Non-Raw report from Raleigh featuring Punk vs. Batista in a squash match
D'Lo Brown beat Matt Striker with a frog-splash. Brown interrupted Striker's
promo in front of a
chalkboard. Most of the crowd seemed to know who D'Lo was and were into him.
D'Lo doesn't seem to
have missed a beat, despite being 10 years older than his big run in WWF.
Good little match.
Charlie Haas beat ???. They announced the unknown guy as being from Raleigh,
and the crowd popped
huge for the announcement of the city, thus causing me to miss the name. Short
match.
They played a 3-minute WWE promotional video. Biggest pops were for John Cena,
Triple H, and Barack
Obama. Seriously.
They played Shane & Stephanie's announcement, as well as the Kane recap video
about 5-minutes
before 9:00pm. Jericho then made his entrance and cut a promo on Shawn
Michaels. As he was cutting
the promo, I guess they played the previous videos to the television audience.
Mark Yeaton was
counting Jericho down, and the second he hit one on the countdown, out came
Michaels for the attack,
and I guess the show opened there.
They played several video packages during commercial breaks. Only thing of
note is they played one for
John Morrison, from his ECW Title run last year. It pushed his Jim Morrison
gimmick, and he talked
about being better than CM Punk. Odd that they'd still be playing that.
In a post-show dark match, Batista pinned CM Punk with a Batista bomb in a
non-title match. Match
couldn't have gone more than 2-minutes. Pretty pointless, as the 6-man tag was
a fine main-event,
and there was no point in ending the show with Batista and Punk rushing in and
out of the ring. Mostly
Punk offense, and then Dave caught him with the powerbomb and pinned him, and
that was it. In both
of his matches, CM Punk seemed to be out of position a lot. He'd just do
these spots that looked
totally awkward, as he'd either be too close, too far away, or walking in the
opposite direction he was
supposed to. I don't know if it was an off-night or what, but the guy looked
pretty indy in there with all
the top dogs in WWE. Not to fault him, though, because the fans do like him
(although they were
obviously more into Batista).
-- Matt H.
{plug}
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