Posted in: Sports, TV, WWE | Tagged: Raw, recaps, wrestling, wwe

WWE Raw: Bobby Lashley Wins, Will Face Brock Lesnar at Royal Rumble

Brock Lesnar will defend the WWE Championship against Bobby Lashley at the Royal Rumble later this month following the events of WWE Raw. Hi. It's been a while. Normally I stand back and let that weirdo Chad McMahon handle the WWE reports since he loves WWE so much and because it's literal torture to watch their TV Shows, but he's not around today so you get my negativity instead. Sorry!

Wrestling is a nostalgia-based business, but who could have imagined WWE would already be trading on 2020 nostalgia in 2022? Nevertheless, harkening back to their greatest COVID outbreak days, the roster has once again been rocked, this time by Omicron, with even Roman Reigns, Universal Champion, taken out of the picture. That left Brock Lesnar with no opponent at WWE Day 1, so naturally, they put him into the Fatal Four-Way (now a Five-Way) for the WWE Championship, a match that all indications show Big E was meant to retain in and gave Lesnar the WWE Championship instead. Now, it looks like they're moving on from Big E already, with Bobby Lashley in the title picture for a match with Lesnar at the Royal Rumble.

Lesnar and Paul Heyman opened WWE Raw this week, with Heyman explaining how he got Lesnar into the title match at Day 1 and how Roman Reigns has completely fallen apart, getting COVID after just one week without Heyman as his advisor, the latest example of WWE using their own real-life failures as a company to fuel their storylines, which is all fair after all — it's wrestling!

Later, in the main event, Big E, Bobby Lashley, Seth Rollins, and Kevin Owens, the original participants in the WWE Championship match at Day 1, faced off again, this time for a shot at Lesnar at the Rumble. Learning nothing from the COVID outbreak, the match featured a significant portion in the crowd, with Owens hitting a big dive off the stands to give Big E an excuse to lose again. Lashley devastated Rollins and Owens to get the win and move on to a match with Lesnar at the Royal Rumble later this month.

A lot of people are upset that WWE panicked and put the WWE Championship on Lesnar, prematurely ending Big E's long-awaited and much-beloved run. But WWE had no choice in the matter due to their own failure to build new stars over the past twenty years. With Roman out, Brock is the only legitimate draw WWE has on their roster, and a match between Lesnar and Lashley is one of the few dream matches the company can actually deliver these days. So while this is a situation of WWE's own making, it's also the only logical booking choice because WWE needs people to keep watching as they build toward WrestleMania. After all, you can't expect them to draw people in with interesting long-term stories or anything like that. That would be way too much work.

That's not all, though. After the main event ended, Brock Lesnar spoke to Kevin Patrick and said he'd be on Smackdown this week to continue his feud with Roman Reigns, even though it seems unlikely Reigns will be cleared by then. Could we be looking at the start of a story that leads to the unification of WWE's two men's world titles? It wouldn't be the worst idea in the world, which is probably the nicest thing I've had to say about WWE in years.

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