The events of this past Monday’s episode of Raw have led to two new matches announced for the upcoming Horror Show at Extreme Rules event on July 19th, as well as a championship match slated for next Monday.
Just before unveiling the new United States Championship belt, it was announced that MVP will face reigning champion Apollo Crews at the pay-per-view, following the former’s win over the latter on last week’s episode of Raw. Bobby Lashley, MVP’s client and fellow ranking member of “The Hurt Business,” is slated to be in the challenger’s corner for the match. Should MVP win, it would be his third US Title win.
The second addition to the Horror Show card is an Eye for an Eye match between Rey Mysterio and “The Monday Night Messiah” Seth Rollins. After several weeks of an intense, personal vendetta involving gouging eyes of not only Mysterio, but his son Dominik, the escalation of the feud will involve someone getting an eye taken out. If that sounds excessive, if that sounds absurd, that is literally what WWE are advertising for the match.
If I had to speculate, that match could be a cinematic one, though doing that and the Wyatt Swamp Fight on the same show could sell one match or the other short. Otherwise, I struggle to see how they can pull this one off with some sort of self-respect.
The feud between Rollins and Mysterio isn’t the problem; actually, it’s one of the more compelling, sweeping feuds on the Raw brand at the moment. But how in the hell are they going to sell this one, even without a proper live crowd? We’ve seen a lot of matches lately that could frankly only happen in times like these, but this one feels like we’re about to jump the shark on the whole thing. I mean, we were already led to believe that Rey fell off the side of Titan Towers at Money in the Bank, now you’re telling me he might be down an eyeball in a week and a half?
Let’s also point out, as Chris Jericho did on Twitter, that an “Eye for an Eye” match has technically already happened. On the February 12 episode of AEW Dynamite, such a match took place between Jon Moxley and Santana. The feud between Jericho and Moxley for the AEW World Championship centered around a segment where Le Champion used a spike from his jacket to gouge one of Moxley’s eyes. For several weeks, Moxley wore an eye patch to sell the injury, with the payoff coming during the title match at Revolution.
At least, in less ocular-centric news, we’re getting a WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship match next week on Raw, as defending champions Sasha Banks and Smackdown Women’s Champion Bayley will take on the returning Kairi Sane and the Raw Women’s Champion Asuka, known collectively as The Kabuki Warriors.
At any rate, the current card for The Horror Show at Extreme Rules now looks like this:
RAW Women’s Championship
Asuka (c) vs. Sasha Banks
Smackdown Women’s Championship
Bayley (c) vs. Nikki Cross
WWE Championship - Stipulation TBD
Drew McIntyre (c) vs. Dolph Ziggler
Wyatt Swamp Fight - Non-Title
Braun Strowman vs. Bray Wyatt
WWE United States Championship
Apollo Crews (c) vs. MVP
Eye for an Eye Match
Rey Mysterio vs. Seth Rollins
The Horror Show at Extreme Rules will air live on Sunday, July 19th on the WWE Network.
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