In a perfect world — well, a slightly less imperfect world than this one, at least — Becky Lynch and Trish Stratus would have come out on “Raw,” a week after being disrespectfully left off the card at SummerSlam, and torn the house down, preferably in the main event. Unfortunately, we live in a fallen world where the good die young and Vince McMahon remains inexplicably unincarcerated, so there wasn’t even much of a house to tear down, and if there had been, they wouldn’t have. They weren’t the main event, either, but in hindsight, that’s understandable.

This was not good. At all. Part of that can be chalked up to bad luck; aside from the superplex toward the end, none of the big spots landed right, Stratus is out here botching moves she’s been hitting for literal decades, and everything just seemed slow and sluggish. The crowd might have something to do with that — Lynch and Stratus weren’t the only wrestlers to have the air taken out of their sails by an absolutely garbage Winnipeg crowd, and you can hardly blame some of these wrestlers if they didn’t give their all for that audience. But honestly, the bigger problem was that the match had no structure, and the match had no structure because there was nothing to base a structure on. This entire storyline has been built around Stark since she joined up with Trish at Night of Champions, so a match where Stark is banned from ringside doesn’t have any teeth to it. The only other thing the feud has to work with is Stratus’ face mask, and for some reason they decided to resolve that already weak plot point mid-match so it didn’t have any impact whatsoever. Cool.

We’re actually happy about the double countout finish, because this was no way for WWE’s second-longest-running storyline (yes, really) to end. And a steel cage match? That’s more like it. That fits the narrative of needing to keep Stark out of the match while still allowing her to appear and probably do something during the match, and it works better to the styles of matches Lynch and Stratus have been having. And Winnipeg doesn’t deserve it.