If Maryse‘s WWE career were made into a scrapbook, the page dedicated to last night’s Raw could be titled ‘My First Raw Win’, as for the first time since being drafted to Raw last month – Maryse scores her first official win as a Raw Diva. The Diva has been a long downward spiral since moving to the red-brand, her last win was against Gail Kim in a Divas Championship match on SmackDown.
This week, Maryse teamed up with the former Women’s Champion and it seems, now number-two heel, Beth Phoenix against Mickie James and Kelly Kelly. At this point, it’s not quite clear which of those two is being pushed as the top babyface. Because as another Raw passes by, we get another ambiguous Divas match which seems to have no bearing on storyline — in fact, I’m hard-pressed in figuring out what is going on with the Divas Championship situation at all. The announcers keep putting over that Maryse is scared of Mickie, hinting at a storyline between those two. But then we have some tension between Maryse and Kelly. I have no idea where they’re going, it doesn’t seem like they do either. I won’t even begin to boggle my mind by trying to unravel this mess.
For all intents and purposes, this week’s Raw was throway because once again with a pay per view coming up, the Divas are left off which gives them nothing to work for. And with no real storyline continuation, it just looked as though last night’s Divas tag team match was ‘filling the Diva quota’ — yes, I have dusted off that phrase again. WWE gave us our three-minute obligatory Divas match and it was just filler, if you ask me.
It was weird seeing Beth playing subordinate to the Divas Champion, Maryse, for so long Beth has been the top heel on Raw and on the Divas roster altogether but all her hard work has been undone in the past couple of months. Meanwhile, Maryse with a decent couple of matches under her belt with Gail Kim on SmackDown and interaction with actual Divas, has now overtaken Beth.
Match-wise, it wasn’t awful though. Starting off, Mickie showed a lot of fire against Beth. I guess she really wants that Divas title shot, she’s upped her game in the ring recently. Mickie then tags out to Kelly, and if history is a predictor, Kelly and Beth seem to have good chemistry and they did her. Beth shows strength, hoisting Kelly up and then carries Kelly well guiding her into a hurricanrana. Beth dominates before tagging out to Maryse, Maryse does her usual shtick including the camel clutch before Kelly hits an enziguri. The end is here as Beth and Mickie get involved.
Has anyone else noticed that the dropkick through the bottom rope has become a staple of Divas matches lately? Kelly brings it to Raw this week, after Alicia Fox and Gail Kim have used it on SmackDown in the last two weeks. However unlike her SmackDown counterparts, Kelly’s dropkick isn’t quite as great. Maryse then hits her patented French Kiss DDT for the win.
The ring-work was decent but not much story was told. It was silly how Mickie, who hates Maryse, came back into the ring and just checks on Kelly when Maryse is right there and she could have attacked her or something. But then again, this is Raw, “We don’t do storylines.”
