This week’s edition of Monday Night Raw saw plenty of thrills and spills.
WWE Champion Drew McIntyre was challenged to a title rematch by Dolph Ziggler, whilst Kairi Sane defeated Bayley in a singles match.
Randy Orton continued to re-establish his ‘Legend Killer’ status with a win over Big Show, before taking out the former World Heavyweight Champion with a punt kick.
Meanwhile, Seth Rollins was again victorious, days after defeating Rey Mysterio in an ‘Eye for an Eye’ match at the pay-per-view Extreme Rules.
The events that unfolded could spell bad news for his opponent Aleister Black, however, who suffered a kayfabe injured arm after a post-match beatdown from Rollins and Buddy Murphy.
Black enjoyed a strong push when Paul Heyman was an executive director of Raw, but Heyman’s dismissal last month has arrived with speculation that the Dutch-born wrestler’s prominent screen time may suffer.
According to Sportskeeda’s Tom Colohue, Vince McMahon has doubts over Black’s ability to carry a show, and also believes that there may be “something’s missing” from his skillset.
(Photo credit: WWE)
Colohue explained: “Things have really changed in the last couple of weeks for Aleister Black.
“Now Paul Heyman definitely loved him and Aleister Black was really the headline of the show for him. Every week, he would be having a half an hour match in the opening minutes.
“To my knowledge, it is Vince McMahon who has mixed opinions shall we say.
“Vince added that creek to the entrance when he leverages up and now he has removed the entrance all together. We haven’t seen the Aleister Black entrance in a long time.
“To put it bluntly, Vince thinks there’s something missing about Aleister Black. It’s similar to how he feels about Cesaro.”
Cesaro has achieved mixed success with WWE himself. He formed a prominent tag team with Sheamus, starting in 2016 and winning the Raw Tag Team Championship four times, as well as the SmackDown Tag Team Championship once.
However, barring a single reign as the United States Champion, Cesaro has not repeated the success in the individual arena.
Black is yet to win a title since joining Raw in 2019, with the next few months perhaps set to give an indication about whether that statistic will change in the near future.