Welcome to the ring, it's rich and atom.
Breaking down the fights with flair and passion.
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Welcome, welcome one and all to Finishes and Factions Does Monday Night Raw.
And this is the Monday Night Raw that follows the Royal Rumble from the 3rd of February 2025.
And we are in Cleveland, Ohio at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse Arena.
There's been 30 Raws take place from Cleveland, Ohio.
And again, my name is Adam. We are without my normal co-host Rich, who is still recovering from illness.
Just at the moment, we are hoping to have him back soon.
But as we've said before, the wrestling world does not stop, it does not falter. We do not falter either.
So we are going to take a look at this week's Monday Night Raw.
We start off as we do after every PLE as a recap of the previous PLE, which was the Royal Rumble recap VT.
And then go into a J. Uso promo where he enters from the arena lobby through the crowd and my god.
I know we say this each and every time we see this man, but yeet the pop that this guy gets.
This just taken to an entire other level where he's now not just main event J. Uso.
He is WrestleMania main event J. Uso.
And he is just beginning this sort of victory lap that he's doing celebrating that Royal Rumble victory.
And there are even signs from the crowd that say about the fact that Cleveland is yeet land.
And something that we haven't really seen before or something that if we have seen it, it's gone completely unnoticed by me,
is after about five, six, seven minutes of J. Uso's intro at the beginning of this promo, the crowd are chanting,
one more time, one more time and WWE are a company of the people. They take full advantage and give the people what they want.
And yeet, I mean as the crowd often are with wrestlers that are as over as J. Uso is at the moment, they are very vocal.
But J is out here talking about his history and his legacy and how he seems to have found his singles confidence,
which is so good to see and I think we will see that more shining through since the Royal Rumble victory.
Again, the crowd chanting, you deserve it.
And do you know what? As much as you will see across social media and other wrestling related influences and things like that,
where they're saying, no, John Cena should have won it, you'll remember that me and Rich have been saying from the beginning,
or at least I have, that John Cena wasn't supposed to win the Royal Rumble.
It got really close as you'll hear in our live watch along that we did of the Rumble matches,
even me and Rich were like, oh actually, are we wrong? Are we wrong? And it's a case that, no, no, we aren't wrong.
We're not wrong by any way, shape or form.
It is a case that Juso was meant to win the Royal Rumble, or at least John Cena was not meant to win the Royal Rumble.
It's a case that he's... that it didn't make sense bearing in mind that before the Rumble had even started,
he'd been announced as having a match at Elimination Chamber.
It would make no sense for John Cena to win the Royal Rumble, then go on to feature in Elimination Chamber realistically.
So we've got to think of how this logically plays out.
Sorry, taking a quick libation.
And yeah, I mean, nobody will... I don't believe anybody can begrudge Juso from winning the Royal Rumble.
He's deserved it, he's worked hard for it.
And yeah, I'll be the one to say it. Well done, J. Well done, J. 100%.
And I mean, Juso is fighting back real emotion during this promo.
The guy looks like, sounds like he's about to burst out into tears. He's so happy.
And yeah, we then get an interruption by Raw's resident heavyweight champion, the ring-general Gunther.
Who comes out to the ring. I mean, Gunther and Juso have had their history in the past.
They know each other really well. J is still yet to have beaten Gunther in a one-on-one match, which surprises me a little bit.
But it's a case that Gunther's not really interested in J anymore.
Gunther knows he can beat J and it's a case that if J is to pick Gunther as his opponent at WrestleMania,
Gunther is going to basically make the road to WrestleMania for Juso an absolute living nightmare.
And it's going to end at WrestleMania quoting the ring-general saying that he's going to put Juso down like a disease dog.
Credit to Juso here though is that he's not sort of deterred by any of this.
J has openly promised that he's walking out of Mania a champion.
And again, not begrudging J anything. I genuinely believe he's going to go on to Mania and win the championship of his choosing,
no matter who his opponent is. I just think that is the projection that J is on. That's the path he is following.
But he also announces that he's going to SmackDown to see Cody Rhodes. So we're going to see him on Friday night as well.
Now, we went from this promo into a Royal Rumble post-show recap with a John Cena press conference interview
where it was a very somber appearance from John Cena. I mean, even after big losses, we've seen him be quite jovial, quite sort of upbeat.
And this was almost a darker side to John Cena's face character that I think he was genuinely disappointed not to have won the Royal Rumble,
being as it's his last ever Royal Rumble. But it's a case that he's already said he's going to compete in the Elimination Chamber match,
go on to main event WrestleMania and win his 17th world championship, which do you know what? I genuinely hope he does.
It's just it's got to make sense. It's got to make sense that somebody on their farewell tour is going to be able to conceivably beat the champion that they choose to go against,
or the champion that they are matched against in John Cena's case. As we know, winning the Elimination Chamber match does give the winner a ticket to main event WrestleMania
against the other heavyweight champion that has not been chosen by the Royal Rumble winner. Royal Rumble winner gets the choice of the champion of their choosing.
The Elimination Chamber is left is left to challenge whomever is left.
So that means if Joe so goes on to challenge Gunther at WrestleMania, then whoever wins the Elimination Chamber goes on to face Cody Rhodes for the WWE Championship.
But we've got to wait until the until Elimination Chamber on the 1st of March in Toronto, Canada for to find out what's going on.
Another thing that John Cena announces during this this little interview and it gets play, it's going to be played a lot. I feel as time goes on is that he's worked a long time in the company which
props to him. He has 100% worked a long time in the company and that he's not going to be competing in any qualifiers.
He's not going to be appearing before the Elimination Chamber, but he feels he is owed this Elimination Chamber match just to be able to go straight on through.
And do you know what? I have a hard time arguing against that. The body of work that this man has put through is phenomenal, realistically.
The guy is 100% a future Hall of Famer. It wouldn't greatly surprise me if WWE choose to induct him this year, even though he's on his farewell tour.
So watch this space. I've called it here if it happens.
But realistically, next few years is going to be John Cena's time when he is inducted into the Hall of Fame and we're going to have that conversation about who inducts John Cena.
There's so many candidates to induct John Cena into the Hall of Fame. I mean, who would we want to see?
Get in touch with us through our email, which is finishesandfactionsatgmail.com, to let us know who you think John Cena would be inducted into the Hall of Fame by, who would be the lucky soul to induct that man?
Moving swiftly on anyway, the first match in Raw's card was a men's singles match, which saw Ludwig Kaiser versus Penta.
Now, this was a match that after the men's Royal Rumble, we should have realistically seen come in.
To those that haven't seen it, go back and watch it. Spoiler alert if you haven't watched it or listened to our episode on it.
Ludwig Kaiser is embarrassed as Penta eliminated Kaiser from the Rumble after only six seconds in the ring.
Now, Ludwig Kaiser came out and sort of tried to snake his way into the Rumble match, pick out the best opportunity, which didn't really work out very well for him because the opportunity that he picked ended up with him being eliminated by Penta after six seconds.
Now, Penta is, despite the fact that he's only been in WWE for a month, Penta has already set records. He's this year's Iron Man of the Rumble, lasting just over 47 minutes.
So he's already made his mark on WWE as far as we're concerned, apart from the fact that he's had stellar matches up to this point.
Penta also went on record as he was one of the first entrants into the Royal Rumble match. He came in at number two, I believe, and started the match off versus Rey Mysterio.
I mean, it was the very first all Mexican, all luchador start to a Royal Rumble ever. So that is a piece of history that we will have all witnessed and what a start to a match it was.
But back to the match between Ludwig Kaiser and Penta. I mean, Penta, after an initial back and forth, Kaiser seems to take control in the early stages.
Kaiser throws, no, Penta throws Kaiser over the top rope, just like at the Rumble. And this just seems to further aggravate Kaiser, who we normally see as quite a composed, he's quite, he's quite a methodical wrestler.
But he's acting on pure emotion in this match, despite that seems to remain in control. But when Penta does gain control, just sort of feeding off the crowd's energy, we see wrestlers do this all the time, where they sit, they're on their knees in the middle of the ring,
going, fucking come on, hit me, hit me, hit me. And it just seems to go absolutely, absolutely nowhere. Kaiser is sent over the top rope again in this match, setting him up for a massive suicide dive from Penta.
Penta locks in the sacrifice submission hold on Kaiser and converts it into a Penta driver for the win. Now, this match, I mean, Penta has been impressive from day one in the WWE.
And this shows that he's not willing to sort of turn things down or anything like that. He is not sort of relaxing into a gentle stride. He is going to continue to push boundaries on this.
So, yeah, I mean, Kaiser picks Penta picks up another win on WWE on Monday Night Raw in a post match interview with Jackie Redmond, which was interrupted by Pete Don, who Penta defeated a few weeks earlier.
I mean, Pete Don has been feeling ignored and otherwise disrespected by the WWE on mass. And Ludwig Kaiser takes advantage of this entire situation and attacks Penta from behind.
It's a despite Penta walking out with a win. It is not Penta's week this week. But we'll see how this all sort of unfolds because it looks like there's a few generating not just between Ludwig Kaiser and Penta, but we're also seeing between Pete Don and Penta.
And I'm willing to bet that we're either looking at a team up between Ludwig Kaiser and Pete Don or a rivalry, bringing it into a bit of a rivalry triangle between Kaiser, Don and Penta, which to be honest, individually, they're both phenomenal,
they're all phenomenal wrestlers in their own right. So it would be interesting to see how that works out in going moving on.
We go from there to a backstage promo with the Judgment Day.
Liv Morgan, Raquel Rodriguez and Dominic Mysterio discussing the Elimination Chamber qualifiers. Now, this is how superstars are entering themselves into the Elimination Chamber match, which if you've never seen the Elimination Chamber match before,
it is a match that is made up of six superstars to start off in the ring. Four are sequestered away in sort of holding tubes.
And at random at certain points throughout the match, the one more superstar is released into the ring, and it is a last man standing. So they are eliminated individually, either by submission or pinfall.
And it is normally a gruesome match to watch. Now, this is after his return at the Royal Rumble. Finn Balor comes in and declares basically everything's gone to shit in his absence.
And he is blaming he is putting majority of the blame on Dom, on dirty Dom Mysterio, accuses Dom of stealing his tag title rematch his tag partner and then going even as far as to say, oh, you you you allowed him to get injured as well.
I mean, I mean, this is coming across that JD McDonough is out on the injured list at the moment with some broken ribs and a punctured lung at the moment. We obviously wish him a speedy recovery.
And Liv jumps in just before, just after Balor is claiming that Dom needs a babysitter, which as any of us can sort of understand is not going to go down very well.
So, and as I said before, Liv Morgan jumps to, jumps to Dom's defense, basically telling Finn all about her chamber qualifier that Dom sorted out the tag team opportunity for Raquel Rodriguez, which Liv is also sort of crediting Dom with as well.
And Balor, I mean, says that, oh, this is all good, but there's nothing there for him. And Liv also mentions that Balor has a chamber qualifier match courtesy of Dom.
Now, again, we've been seeing these cracks forming in the judgment day for a number of weeks. I think we are heading for a judgment day implosion at some point.
I mean, this backstage promo also finishes out with Carlito coming in from the background saying, well, you've got something for everybody else. What did you get for me?
We all know that Carlito is probably not going to be entering into an elimination chamber qualifier match with how old he is and everything along those lines.
The guy is there more so for comic relief at this point, I feel.
We went from a backstage promo to an in-ring promo where we've heard from one Royal Rumble winner on this show.
We then move over to the second Royal Rumble winner, which was Charlotte Flair.
Now, you will know if you listen to our coverage of the women's Royal Rumble that myself and my normal co-host Rich are not huge fans of Charlotte Flair.
And I'm going to perpetuate that this evening. I genuinely don't believe she should have won. I think that she's Q-jumped again based on the fact that her last name is Flair.
I mean, she's got talent. Don't get me wrong. I am not trying to say that she is untalented.
However, the final two in that Royal Rumble match was Charlotte Flair and Roxanne Perez.
And I've been saying for a couple of weeks now that Roxanne Perez is ready for a call up to the main roster.
And a Royal Rumble win, her first Royal Rumble win over Charlotte Flair, could have set up a really nice run up to a WrestleMania main event.
As I honestly believe that Roxanne Perez is talented enough to be able to main event WrestleMania.
And I think that would be a fantastic way to call her up to the main roster.
But no, they decided to go with Charlotte Flair, who'd been off for 15 months, comes in backing up the Royal Rumble to then go straight to the main event at WrestleMania.
And she's going to milk it for all it's worth. I just don't honestly see the value that they're adding with having her do that.
But that will be my run over for now.
So few stats.
Previously, when Charlotte Flair has competed in Royal Rumble matches, she has finished in the top three.
Now, bearing in mind, she's had five career Rumble matches and finished in the top three of all five.
This is she is the first woman to win multiple Royal Rumble matches.
There has never been a woman who's won more than one Royal Rumble match in the past.
And yeah, I think the Royal crowd was very much the same.
Felt very much the same way about Charlotte Flair that me, myself and Rich do.
And they were very vocal about that.
It has also come out recently outside of the ring that her and her now ex husband Andrade have divorced.
Now, we're recording this after Monday Night Raw has already gone out.
And it's a case that I've seen that she's coming close to her father's record on divorces as well as world titles.
So yeah, like father, like daughter, I suppose.
But she's claiming to she's claiming to be like the greatest superstar of all time. And I just think maybe she's the most overpushed superstar of all time.
But thankfully we get a reprieve. We are interrupted by mommy.
Rhea bloody Ripley comes out and yeah, I mean, Rhea Ripley looks phenomenal every time she comes out.
I'll be the one to say it. We're all thinking it.
And yeah, she's Ripley comes out points out that she beat Flair last time when they faced at WrestleMania.
Flair slaps back at her by saying that she beat Ripley the first time.
So if Flair does choose Rhea Ripley to go up against, she could well be sort of completing a best two out of three.
We're seeing there because they've competed twice, one one each at Mania.
Maybe we should see how this fair out this pans out and get and give one more time for Rhea Ripley and Charlotte Flair at WrestleMania.
But Flair showing just showing the disrespect really saying, oh, well, Ripley saying that she was just a kid back then when when Flair beat her the first time.
And Flair just showing zero respect to Ripley by insisting that she is still just that same kid.
Now, Flair also announced that she's going on her own victory lap.
She's going to be going to be appearing at NXT as well as Smackdown before making a decision on who she wants to go and face at WrestleMania.
And I believe the way she actually put this was looking for inspiration, which do you know what?
All hate aside, I can't really blame her for it is what it is.
If you've got to be able to make an informed decision, she's been off for 15 months.
And the Smackdown champion is Tiffany Stratton, who has been in the WWE who's come into onto the main roster since Charlotte Flair has been in the WWE.
Charlotte Flair has been gone.
So it's a case that there's there's unknown elements here.
Ripley basically begging for the opportunity to beat respect into Flair, which honestly, I'm hoping happens.
I am hoping that she goes on to face real Ripley at real Ripley at WrestleMania and Ripley just embarrasses the fuck out of her.
But there is a decade, 10 whole years in age between Ripley and Flair, and Flair does not come out on the good side of that.
It's ridiculous how the age gap between the two.
But we go from in ring, we go back to backstage here with another backstage interview promo held by Jackie Redmond with Sami Zayn.
Now, if she start Jackie starts talking about to Zayn about the disappointment of not winning the Rumble being eliminated by Jey Uso.
Now we saw this in the Rumble match that it was eye class it as accidental.
He wasn't aiming for Zayn, but Zayn was sort of collateral damage in it a little bit.
He talks about his elimination chamber qualifier match later on with CM Punk and talks about Kevin Owens versus Cody Rhodes.
Obviously, there's likely to be some backlash around the Cody-Kevin Owens match, but I think Cody versus Kevin Owens, at least for the time being, is done.
I don't think we're going to see anything more on that just for the moment.
I think we're going to see Kevin Owens' attention turned elsewhere, but we'll come to that a little bit later on.
Zayn leaves the interview to confront Jey Uso, or at least that's how it would appear.
Do you know what? Jey Uso, very sort of diplomatic about it, just says, look, I'm sorry to have eliminated you.
It wasn't intentional.
And Zayn, being Zayn, wholeheartedly congratulates Jey, basically says, do you know what, bro?
Honestly, don't worry about it.
I'm glad you won. Congratulations. And yeah, can't wait to see what you do with it.
We then see Karrion Kross coming to sort of undermine Sami Zayn's nice guy attitude.
Now, Karrion Kross has been putting in the work with Sami Zayn to try and see if he can get in his head, get under his skin and all the rest of it.
And as it stands, he's not managed it just yet.
But it's sort of this promo ends with Karrion Kross almost threatening Sami Zayn.
So are we going to see a storyline between those in the make?
I feel like there's one building. They're definitely putting a lot of time into it, and I'm excited to see how that works.
We then go to the second match of the evening, which was a men's tag team match which saw Xavier Woods and Kofi Kingston of the New Day versus Dragon Lee and Rey Mysterio of the LWO.
And do you know what? The biggest thing about this match for me was the new entrance that New Day came out to, sort of really illustrating, driving home that heel to the left.
And I'm not mad at it. Really like the new ring gear, really like the new entrance. Really glad they got rid of the happy, fun time New Day because quite honestly, we'd had that for a number of years and I was bored of it.
It really got under my skin. But we also went from the New Day's new entrance to a mid-match promo with Rhea Ripley and EO Sky saying maybe seeing Ripley at Mania.
And EO walks away only to be blindsided by Liv Morgan. Now we know Liv Morgan's got a elimination qualifier match later in the evening. And it turns out this is against EO Sky for a spot in the elimination chamber match.
And Ripley, bless our heart, comes back to help EO Sky and then gets charged over some hauling crates by Raquel Rodriguez.
So the women's champion, women's Raw champion and EO Sky both being laid out by the judgment day before their match later on.
Which, yeah, I mean, what more can we say on that? We then went back to the men's tag team match between the New Day and the LWO.
Match starts with Dragon Lee vs Xavier Woods. Despite early success by their opponents, the LWO do seem to take control.
One thing that we didn't expect to see in this match was Logan Paul coming out to ringside. Paul has revealed that Logan Paul has an elimination chamber qualifier vs Ray Mysterio next week on Raw.
So we'll be covering that as time goes on. So Paul's obviously come out to make an appearance, also get inside Ray Mysterio's head, try and do a bit of scouting first hand rather than watch it on the monitors in the back.
And with Paul coming out, New Day took advantage, took control of the match. There were some really good high spots in this match as we would expect from a match involving Ray Mysterio.
But majority of them coming from Dragon Lee actually. I think this was a really good showing from Dragon Lee who we haven't seen in action for a little while.
Dragon Lee with a sitout power bomb to turn the tide with a hot tag to Mysterio. Woods manages to save Kingston from a 619 and Mysterio dives from the apron to Kingston on the floor.
Kingston squared off to Paul who gets sent flying. Kofi tries to take advantage of a distracted Mysterio but gets driven into the ring post.
Now this ring post bit seems to be something that's occurring more and more as time goes on. So it'll be interesting to see how this all sort of plays out moving forward.
Dragon Lee with a huge jump to Hurrican-Ronato Woods off the ring apron which was a phenomenal bit of business. Love to see that. What else did we see?
Flying. After this Woods tries to kick Mysterio who grabs it, wraps it around the ring post. So both Kofi and Xavier Woods being wrapped around the ring post and yeah, it's never good for anybody.
Mysterio gets Kofi back in the ring, gets dragged from the ring by Paul and then sent back into the ring. All this time the ref is checking on Kofi.
Kofi hits trouble in Paradise and picks up a win over Rainer-Sterio via pinfall but realistically I think the LWO had New Day's number in this match and it could have quite easily gone either way.
So following on from that match we went into a rumble recap concerning Roman Reigns, the tribal chief. After his elimination from the Royal Rumble we saw him get absolutely manhandled and curb stomped to within an inch of his career I think.
And the update we have so far is that Roman Reigns is likely to be out indefinitely. This seems to be the writing Reigns out of the elimination chamber picture which means that his appearance in WrestleMania may be in danger as well.
But I've read since Roman Reigns went out that this could be to try and protect Reigns rather than to sort of endanger him as for him to make it to Mania without making it in the elimination chamber would mean that he'd have to lose via either pinfall or submission in the chamber and that just wouldn't be protecting the character of the gimmick which we know is important.
But we went from that update on Roman Reigns from the commentary team to a backstage promo where CM Punk is being interviewed by Cathy Kelly.
Punk sees that the silver lining to not winning the Royal Rumble is that he made sure that Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns didn't either. As we know Punk was the one that eliminated both Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns simultaneously after they got tied up together on the ropes.
CM Punk drove that last nail into that coffin for them. Punk apologises to Sami Zayn that Sami Zayn's fans will be disappointed after their elimination chamber match later on in the evening.
Some could make an argument that Sami Zayn fans are used to disappointment at this point but we're not going to go there for it just at the moment.
So that's where we give you some facts and figures. Cleveland, Ohio in the WWE has hosted 30 Monday Night Raws over its tenure and 9 PLEs including last year's SummerSlam.
9 PLEs is a huge number considering and it's likely to not rise much further than that especially with WWE's ongoing commitment to trying to make the WWE a more international company by holding some of their PLEs overseas now.
We've heard over recent weeks that previously we've had a PLE that has appeared in the UK twice now called Clash at the Castle. It's been renamed slightly to Clash in Paris I believe.
Paris France will be getting its first, I think one of its very first PLEs to be hosted there which is phenomenal news for Paris. I love that. I love the fact that WWE are branching out.
I just want them to bring a WrestleMania or do you know what? Don't even have to bring a WrestleMania to the UK. I would be happy for them to bring the Royal Rumble to the UK.
I don't care, at that point I'd sell bodily organs to go to that PLE which I think I'd have to with the price that WWE charge for their live events.
But we're not going to mention that being WWE fans as we all are we know that that is something that happens.
The first Monday Night Raw for Cleveland was on the 2nd of March in 1998 where the main event was Kane with Paul Bearer vs Stone Cold Steve Austin which ended in a no contest.
Now without going back and watching the episode myself I honestly couldn't tell you why it ended in a no contest but yeah maybe that's something that we can find out together. If anybody knows drop it in an email to finishesandfactions.com.
I will get round to reading all of your emails and replying to as many of them as we possibly can.
The next thing that we see is a small VT recap of Royal Rumble. Now one of the big stories that come out of the Men's Royal Rumble match if you haven't seen it, spoiler alert, was that Akira Tazawa was due to come in I believe it was at number 9
or somewhere around that number was entered into the Royal Rumble, came in as Carmelo Hayes was eliminated, Carmelo Hayes understandably upset about being eliminated then took out his frustration on Akira Tazawa on his entrance.
Akira Tazawa was then taken to the back not being able to wrestle, Aisho Speed found himself in the gorilla position behind the with Triple H and Triple H basically just says speed, speed, speed, you're in the Rumble, get out, get out, go, go, go, get out, you're in the Rumble.
And do you know what, there are people that have had far less embarrassing or far more embarrassing entries out in the Royal Rumble than Aisho Speed did.
Aisho Speed managed to assist in an elimination, but he also got absolutely torn in two by Brom Breaker's spear, which as part of this clip was the most viewed Royal Rumble social post of all time with more than 300 million views in less than 24 hours.
That is insane numbers and we love it.
Next we went to a VT promo announcing Lyra Valkyria vs Bayley in an elimination chamber qualifier match next week on Raw.
Next week we'll be taking place in Nashville, Tennessee, the home of music. So we went from there to match three, a women's singles match competition which also happened to be an elimination chamber qualifier match with Eoschuy vs Liv Morgan who came out to the ring with Raquel Rodriguez.
Now we saw Eoschuy get blindsided by Liv Morgan earlier on. Now she is obviously still showing signs of that beating coming down to the ring and despite that, I think Eoschuy showed some amazing intestinal fortitude with the performance of the match that she put in because she looked dominant really early on.
Eoschuy performing things like suicide dives to Liv Morgan on the outside of the ring and huge missile drop kicks from the top row, all of which with the injuries that she sustained going over those production cases earlier in the evening.
They are not soft, they do not have any give, it is a case that they will fuck you up basically. But despite that, Liv Morgan came out of the ropes, did not sit back and take this.
She managed to pull off her three amigos and even get some help from Rodriguez on the side who distracts Skye to allow Morgan to seize control on the match. Morgan attempts a sunset flip powerbomb which fails where Eoschuy pulls off a lovely German suplex.
Liv catches Skye from a top rope move into a code breaker counter for a near fall which was fantastic timing. It is not very often that WWE will attempt moves like this because they are so wrought with risk but it is nice to see them when they do.
Skye then goes back to the top rope where Rodriguez provides enough of a distraction for Liv to get her knees up. Rodriguez I think is integral in Liv Morgan's success at the moment.
Rhea Ripley comes out for payback on Rodriguez. Obviously Rhea is not a sanctioned part of this match, it has no effect on the outcome of the match as to what happens with her, she is going to WrestleMania.
The reason I say this is that Liv gets involved Ripley loses sight of what she came out to do, lands a blow to Morgan which hands the win to Morgan via DQ and essentially robbing Eoschuy of a chance in the chamber to go on to WrestleMania.
I can't help but feel so very sorry for Eoschuy at this point because despite being injured earlier in the night she performed admirably in this match and it could have gone either way.
With Rodriguez on the outside I can imagine that Liv Morgan still would have won this but Liv Morgan essentially has had a ticket punched for her to elimination chamber in Toronto and yeah all power to her why not.
And we go from there we go backstage to the War Raiders being interviewed by Cathy Kelly.
War Raiders showing respect for the injured JD McDonough. Obviously McDonough was injured during a match with the War Raiders for their tag team championship.
Now JD McDonough's most brutal part of that match was smacking the back of his head off the now reinforced announcers desk which remarkably didn't do him anywhere near as harm as apparently the broken ribs and a punctured lung will have done.
But essentially American made interrupt talk about how War Raiders injured JD McDonough and how apparently their tag team could out wrestle the War Raiders.
War Raiders are basically coming back with if you're prepared to step in the ring be prepared that it's not going to be a wrestling match it's going to be war.
And they leave thoroughly unimpressed by American made. Now Chad Gable announces that he's going to be going on a quest to conquer the dark arts of Lucha Libre.
Now this isn't the first time that we've heard Chad Gable and dark arts of Lucha Libre be mentioned in the same sentences and yeah this sort of adds more fuel to the fire that we could possibly see Alistair Black coming back.
To help sort of push Chad Gable to that next level.
And basically Chad Gable being the leader of American made has set the expectation and said I expect gold around your wastes by the time I return sort of thing.
With he's expecting Ivy Nile to have at least won some kind of championship even though she's currently in pursuit of the women's intercontinental title and for the tag team in American made to be chasing down the men's tag titles which are currently held by the War Raiders.
So yeah going from there we move on and we move on to another backstage promo which sees Adam Pierce the raw general manager who we do not see a lot of at all in comparison to the other shows like NXT with Ava and Smackdown with Nick Aldous who we see quite who both of those GMs we see quite regularly.
Adam Pierce manages to stay out of stay out of the the camera view for a lot of the time that raw is on air, which is odd.
But he's being in he's basically gets interviewed to announce that AJ the phenomenal one AJ Styles is going to be going to raw as part of the transfer window.
So Bron Breaker comes to request an audience with the raw GM to discuss his future and that is how we sort of leave that promo.
We're then treated to an in ring promo with Seth freaking Rollins come into the ring looking.
He looks a bit like a camp version of the Undertaker I'm not going to lie. I'm currently trying to figure out who it is that does Seth Rollins is wardrobe and if they actually tell him how much of a dick he looks like before he walks out because there's no way that Seth Rollins can look at what he has to wear in ring and go do you know what actually I'm really happy with how that looks I look fucking stellar mate yeah no no no you don't mate.
Please Seth Rollins fire that stylist because they are making you look like a tit mate.
Seth Rollins hyping himself up and hyping up the crowd as he seems to do at the beginning of all of his promos recently.
He's then giving props to Jey Uso for winning the men's Royal Rumble.
But Seth is turning his attention to CM Punk which it seems to be coming a bit of an obsession for him recently.
Rollins takes credit for putting Reigns on the injured list and says that what he did to Roman Roman would have done to Rollins if given the chance so sort of justifying it a little bit that way.
I mean as we've seen we saw Rollins after he and Reigns were eliminated by CM Punk. CM Punk within the next few seconds was eliminated from the match by Logan Paul and Rollins and Punk brawling on the outside.
Then Reigns and Punk yes a limit who were brawling on the outside.
Punk lays out Reigns who then gets double fucked curb stomped to the floor by Seth Rollins and is then later on during that sequence curb stomped off the steel steps as well.
And yeah it's a case that we just yeah.
Seth Rollins also announced that his elimination chamber match qualifier will be against Finn Balor announced in for a few weeks time.
So we've got a little bit of time for Seth Rollins to recover from the Royal Rumble as well as Finn Balor to continue his recovery from the brutal Street fight he had with Damien Priest some weeks past because I can't imagine he is at 100% just yet.
Even though he participated in the Rumble he wasn't in there for a dramatically long time so we've got to assume that he is still out injured or he's not out but he's now in and injured.
So let's let him get back to at least as close to 100% as a professional wrestler can get before he gets in the ring with Seth Rollins to see if he can stamp his punches ticket to elimination chamber.
Rollins comes out after giving all of this but all of this balls and bluster to call out Sami Zayn which was a surprise.
So Seth comes out he's basically giving Sami Zayn a bit of a pep talk before his match which is next for the for his elimination chamber qualifier and is basically said basically gives him yeah gives him a pep talk tries to get him psyched for his match with CM Punk and all the rest of it.
And Zayn is very much sort of left in the ring for his match and the only other thing that happens during this promo is Punk makes his entrance before sort of Rollins has vacated.
Punk and Rollins try to get into it on the entrance ramp which probably isn't the best thing to do under the circumstances.
But it's one of those things and honestly I've done apart from an appearance from Seth Rollins I don't really feel that this was something that was necessary so to speak.
I don't think it did anything to further anything else it addressed a few issues yes could this have been done via VT rather than in ring promo possibly.
But it's it felt like a bit of filler I'm not gonna lie.
The main event match for this evening is a men's singles elimination chamber qualifying match for Sami Zayn versus CM Punk and.
Whether I appreciated the promo or not Sami Zayn came out of the blocks fired up after the pep talk from Rollins and Punk has to get his two cents in making reference to making references to Zayn not being on Punk's level after a promo that Punk cut a few weeks previous where he was saying he's a cut above the rest and everything along those lines.
But despite all that looking pretty equal to begin with at least Zayn pulls off a superplex to Punk as well as a blue thunderbomb for a near fall Punk working an injured elbow of Sami Zayn and Punk even managing to get in an anaconda vice.
Which we don't see Punk use very often but that is his own patented patented submission maneuver.
Zayn misses with a halloova kick where Punk takes advantage with a GTS for a two count near fall.
Zayn then slips out of another go to sleep and pulls off an exploder on Punk setting him up for another halloova kick which Punk manages to intercept and hits a GTS for a three count.
This means that Punk joins Cena in Toronto for the Elimination Chamber match and do you know what at the end of this match something you don't see especially CM Punk do very often as it's not within his character but Punk offers Zayn a handshake as a sign of respect but almost as soon as that happens we have a mystery assailant come in it turns out.
Kevin Owens is back and he is pissed but he is obviously super messed up from that Royal Rumble match that he had a few weeks literally a few nights ago and it's a case that Kevin Owens inexplicably hits Zayn with a package pile driver which we know has sent numerous superstars to the injured list moving forward.
Or in the past sorry.
And yeah that is how Raw sort of ends is a messed up Kevin Owens in the ring with an even more messed up Sami Zayn and leaving us with more questions than answers which of course we're sort of hoping is something that gets resolved before Elimination Chamber potentially.
But yeah a relatively short match card for this mostly promos which we sort of expect after a PLA.
I'm not mad at this week's episode of Raw I really enjoyed it.
My match of the night as it has a tendency to be more often than not was the main event really enjoyed the main event for a match itself and what happened afterwards left us with a lot of questions but I think this is time we wrap this up and the next time you will hear from us is
Finisher's and Factions does NXT and yeah until then we look forward to seeing you thank you for dropping by.
We will let you know about social media as soon as we manage to get it all up and running and everything along those lines will start getting making sure that posts are put up regularly for that.
And yeah thank you for catching some action with me Adam and this was Finisher's and Factions does Monday Night Raw.