Very Detailed Off-Air Notes From This Week’s WWE RAW

Credit: Stephen Gray & F4WOnline.com

Quick Off-Air Results:

Dark Match:

Primo (as a babyface) d. Local Wrestler (maybe? Bruce Something – the audio on some names and promos was hard to hear at times).

Post-show Main Event:

John Cena def. Batista to retain the WWE title.

Notes:

Awesome, hot crowd. I’ve never been to a Toronto Raw but this was great. People still "woo" before the event which I thought was odd, but whatever. I thought they may have burned us out early with Santino, Bret, Jericho, and Edge vs. Christian, but my section stayed pretty hot all night with some minimum downtime.

The show opened with the WrestleMania XXVI recap package. Bret Hart got a lot of cheers.

Primo worked as a babyface and a lot of people cheered him immediately upon his coming out. Puzzling for me but few seemed to recall him being a heel anyway. His opponent did nothing much of note except a pretty good running enziguri.

Santino vs. Kozlov was more of an angle than a match and the people ate it up. Very loud "Santino! Santino!" chants as he entered and while he tried to cut a promo asking Kozlov to be his tag team partner. At one point Santino seemed to break character and seemed quite modest to the ovation he was getting. He had to ask us to keep quiet as he was trying to explain something to Kozlov. He even got some cheap heat by mentioning a player leaving a Toronto sports team (I think, this was another instance where I couldn’t clearly hear over the PA, partially due to people cheering loudly) but people forgave him. It was an extended comedy bit and, like I said, everyone loved it. Then the match began and Santino immediately lost to three headbutts and an uranage like move.

William Regal vs. Goldust was a match people were not into after they finished cheering Goldust and the fact it had a ref stoppage for blood (Goldust had to be cleaned up) didn’t help matters. People were really into Goldust winning though.

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As for the dark match main event, it was very short but people were going nuts. During Sheamus vs. Cena, this girl in my area was trying to attack people in front of her booing Cena (by "attack" I mean "hit with her foam Cena hand") but the guy she was with kept stopping her. That was a fun environment to be a part of.

People were quite happy to see Christian and it was another super pop for The Undertaker. Edge/Christian was great lives and people bought into all the nearfalls.

And of course, Bret Hart. The reactions to him in the opening promo and winning the US title were amazing. I have no idea what half of his promo consisted of as it was nigh impossible to hear.

The only real down points were during the second hour, people were often just coming and going and not always into what was going on. No mandated 3 minute breaks meant people were going to concessions during matches instead (though I guess people do this anyway…). There were a lot of people around my cheering and chanting for Virgil but I have no idea if it made TV.

Overall, I have no idea how it came off on TV, but it was awesome live. Couldn’t tell you about most cheers/heat because everyone seemed to be really heavily cheered if they were a main event face and boo’d if they were John Cena.

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