WWE Monday Night Raw: The 10 for February 18, 2019
6. Tag team wrestling!
The Revival have vowed to, well, revive the state of the WWE’s tag team division (or at least Monday Night Raw‘s), and apparently the company is starting to come around to the idea. The Revival won the Raw tag titles a week ago and, on this week’s show, have a non-title bout of the reunited (if only for one night only) DIY, the former tag team of Tommaso Ciampa and Johnny Gargano.
While Gargano and Ciampa have spent time apart and all of 2018 in one of the most emotionally-charged and brutal feuds in NXT history, their experience as a tag team has remained imprinted in their DNA, a sort of muscle memory. While there’s a level of the ‘can they coexist?’ narrative given the pair’s past, in the NXT universe Gargano and Ciampa have recently come to at least accept one another as peers and champions. Instead, this is about what comes next in the story of The Revival vs. DIY, two teams that have an extensive history with one another. It’s a shame that the live crowd did not care.
The match was excellent, yet another straightforward example of tag team wrestling that The Revival trade in so well. The ending, though, was curious, with The Revival losing clean after Gargano and Ciampa hit Dawson with the knee strike/superkick combo.
While it makes some sense that Gargano and Ciampa won — clearly the plan for the night was to make sure all the NXT Superstars win — having this happen just one week after The Revival became champions, presumably to reset the tone of the division, weakens their reign from the start. In the grander scheme of things, this loss won’t matter if The Revival hold the belts for an extended amount of time and come out decisive winners in title bouts against believable contenders. And even in non-title bouts (or perhaps, especially), the champions should win because they are the champions, facing opponents that one should assume aren’t of the No. 1 contender variety.
Of course, we all know the WWE’s stance on champions losing in non-title contests and the goal for the night was to make the NXT newcomers look strong, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that The Revival took the fall. Still, there’s something to be said for newly-minted champions to maintain momentum.