Welcome to the “Raw Is Ireland” edition of The Wrestling List. Tonight, I’ll be looking at this week’s Raw, the TNA Impact debut on AMC, and more.
This week’s Raw continued the international tour of January with the latest stop being in Ireland. Fun atmosphere with it being a home atmosphere for Finn Balor in the main event against CM Punk. This was a lot of fun. We had Finn being the big babyface there including him even bringing back his old entrance with music. CM Punk going out and having fun playing the heel. Good back and forth match with some big hope spots of could Finn pull this off? Punk ends up getting the win and then makes the babyface move at the end offering a hand of respect to pull Finn up from sitting on the mat. Finn accepts. Punk then holds up Finn’s arm to the home crowd and embraces him. Finn accepted the embrace and then rolled out giving the ring to Punk. Very cool moment all around. I will be interested to see if there is any Judgment Day storyline fall out here as earlier in the show, Liv was giving a cheer type speech of all of us are going to have gold soon including saying it was time for Finn to deliver. Speaking of Liv, we had her and Roxanne setting up an attack on Rhea and Iyo with getting Raquel involved which is continuing the build to their tag title match next week at Saturday Night’s Main Event. Another big headline today was AJ Styles demanding another match at Gunther and Gunther backing down from it. AJ said Gunther was scared and told him to demand whatever he wanted for the match to happen. Gunther said put your career on the line and I want your answer by the end of the night. AJ did accept later on and it will be AJ Styles vs Gunther at The Royal Rumble with AJ’s career on the line. On commentary, they were mentioning how AJ has been saying that this is going to be his final year so they are acknowledging that on TV. Will this be AJ’s final match? My gut says surely not but we’ll see. A heel turn by Natalya today. Maxxine faced Becky in a rematch for the title with Natalya surprisingly showing up for the match. Yeah, this screamed heel turn all over it and the moment that cemented it for me was the shot of Natalya outside the ring yelling to the fans of we’ve got this, we’re ok. It was too much and I said oh, she’s turning heel. LOL. The spot that it happened at was Maxxine getting what looked to possibly be a three count and then Natalya grabbing Becky’s leg and putting it on the ropes to stop the count. Maxxine immediately looks sad at Natalya of why did you do that? Becky nails her while distracted and retains the title. After the match, Natalya attacks Maxxine. Maxxine got one little defiant fight back moment but Natalya put her back down. Officials pulled Natalya off of Maxxine but then a minute or so later, Natalya was back on top of Maxxine again continuing the beat down. We continue the battle between The Vision and Adam Pearce or specifically more of Pearce and Paul Heyman. Pearce got physically involved with Bron last week when Bron wouldn’t stop what he was doing. Pearce suspended him indefinitely and then told Heyman that Bron had went too far to which Heyman pointed out that Pearce put his hands on Bron first instead of the other way around. Basically threatening legal action on him. Today, we had a six man tag with The Vision. Pearce ends up at ringside during this and Logan tries to get the brass knucks involved but Pearce gets the knucks and puts them on the mat. While Logan is distracted, Rey Mysterio grabs the knucks and nails Theory with them leading to them get the win. Heyman was shown getting ready to make a call on his phone and we continue to see Heyman trying to do things to cost Pearce his job with whoever he is in contact with. Je’Von Evans had his match stopped with the match with El Grande Americano over what appeared to be an injury. When the match came back from commercial, the match had stopped with an announcement of a match stoppage and declared winner. Clearly not storyline here with the match stopping during the commercial. Hoping Je’Von is ok!
On Smackdown, we had qualifying matches to determine the challenger for Drew’s championship. Randy Orton defeating The Miz. Trick Williams defeats Matt Cardona. Damian Priest defeats Solo Sikoa. Sami defeats Ilya. So, it will be those four battling it out on Saturday Night’s Main Event to determine Drew’s next challenger.
TNA made their debut on AMC this past Thursday night and I definitely had to check it out to see how the show was. My history of viewing with this company. I watched the first three shows back in 2002 when they did the PPV model of shows. They brought Vince Russo in after three shows. I was back out. They got rid of Vince Russo. I was back in. My time with watching that company in the early days revolved around whether he was involved or not. I watched the Fox Sports Net era and enjoyed it. The Spike TV era. Loved the mid to late 2000’s era of Impact. I was excited for the Hogan/Bischoff era of the company thinking it was going to jump them to the next level…..and it did not. I watched for a bit and then tuned out and just never came back cause I just did not enjoy the product anymore. From there, I would hear about what the company was doing and often with how bad the company was struggling including them even trying to obviously stay in business. It got dark there for a while for TNA. The fact that TNA is still around from 2002 on up to now in 2026 is going to be quite the book someday with how much of a rollercoaster of a ride that they’ve been through. So many big moments. High highs. Low lows. Nearing being out of business. Complete rebuilds. Company sales. Now, here they are with a big TV deal on AMC. This company is quite the story and I want them to succeed so badly. So, I tuned in for the premiere and this was the first full TNA show I have watched in I don’t know how long. I’ve seen more of them lately with the pairing up with NXT. Overall, I was entertained with the premiere. It had its positives and negatives like any show does. When the show came on the air, I said to myself that I liked the overall look of the building. Felt like a good energy to start the show with the crowd. Loved AJ Styles being the one to kick the show off. That guy was the face of that company for A WHOLE LOT of years. When I think of TNA, AJ Styles is the first person I think of so it’s fitting that he was the one to give the speech to kick off the AMC era. With this being his last year before retirement, I do hope we see more of him there for a full circle moment tribute with his career. I enjoyed him popping up in segments through the night talking to talent including him teasing wanting a title shot. Speaking of title shot, I really enjoyed the main event with Kazarian and Santana. Fun match and I was definitely into it. Santana wins the TNA championship. I thought it was smart to have the Hardys in the opening match of the show. Give the fans that are tuning in fresh names that they know immediately. Enjoyed the band playing the live song for the Hardys too. Fun opener with them and Elijah getting the win over Order 4. I’m a Cora Jade fan here so seeing the Elayna Black surprise was very fun. Last I knew she had said she was moving on from wrestling so it’s great to see her back. I really feel like that her getting released from WWE has been a whole lot for her to process just like with anyone where their foundation gets messed up underneath them and they have to figure out what to do from here. I want all the success for her! Another surprise return in the same segment was the former Sonja Deville being introduced as the new co-authority to play heel against Santino Marella. I’d heard Santino was the authority figure there and I enjoyed him in the role seeing it for the first time. With her though, I’m happy for her but whew, my brain just tends to shut off when I see a heel general manager cause WWE just beat us over the head with it for so long that I’m long burnt out on heel general managers. I had not heard that Santino’s daughter turned on him until I saw the recap package while I said ok, I’m interested in seeing where that goes. We also had new tag team champions crowned as the Elegance Brand defeated The Inspiration. I’m a long time Iconics fan so I was excited to see them again on TV. It took some getting used to for me to see them working as babyfaces cause I’m so used to them working as heels. LOL. So, the Elegance Brand. Not into them and their promo went on forever. What turned me off even more was that their promo went that long and then The Inspiration walk out to start the match…..and they go to commercial. I said I sat through that forever promo and then they throw to commercial for the match. Throw to commercial during that promo and give me the match especially when I wanted to see The Inspiration. I have seen a bunch of criticism of the show saying there were way too many commercials and a lack of wrestling. I saw that too. I know that by 7:40 and seeing a promo segment in the ring, I said what time is it cause there isn’t much wrestling on this show so far. Now, I have seen that they had issues with last minute changes to the show due to talents having visa delays so I totally take that into account as that is out of your control. I didn’t think having the AMC crossover segment that early in the show was a great idea and with how long it lasted. I know they want that AMC synergy to cross promote but that was a long segment to include them in when you’re trying to hook new viewers. I also get tired of the Netflix crossover stuff on Raw when it gets too long. LOL. Another production thing was when they showed the influencers in the crowd and they showed them in front of the side where the hard camera was set up which was completely empty behind them. It showed so much of that whole empty section cause they had the camera so wide. It looked bad. You never want to show the hard camera side if it’s empty. Get a camera on them from a different angle with the stage in the background or something but that shot looked really bad. Another surprise we got. Dixie Carter. Whew, and did she ever get booed. I groaned myself too. One thing I really liked through the night was the video packages on each division showcasing the current talent while also honoring the talent of the past. It made me smile with a lot of memories and a bunch of fun times with that company. So, the show itself for me was enjoyable. I know people have a lot of strong opinions on it and I understand all of them. Some are fans that watch every week. Some are newbies who have never watched Impact before. Some are ones who returned to check it out. So, it’s a demographic all across the board. They have things to work on for sure. For me, I enjoyed it but I had my positives and negatives on it too with show pacing and such. We’ll see how they do with week 2.
A couple of fun podcasts to check out that I watched over the last week. Bayley was on the Stephanie McMahon podcast where she talked about her career, her hopes of a family, her training seminar, and much more. This was yet another long sit-down interview with Bayley that I loved especially as a Bayley fan.
The Miz was the guest with Chris Van Vliet in a nearly two hour interview talking about him breaking into the business, his struggles to being accepted in the locker room, his career moments, why he says the “Hate Me Now” video before his WrestleMania main event is better than the Austin/Rock “My Way” video, and much more. Just a really fun interview with him and just so much passion from him too. Miz fan here so this was a fun watch.
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