1. Raw is live from London tonight, and the O2 Arena crowd go wild for Dean Ambrose as he comes out to present the Ambrose Asylum. Much as I generally don’t care for these sort of segments, Ambrose is great on the mic, and Shane is on a roll as acting Raw GM. Owens joins the party for some well placed insults, followed by Sami Zayn to continue their excellent feud, and finally Jericho because the aging rocker segment was definitely under-represented. Shane sets up a couple of matches for Payback and clears the ring, triggering the inevitable brawl. What, no tag match?
2. Back from the break Sami Zayn is facing Chris Jericho. Good match with Jericho using his experience to counter Zayns superior speed and agility, and Sami busting out the awesome corner dive DDT before eating an eye poke and a code breaker that gets Jericho the win.
3. AJ interview turns into an intro for Anderson and Gallows, who get to display a bit of personality on their way to dominating the tag division. And speaking of tag matches, next up we’ve got Enzo Amore and Colin Cassidy taking on the Dudley Boyz!
4. Enzo gets tossed around like a rag doll until Cass gets the hot tag and cleans house. Standard but still entertaining tag match, with Enzo and Cass picking up the win with the rocket launcher following some Dudleys miscommunication.
5. Reigns gets more of a mixed reaction than usual, probably due to the hot British crowd. A bit of sub-par promo work quickly turns them against him. AJ Styles comes out to make things slightly better, and I’m desperately hoping for a Bullet Club beatdown of Reigns to end this segment… And it happens! AJ doesn’t look happy, but to be fair it’s a little hard to tell under the emo haircut.
6. Next up we’ve got Fandango facing Baron Corbin, a match I actually have less than zero interest in. Fast forward, Corbin gets the win then attacks Ziggler. Meh.
7. Miz TV sets up the League and Miz vs Cesaro and New Day in your typical shambolic 8-man match. Cesaro hits a bunch of running European uppercuts and the neutralizer on Shamus for the win. Fun for what it was.
8. And now it’s time for an 8 woman tag match featuring some of the best female wrestlers on Raw and Ric Flair for some reason. Becky Lynch plays face in peril for a while before Natalya gets the hot tag and Summer Rae says ‘fuck’ before taking a rope rebound slam. Natalya gets the submission win over Charlotte, which suggests she has no chance in hell of going over at Payback.
9. It’s time for some chivalry as the Vaudvillains take on the Usos, and could we be seeing two recent NXT call ups in the tag tournament finals? Nice, hard hitting match from Gotch and English, picking up the win in near squash match fashion. Nice work, chaps.
10. Apollo Crews video package leads to a squash of Heath Slater with the Social Outcasts, minus the suspended Adam Rose. Crews wins with the toss powerbomb, and it’s time for the main event!
Bonus 11th thought; A pretty bloody good episode of Raw ends with Owens and Ambrose beating the crap out of each other in a highly entertaining way, with Ambrose eventually picking up the win with the dirty deeds. For the first time since Raw went to 3 hours, it didn’t actually feel way too long. I did fast forward a bit though, to be fair.
