With Mike Adamle in a special meeting with Shane and Stephanie McMahon, Chris Jericho took over the GM duties on Raw and use them to his advantage to take out his adversaries. The main man on his hit list was Batista who gained the number one contendership at No Mercy. Further fuel was added to this fire when Batista interrupted Jericho’s opening speech with a spine buster on the champ. To get his revenge Jericho put up the number one contender spot back on the line with a rematch with JBL. To spice things up he also added a guest commentator in Randy Orton, guest time keeper in William Regal and a guest ref, Jericho himself. Despite these odds Batista would find the win. Jericho did everything in his power, including having Regal attack Batista while Jericho tried to “control” JBL. This all back fired when Batista speared both the ref and JBL. To restore order in the ring Adamle appeared and called for a legit ref who was able to give Batista the win. If it wasn’t over before, it has to be now for JBL who will have to find a new story line. As for Batista and Jericho they will meet at Cyber Sunday for the title.
The other screw job was supposed to be for Shawn Michaels who would face Lance Cade in a no disqualification match. This looked like it would be Cade’s time to shine as he really hasn’t been very involved with his alliance with Jericho. And he did a decent job opening up the match, including throwing HBK through a table. But the tide quickly turned and he fell victim to two vicious chair beatings at the hands of HBK. This match ended to quickly for my taste as it seems Jericho and Michaels may be over. Other than HBK becoming the guest ref at Cyber Sunday I’m not sure how they will keep this going with Batista now in the picture. Logic would say give Cade a shot with HBK to push him with a major player on the roster. Maybe they still will go this way, but all I know is Cade needs some major program as he really hasn‘t established himself as of yet.
The rest of the night didn’t feature much story wise, but there was the usual good matches mixed in with the not so great ones. We finally got to see Ted DiBiase handle himself in the ring on his own as he took on Kofi Kingston. We got to see him string together some offensive moves and handle the pace of the match. He also got the win courtesy of an out of ring distraction from partner Codi Rhodes. CM Punk made sure Rhodes would not interfere but the distraction allowed DiBiase to take out Kingston from behind. The bigger story here is CM Punk who only a few months ago was the World Heavy Weight champ, but now is backing up Kingston. Not really a upward career move if you ask me.
Kane and Mark Henry would team up to face Matt Hardy and Mysterio. Other than Henry’s usual lackluster performance the rest of the match was decent. I even felt the Kane and Mysterio match-up was better than their meeting at No Mercy. It would be Kane getting the win by taking out Hardy with the choke slam. This keeps Kane’s quest to unmask Mysterio alive and we will see if this will come into play at Cyber Sunday.
Other matches saw Glamorella beat Mickienoble with Santino getting help from Beth Phoenix in pinning Jamie Noble. Noble’s career is getting boost from this teaming with Mickie James and you have to see them facing William Regal and Layla in the future. As of now they haven’t really developed this other than having Regal and Layla at ring side occasionally getting involved. Look for something major to happen next week to kick this into full gear.
The other match on the card could have been left off for all intensive purposes. Kelly Kelly defeated Jillian in a match that featured the commentary banter of Miz and Morrison with Cryme Tyme more than the match itself. Again I will give credit to Kelly Kelly as she now has firmly establish herself as a in ring talent. As for the banter, there seemed to be some funny line trades between the two tag teams, but most of the time you could barely make out what they were saying as they talked over each other and their words became garbled.
