Day 1 (2022): WWE Lost Its Main Event and Somehow Found Another One

There should be a tax on asking The Usos and The New Day to wrestle each other again. By January 2022, WWE had spent years withdrawing from that account. The teams had traded titles, television matches, stipulations, brand assignments and enough near falls to stock a small promotion. The obvious danger at Day 1 is not bad wrestling. These four were too good for that. The danger is familiarity becoming wallpaper.

Instead, they wrestle like the rivalry still has something to prove. The opening minutes are controlled rather than frantic. Woods and Kingston force the champions to react, while Jimmy and Jey keep pulling the match back toward the physical, compact style that favors them. Because everybody knows everybody's offense, counters feel less like choreography and more like scouting. A move does not fail because the script says it should. It fails because these teams have already seen each other's answers.

The match escalates without drowning in kickouts. Kingston's SOS creates a believable near fall. Jey's splash does the same. The double Uso Splash looks like the finish until Woods saves Kingston, and the crowd responds because the sequence has earned the interruption rather than simply scheduling it.

Then WWE gives the rivalry something new. The Usos hit the 1D on Kingston and win cleanly. The move is borrowed lineage — the Dudley Boyz' 3D with Uso speed attached — but it immediately gives Jimmy and Jey a tag-team finish that looks final in a way two separate splashes sometimes did not. More importantly, the champions do not need Roman Reigns, a distraction or an authority figure to survive. They beat The New Day themselves.

That cleanliness is the match's secret weapon. A rivalry this old can support endless story machinery, but Day 1 lets the wrestling be the story. This is the best match on the card. It is also a reminder that repetition is not automatically the enemy of wrestling. Repetition without development is. The Usos and The New Day find development anyway.

Drew McIntyre versus Madcap Moss has the structural problem of a match whose real opponent is standing at ringside. Happy Corbin is the character with history against McIntyre. Moss is the extension cord. That can work on television, where a supporting victory advances the weekly plot and nobody is pretending every segment needs premium-event weight. On Day 1, the mismatch in stature is harder to ignore.

Moss does more than merely occupy nine minutes. He is athletic enough to bump big for McIntyre, strong enough that the power exchanges do not look absurd, and willing to make the former WWE Champion's offense feel appropriately violent. There are stretches where the match is perfectly competent.

Competence is also the ceiling. The crowd understands that McIntyre is not losing. The story has not given Moss a mechanism, stipulation or level of momentum that creates meaningful doubt. Corbin's presence adds the possibility of interference, but even that feels more like a bridge to the next chapter than a genuine finishing threat.

McIntyre eventually lands the Claymore and wins, which is exactly what should happen. The post-match backstage attack is actually more consequential than the bell-to-bell result, with Corbin and Moss injuring McIntyre's neck in storyline and creating a reason for the feud to continue. That tells you almost everything about the match's function. The wrestling gets the characters from one angle to another.

There is nothing disastrous here. There is also no reason to seek it out unless you are watching the entire event or following the program chronologically. On a card with only six main-show matches, this is the one that feels most obviously borrowed from Friday night television.

RK-Bro is one of those wrestling ideas that sounds like somebody lost a bet until the participants make it obvious. Randy Orton's exhausted-adult energy and Riddle's permanently unlocked enthusiasm had become a genuine act by Day 1. The Street Profits are useful opponents because they do not need elaborate motivation to make a tag-title match move. Angelo Dawkins supplies force, Montez Ford supplies altitude, and both teams understand that the crowd is already invested in the champions' personality before the wrestling begins.

The match is brisk without trying to compete with Usos-New Day's opener. That is a smart choice. Dawkins and Ford get enough control to make the titles feel vulnerable, while Orton spends stretches in the role he has mastered for two decades: waiting for the exact second when stillness becomes violence.

Migos at ringside could have turned the bout into celebrity decoration. Instead, their presence mostly stays decorative. Atlanta gets its local music connection, the broadcast gets a few reaction shots, and the match remains about the four wrestlers.

The finish is the reason to remember it. Riddle launches Ford upward and Orton catches him with an RKO on the way down. It is simple tag-team logic disguised as a highlight-reel spot: one partner creates the height, the other supplies the finish. The move works because it looks like the natural combination of their individual identities rather than a tandem sequence invented solely for one night.

The championship retention is predictable, but predictability is not a flaw when the execution pays it off. RK-Bro were still one of Raw's most over acts, and Day 1 had no compelling reason to interrupt that run. The match lives a tier below the opener because it never develops the same urgency or emotional tension. It does not need to. Eleven minutes of good tag wrestling, a crowd-friendly act and an excellent finish are enough.

Edge and The Miz receive twenty minutes because both men know how to make a wrestling match feel important before they touch. The entrances matter. The facial expressions matter. The pauses matter. The problem is that eventually all those pauses have to become a match.

There is an old-school logic to the structure. Miz attacks the leg and uses the figure four. Edge sells, fights from underneath and looks for the Crossface and Spear. Maryse creates the outside variable. Nobody is rushing to accumulate moves simply because the clock is running.

In a tighter match, that restraint could be a strength. At twenty minutes, the middle begins to feel padded. The feud was built more around status, ego and verbal sparring than a personal issue that demanded an epic physical resolution. The wrestling keeps asking the audience to treat the match as more heated than the story has actually made it.

The near fall after Miz's Skull Crushing Finale is effective. Edge's desperation offense works. The final act also has the personality jolt the match has been waiting for: Beth Phoenix appears, Maryse retreats, and Edge hits the Spear for the win.

That ending advances the program toward the mixed tag at Royal Rumble, so the booking has a purpose. It also underscores the problem. Phoenix entering the scene is more memorable than most of the wrestling that precedes her.

There is craftsmanship throughout. Edge can structure a long match, Miz understands control segments, and neither man embarrasses himself. But 'professionally assembled' and 'worth twenty minutes' are different standards. Day 1 asks for the second and mostly delivers the first.

Liv Morgan's job at Day 1 is more difficult than simply trying to beat Becky Lynch. She has to make the audience believe WWE might let her. Lynch had already beaten Morgan on Raw by using the ropes for leverage, giving the challenger a clean grievance and a reason to approach the rematch with something more specific than underdog optimism. Day 1 builds from that history. Morgan attacks Lynch's arm, returns the steel-step punishment Lynch had used against her, and wrestles with the urgency of somebody who knows moral victories are useless once the title is on the line.

Lynch is excellent in the role she occupied throughout this portion of her career: champion as problem solver. She does not simply dominate Morgan. She absorbs the challenger's best ideas, turns mistakes into openings and makes every escape feel like evidence that Morgan is getting closer without actually arriving.

The arm work gives the match a spine. Morgan's offense has a target, Lynch's selling creates continuity, and the Dis-Arm-Her tease reverses their usual roles just enough to make the champion uncomfortable. The closing sequence avoids the cheap finish their prior match had used. Morgan goes for Oblivion, Lynch counters and hits the Manhandle Slam. Champion retains.

That result frustrated viewers who wanted Morgan's breakthrough, but the match itself does not treat her like a placeholder. She receives seventeen minutes, credible near falls and enough offensive agency to emerge as a real title-level wrestler even in defeat. The one limitation is that the crowd never quite reaches the fever pitch of the opener or the main event. The outcome still feels more likely than not, and the match is working uphill against the knowledge that WWE often asks an underdog to become 'made' by losing competitively. Still, this is the best singles match on Day 1 and the clearest evidence that the undercard could produce something more substantial than maintenance booking.

This match did not exist when most people woke up on January 1, 2022. That fact explains almost everything about why it works. There is no attempt to recreate the pacing of the four-way WWE had advertised. There is certainly no attempt to make Brock Lesnar's addition feel elegant. Five wrestlers enter, everybody understands the match has been rebuilt under emergency conditions, and the bell rings on eight minutes of concentrated damage.

Kevin Owens and Seth Rollins attack Lesnar immediately because letting him establish control would be idiotic. Big E and Bobby Lashley bring the heavyweight collisions. Lesnar responds with suplexes and F-5s. The match keeps splitting into temporary alliances that survive exactly as long as common interest requires.

Lashley Spearing Lesnar through the barricade is important beyond the spectacle. WWE had never really given the two a sustained singles rivalry, and the spot instantly presents Lashley as the one man in the match who can meet Lesnar on the same physical frequency. Later, Lashley catches Lesnar with another Spear and applies the Hurt Lock. Big E has to break it.

That sequence quietly builds the Royal Rumble direction while the current championship is still being decided. Big E also gets his moments. The powerbomb through the announce table gives him a major visual, and he is the wrestler positioned to stop Lashley's submission. The problem comes at the finish, where his attempt at the Big Ending becomes Lesnar's F-5 and the end of his WWE Championship reign.

As a match finish, it is decisive and explosive. As a booking choice, it is much harder to love. Those two judgments have to remain separate. The match itself is excellent at the thing it chooses to be. There is no dead air, no obligatory rest sequence and almost no move that does not create immediate consequence. It is professional wrestling edited like an action trailer, except the performers are doing the editing with their bodies.

Could it have gone longer? Certainly. Would longer have made it better? Probably not. The emergency gives the match an identity that a more conventionally structured twenty-minute multi-man bout might have lost. Lesnar wins the WWE Championship in a sprint that feels enormous precisely because it refuses to pretend the night went according to plan.