Tonight should be big, but after Vengeance I can’t help but feel it will end predictably. If I had to guess I’d say they’ll book CM Punk and John Cena vs. Miz and R-Truth for the easy (and lazy) main event. It will inevitably end in a beat-down with Kevin Nash. I’m not going to put any money in this prediction, but some variation of a Nash, Miz, Truth team-up will happen at the expense of Punk and Cena.They’ll probably save the announcement of the big Survivor Series match for next week and reveal the rest of the participants as we get closer. That’s standard WWE booking, and it makes sense.
My only issue with that is we already know what’s going to be booked for Survivor Series. Even if you don’t read dirt sheets, there’s ALWAYS a classic Survivor Series match. You can see it coming a mile away, and I’d like it more if they just came out and got the announcement out of the way. Kevin Nash builds a team against Triple H to settle the score. Put it out there so we can start building towards the big night.
I don’t expect we’ll see Mark Henry on Raw tonight, nor should we. He barely made it out of Vengeance, and he needs to sell those effects at least until Smackdown on Friday. If we do see him he better not strut out to that ring like nothing happened…
What I do expect to see, however, is the next step for Dolph Ziggler. They cannot keep him relevant as a United States champion and relevant as a tag team competitor, and relevant as a part of the anti-WWE team all at the same time. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a re-match scheduled against Zack Ryder tonight (he pinned him twice, therefor he gets two shots?), and if that happens I think they’ll put the title on Ryder. But they do need to clarify what direction they are going to go with him leading into Survivor Series.
We’ll likely also find out what the Divas title picture looks like moving forward. Will Eve and Kelly continue to be involved? Will Natalya step up and do more than get her ass kicked so Beth doesn’t have to? I’m personally hoping we get a Maryse or Layla return, but I have no idea how Layla’s injury recovery is doing. I’m just really sick of seeing the same people involved every single week. Hell, I’d even take the Belles getting involved at this point…
There will be chaos on Raw as we approach Survivor Series, but tonight may not be the night for it. We have several weeks left, and it all depends on how much they have booked. I’d rather be let down this week than have the momentum stop two weeks before hand because they used up all their brilliant ideas. Still, if we want to speculate, just about anything is possible tonight. Will we see the return of Shawn Micheals? Mick Foley? Steve Austin? Will the man pulling all of the strings be revealed, or are we indeed over-analyzing it?
Find out the answers to all of life’s questions and more tonight as Raw goes live at 8/7c! You can follow along with all the action here on Wrestlezone, start chatting in the forums, or follow myself and many other writers as they live tweet throughout the night. I’m @MikeKillam… you stay classy Wrestlezone.