesnar’s Money in the Bank cash-in is announced for this episode of Raw! Brock Lesnar’s Money in the Bank cash-in doesn’t happen on this episode of Raw! But it’s OK, because – Pull up your pants and do the muscle man dance!

And which NXT stars might be getting called up to the main roster soon?!

Click the timestamps in the video description below to go straight to any of those stories.

I’m Oli Davis – give us a subscribe, press the thumbs up button, and answer our question of the day in the comments: Will Brock Lesnar win the Universal title this Friday? Because I’ll be replying to people FROM OUTTA NOWHERE! And click the ‘i’ above my head to give your rating of the show – where you can choose from: RawSome, Cor, AVRAWGE, Poor and RawFul – as I review the Super Showdown go-home episode of Monday Night Raw!

A big part of this episode was how WWE announced in advance that Brock Lesnar would finally be cashing in his Money in the Bank boombox on Raw – I’m sure they’ll totally deliver on that! – because Stephanie McMahon is sick of him disrespecting the briefcase… a briefcase whose gimmick has historically been based around not telling people when they’re going to cash-in. It makes so little sense, even Raw commentator Corey Graves is confused. Corey Graves to AEW confirmed. And I’m pretty sure Stephanie was a heel the last time we saw her. And who attacked Sami Zayn at Money in the Bank!?

So Brock cashing-in, potentially wrestling his first WWE TV match in over 15 years, was the expectation set for this episode. Not us getting carried away with fantasy booking – something WWE directly promised its fans. Keep that in mind.

The actual show kicked off with SmackDown star Roman Reigns, but, let’s be honest, Raw star Roman Reigns, where he was immediately interrupted by his Super Showdown opponent, SmackDown star Shane McMahon, but, let’s be honest, Raw star The OmniShane!

A six-man tag quickly got underway, where Reigns teamed with his real-life cousins the Usos to take on their fierce back-shaving, cornhole-playing rivals The Revival featuring Drew McIntyre.

WWE are very good at six-man tags, and this match got suitably frantic near the end, with Drew eventually winning. Shane then speared Roman for good measure.

I’m very much not into the Shane vs Roman feud, which is pulling significant TV time on Raw and SmackDown into the OmniShane’s Midcard Vortex, and now they’re obviously setting up Reigns vs McIntyre post-Showdown. Which isn’t even remotely exciting because they’re on separate brands, we’ve already seen that, it had a decisive finish of Roman winning clean, and, most importantly, it was Super boring.

Lars Sullivan continued to beat up ethnic minorities next, brawling with the Lucha House Party ahead of their match at Super Showdown.

Becky Lynch came out to promise when she gets her hands on Lacey Evans, she’ll knock her silly. For Lacey Evans to then come out and stand just a few feet across from her in the ring. She’s right there, Becky, you can beat her up if you’re that angry.

This turned into a terrible heel vs heel match between Evans and Charlotte, which started bad with a botched punch, and got worse from there. Thankfully Becky eventually caused the DQ to end it after 5 minutes. I can’t wait for the women’s title match at this Friday’s Super Show-ah, right. We definitely won’t be seeing the Women’s Right in that country!

Rey Mysterio then came out for a segment that was advertised for last week and then dropped without explanation-yeah, we’re not getting a Lesnar cash-in, are we? – where he revealed he’s going to do the right thing and relinquish his US title to Samoa Joe because of his shoulder injury, not because he unfairly beat Joe at Money in the Bank. Joe then rather justifiably attacked Rey for being a dick.

Braun Strowman beat Bobby Lashley in an arm wrestling contest to hype their Super Showdown match because… wrestling!

The awkward Nikki Cross and Alexa Bliss character inconsistent friendship storyline continued next, where Bliss was in Nikki’s corner for her match against Peyton Royce.

At least Alexa’s caffeine addiction is consistent, when a stagehand gave her a coffee half way through the match, for Peyton to kick it out her hand and Billie Kay to push her in the spilled liquid, ruining her white jeans. Because what’s more shallow than building women’s feuds around who’s friends with who? Build them around stains on clothes. Nikki won off the distraction.

Baron Corbin answered Seth’s calling out of Lesnar next, leading to a brawl between the two, where Corbin laid Rollins out after Brock’s music caused a distraction.

Then out came Lesnar for the big selling point of the show, why many viewers would’ve tuned in, and stuck around through the first two hours… to just see Brock beat up Rollins with a chair and reveal he’s actually going to cash in on Friday. Of course, it was a rouse! You got us, WWE. Way to sell the Saudi Arabia pay-per-view that everyone’s annoyed about already.

Baiting and switching three weeks in a row with Lesnar, and then using it to sell your blood money pay-per-view is a very off-putting carny tactic. There’s only so many times you can cheat viewers with fake-out angles before they lose any trust in you as a company. But, in truth, that happened long before now, so maybe shame on us. And why does Brock want to wait until then instead of just winning the title now? It’s not even consistent with his character of wanting to work the fewest dates possible. Don’t expect that motivation to ever be explained, though, because we still don’t know who took out Sami Zayn at Money in the Bank.

They did a big stretcher angle for Seth, with his real-life girlfriend Becky Lynch even getting in the ambulance for ‘realism’ (inverted commas).

Thankfully this was followed up by possibly Bray Wyatt’s best Firefly Fun House promo yet – a super serious episode… about exercise! Bray introduced a new puppet friend – Huskus the Pig Boy, an amazing play on his first fuller figure character Husky Harris, continuing each puppet being an element of Bray’s damaged psyche, whom a puppet Vince McMahon threatened to fire for not being in shape. That was brilliant enough as it was, but then Bray and his cast of puppets launched into a Tim and Eric style green screen music video of them all doing the Muscle Man Dance work out. The key to getting your character over, it seems, is to pre-record all your stuff in advance so McMahon can’t tinker with them.

Triple H and Randy Orton had their first non-video package build for their Super Showdown match, and based it around the size of Hunter’s testicles. If only other roster members were trusted to get over without scripted promos.

Ricochet then took on Cesaro for the third time in the last few weeks in a very good TV match, with their spots riffing off their previous matches. Ricochet rolled up Cesaro for the win, leading Cesaro to beat him up afterwards, get a table from under the ring, to find 24/7 champion R-Truth hiding on it. This was pretty funny too, with the usual undercard scramble chasing Truth out the arena to follow. The better finish, however, would’ve been for the lights to cut out and Undertaker to win the belt.

Instead he came out to cut a promo on his Super Showdown opponent Goldberg, which was the usual Taker stuff of death and souls, but no ‘rest in peace’ catchphrase, because he’d spent too long walking to the ring, and Raw had run out of time.

The third hour of this show was pretty good, even if they did completely drop its ‘gritty’ theme. Unfortunately, overall, the Lesnar storyline not making sense and cheating fans one too many times made this a deeply frustrating watch. This week’s Raw is the worst possible score, Bore.

And now over to Luke with the news!

Great review there, Oli – glad your final thoughts didn’t get cut short by the show ending.

Following on from their excellent TakeOver: XXV show –  which you can watch mine and Laurie’s review of on the WrestleRamble – NXT will be getting ready for their next set of TV tapings to build towards their next big show TakeOver: Toronto. As well as advertising the re-debut of Punishment Martinez – who has been renamed to Damien Priest, we should see more re-debuts on the show along with some new names.

It’s being reported that Adrian Joude will now go under the name Artuo Ruas, Jessie Elban will now go by Jessie Kamea and Luke Menzies will be now be called Ridge Holland. Which is also the name of an excellent wallet.

The bigger changes however come for former Impact Wrestling X Division Champion Trevor Lee – who has changed his name to Cameron Grimes, a reference to his hometown of Cameron in North Carolina. And perhaps most upsettingly, the excellent Eric Bugenhagen has had his excellent name to something way less excellent – Rik Bugez.

Someone looking to get in on the NXT action is former WWE Women’s Tag Team Champion Sasha Banks – who hasn’t been seen on WWE TV since she lost the titles at WrestleMania to The IIconics. It was revealed late last week that Tyler Breeze had moved from the main roster back to NXT, and it looks like Banks could be getting on that train.

NXT UK’s Piper Niven – otherwise known as Viper – recently appeared at an ICW show to challenge NXT UK Women’s Champion Toni Storm to a title match at the promotion’s Shug’s Hoose Party 6. ICW themselves tweeted about the announcement, asking if Storm will accept the challenge – which Sasha Banks replied to asking if she could accept instead.

It was reported over the weekend that Sasha Banks had a meeting with Vince McMahon about her future in the company, which reportedly went well with Banks expected to return to a WWE ring in the summer. Or could she stop by NXT UK for a series of matches with Viper and Toni Storm first?

Someone who could be moving from NXT to the main roster is The King of Bros – and reader of the WrestleTalk Magazine Matt Riddle, it really is an excellent magazine. Riddle actually teased himself for a Raw debut – or debutt if you’re talking in Riddle-ese – but of course that didn’t happen. However PWInsider are reporting that Riddle is set to be part of the huge 50-man Battle Royal at Super Showdown this coming Friday when WWE heads to [country redacted].

According to PWInsider, Riddle’s name was brought up as recently as this past weekend for a spot in the Battle Royal, and it’s been reported that The King of Bros could be one of several NXT names to make the trip over for Super Showdown to compete in the match. This was to be expected, with NXT stars like Roderick Strong, Babatunde, Dan Matha and Tucker Knight entering the Greatest Royal Rumble last year.

And now Dave Meltzer is reporting that WWE have plans in mind to also bring up NXT Champion Adam Cole and NXT Women’s Champion Shayna Baszler to the main roster in the near future.

According to Meltzer on Wrestling Observer Radio, WWE are in particular high on Baszler, and she is “supposed to be geared up” for a main roster call-up soon. When these call-ups could happen it unknown, but the speculation is they’ll be after Summerslam which allow both Cole and Baszler to lose their titles.

There’s also no word on wether Adam Cole’s call-up will include the rest of the Undisputed Era – or whether he will be called up as a singles star.

Thanks for watching and a special thank you to our Patreon Pledge Hammers, some of which you can see scrolling their way into my stomach. Click the video over there to see my breakdown of the Godzilla: King of the Monster Easter Eggs for ScreenStalker, and watch El Fakidor and Housemate Simon go through all the wrestling internet news with Colt Cabana on ScreenGrapple by clicking the other video. I’ve been Luke Owen and that was wrestling.

Great review there, Oli – glad your final thoughts didn’t get cut short by the show ending.

Following on from their excellent TakeOver: XXV show –  which you can watch mine and Laurie’s review of on the WrestleRamble – NXT will be getting ready for their next set of TV tapings to build towards their next big show TakeOver: Toronto. As well as advertising the re-debut of Punishment Martinez – who has been renamed to Damien Priest, we should see more re-debuts on the show along with some new names.

It’s being reported that Adrian Joude will now go under the name Artuo Ruas, Jessie Elban will now go by Jessie Kamea and Luke Menzies will be now be called Ridge Holland. Which is also the name of an excellent wallet.

The bigger changes however come for former Impact Wrestling X Division Champion Trevor Lee – who has changed his name to Cameron Grimes, a reference to his hometown of Cameron in North Carolina. And perhaps most upsettingly, the excellent Eric Bugenhagen has had his excellent name to something way less excellent – Rik Bugez.

Someone looking to get in on the NXT action is former WWE Women’s Tag Team Champion Sasha Banks – who hasn’t been seen on WWE TV since she lost the titles at WrestleMania to The IIconics. It was revealed late last week that Tyler Breeze had moved from the main roster back to NXT, and it looks like Banks could be getting on that train.

NXT UK’s Piper Niven – otherwise known as Viper – recently appeared at an ICW show to challenge NXT UK Women’s Champion Toni Storm to a title match at the promotion’s Shug’s Hoose Party 6. ICW themselves tweeted about the announcement, asking if Storm will accept the challenge – which Sasha Banks replied to asking if she could accept instead.

It was reported over the weekend that Sasha Banks had a meeting with Vince McMahon about her future in the company, which reportedly went well with Banks expected to return to a WWE ring in the summer. Or could she stop by NXT UK for a series of matches with Viper and Toni Storm first?

Someone who could be moving from NXT to the main roster is The King of Bros – and reader of the WrestleTalk Magazine Matt Riddle, it really is an excellent magazine. Riddle actually teased himself for a Raw debut – or debutt if you’re talking in Riddle-ese – but of course that didn’t happen. However PWInsider are reporting that Riddle is set to be part of the huge 50-man Battle Royal at Super Showdown this coming Friday when WWE heads to [country redacted].

According to PWInsider, Riddle’s name was brought up as recently as this past weekend for a spot in the Battle Royal, and it’s been reported that The King of Bros could be one of several NXT names to make the trip over for Super Showdown to compete in the match. This was to be expected, with NXT stars like Roderick Strong, Babatunde, Dan Matha and Tucker Knight entering the Greatest Royal Rumble last year.

And now Dave Meltzer is reporting that WWE have plans in mind to also bring up NXT Champion Adam Cole and NXT Women’s Champion Shayna Baszler to the main roster in the near future.

According to Meltzer on Wrestling Observer Radio, WWE are in particular high on Baszler, and she is “supposed to be geared up” for a main roster call-up soon. When these call-ups could happen it unknown, but the speculation is they’ll be after Summerslam which allow both Cole and Baszler to lose their titles.

There’s also no word on wether Adam Cole’s call-up will include the rest of the Undisputed Era – or whether he will be called up as a singles star.

Thanks for watching and a special thank you to our Patreon Pledge Hammers, some of which you can see scrolling their way into my stomach. Click the video over there to see my breakdown of the Godzilla: King of the Monster Easter Eggs for ScreenStalker, and watch El Fakidor and Housemate Simon go through all the wrestling internet news with Colt Cabana on ScreenGrapple by clicking the other video. I’ve been Luke Owen and that was wrestling.

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