The most revealing moment came when Giulia tried to lift Lash Legend.
She had already kicked at the legs, wrapped herself around Legend in an Octopus Hold, landed the Arrivederci knee and generally spent what little time she had behaving like someone determined to make a wrestling match happen. Then she reached for the Northern Lights Bomb.
Nothing.
Legend was simply too big, too strong and too well planted. Giulia had to abandon the idea and find another route, switching into a guillotine instead. Legend rose, headbutted her, hit the Lash Extension and pinned her.
One, two, three.
Two minutes.
That was it.
There is a perfectly reasonable wrestling match hidden inside those 120 seconds. In fact, the basic idea is quite good. Giulia is the smaller, more technically experienced wrestler trying to dismantle a much larger athlete. Legend survives the submissions and strikes, Giulia discovers she cannot simply throw her around, and eventually the difference in raw power becomes decisive.
Give them ten minutes, and you have something.
Give them two, and you have an administrative procedure.
Which is essentially what WWE presented on the July 31 episode of SmackDown in Green Bay. Giulia and Lash Legend were competing for the fifth and final place in the Interim WWE Women’s Championship ladder match at SummerSlam, joining Tiffany Stratton, Jade Cargill, Charlotte Flair and Chelsea Green.
This was supposed to matter.
Rhea Ripley’s torn meniscus had created a vacancy at the top of the SmackDown women’s division, and WWE’s solution was the sort of elaborate wrestling bureaucracy that eventually results in someone climbing a ladder in Minneapolis to become interim champion. Fine. Wrestling has always enjoyed solving relatively simple problems with brackets, qualifiers and increasingly specific championship terminology.
But if the qualifying matches are supposed to establish who deserves to compete for the title, treating the final one like someone has just noticed the show is running long rather undermines the exercise.
Particularly when one of the wrestlers is Giulia.
WWE has a Giulia problem
There is a peculiar habit in wrestling discourse where questioning the booking of one wrestler is interpreted as an attack on whoever beat them.
So this needs saying clearly.
Lash Legend winning was not the problem.
Legend has obvious upside. She is enormous by the standards of the division, carries herself like a star and has the sort of athletic background WWE has spent years trying to cultivate through its Performance Centre system. A former SEC basketball player developing into a convincing professional wrestler is exactly the kind of success story the company wants.
Putting her in the SummerSlam ladder match makes sense.
Having her beat Giulia can make sense too.
Having her beat Giulia in two minutes is what makes things strange.
Because wrestling has never really been about who wins and loses in isolation. It is about what the audience is encouraged to believe about the people involved.
A competitive defeat tells us Giulia was good enough to threaten Legend but ultimately couldn’t overcome her size.
A two-minute clean defeat tells us something rather different.
That distinction matters because Giulia arrived in WWE with years of credibility accumulated elsewhere. She had been World of Stardom Champion, Wonder of Stardom Champion and NJPW STRONG Women’s Champion before becoming NXT Women’s Champion and twice holding WWE’s Women’s United States Championship.
None of those belts provides diplomatic immunity from losing.
They should, however, establish a basic expectation that beating her means something.
Instead, WWE took a wrestler many fans regard as one of the outstanding performers of her generation and used her to demonstrate that Lash Legend is very large. We knew that already.
Beautiful Madness, neatly scheduled
Perhaps the frustration would be less pronounced if this existed in isolation.
It doesn’t.
Giulia’s American career has developed an odd rhythm in which her reputation and WWE presentation appear to be having two separate conversations.
Her first Women’s United States Championship reign lasted 133 days. Across two reigns, she has accumulated 245 days with the belt. On paper, that sounds substantial.
Yet she never defended the championship on a Premium Live Event.
Instead, someone who became famous partly because her matches felt dangerous, abrasive and occasionally slightly unhinged has regularly found herself squeezed into short television bouts.
The Beautiful Madness has been allotted four minutes before the advert break.
There is something very WWE about this.
Professional wrestling companies have always had difficulty translating wrestlers between ecosystems. What makes somebody extraordinary in Stardom does not automatically transfer to American television, just as being excellent in NXT does not guarantee success on SmackDown.
Presentation matters. Context matters. Audience familiarity matters.
But Giulia is hardly an obscure technician who requires several PowerPoint presentations before anyone can understand her.
Look at her.
She walks to the ring with the expression of someone who has already won an argument nobody else realised they were having. Her offence looks unpleasant. Her physical charisma requires little translation.
WWE somehow looked at all of this and decided she needed Kiana James to help speak for her.
Which is one way of looking at it.
The more obvious option might have been to allow Giulia to be Giulia.
The match that never had time to become one
What makes the Legend match especially irritating is that the wrestling itself suggested something worthwhile.
Giulia immediately attacked the hamstrings. Sensible. You do not defeat someone much larger by politely attempting to overpower them.
She moved into the Octopus Hold. Legend responded by using the size disparity rather than suddenly becoming a technical wrestler, lifting Giulia and throwing her throat-first across the ropes.
Again, sensible.
Giulia hit Arrivederci and got the match’s only nearfall. Then came the failed Northern Lights Bomb, followed by the guillotine. Legend powered upright, headbutted her and finished things with the Lash Extension.
There is your match.
Unfortunately, it was being played at double speed.
Nothing had enough time to settle. Giulia couldn’t gradually discover the problem presented by Legend’s size because she had roughly the lifespan of a supermarket sandwich to work it out.
Legend couldn’t really demonstrate that she had survived Giulia either, because there was barely anything to survive.
That does neither wrestler much good.
Squash matches have a purpose. Wrestling has used them forever because watching an enormous person obliterate someone is an extremely effective way to establish that the enormous person is dangerous.
But the victim matters.
You squash an enhancement wrestler to demonstrate power. You can even squash an established wrestler when the shock itself is the story.
If you squash someone the audience considers roughly comparable in status, however, you are making a fairly explicit statement about hierarchy.
That is why the silence after the three-count mattered.
The Resch Centre did not erupt because Lash Legend had pulled off a major victory. According to accounts from inside the building, the finish instead produced something closer to bewilderment.
People were processing what they had just been told.
“Let it play out”
AJ Styles subsequently offered the traditional wrestling defence.
“Let’s see where it goes.”
Every wrestling fan has heard a variation of this sentence.
Sometimes it is correct. Wrestling stories are episodic and judging chapter three before chapter ten can make everyone look rather silly when chapter ten arrives.
The difficulty is that wrestling fans possess memories.
Often annoyingly good ones.
They remember the other occasions when they were told to wait. They remember pushes quietly disappearing, programmes ending without conclusions and wrestlers spending months in catering while everyone insisted there was probably a plan.
So “let it play out” has gradually become wrestling’s equivalent of being told your train is delayed due to “operational reasons”.
It may be entirely accurate.
You are still standing on the platform.
Giulia’s response was considerably more convincing.
She apologised to those supporting her before essentially telling everyone not to worry because she was stubborn, tough and wasn’t going anywhere.
That sounded like Giulia.
More importantly, it created something WWE desperately needs to preserve with her: defiance.
Because losing is not fatal to a wrestler.
Indifference is.
Then there is Blake Monroe
Fortunately, there appears to be somewhere for this to go.
Blake Monroe has been circling Giulia since June, attacking her after a victory over Kiana James and turning their shared history in Japan into something considerably less nostalgic.
Monroe’s assessment of their previous encounter was wonderfully unpleasant.
Giulia had been the established wrestler then. Monroe was learning. Now, Monroe believes the hierarchy has reversed.
“I would eat her alive now. I hope she’s scared.”
Good.
There is your story.
Not belts. Not qualifiers. Not another authority figure announcing a multi-person match while everyone stands around nodding.
Two wrestlers with history and mutually incompatible ideas about who they are now.
Monroe remembers Giulia slapping her around in Japan.
Giulia has spent months watching her own reputation being slowly compressed by WWE television.
Those things belong together.
There is even something useful WWE could salvage from the Legend defeat. Giulia tried to wrestle the way she always has and discovered that reputation alone no longer protects her. The American main roster is different. Bigger opponents can overpower her. Two minutes can erase years of accumulated mythology remarkably quickly.
Now she has to become unpleasant again.
That could work.
It might even make the Green Bay defeat worthwhile.
But that requires commitment.
This wasn’t Lash Legend’s fault
It is important to return to Legend because she risks becoming collateral damage in a conversation that isn’t really about her.
She did what the match required.
She looked powerful. Her counters made physical sense. The finish was decisive. WWE wanted her in the SummerSlam ladder match and presented her as somebody capable of overpowering an established champion.
There are much worse ways to push a wrestler.
The problem was the haste.
Had Legend beaten Giulia after eight or ten minutes, surviving Arrivederci, escaping submissions and finally exploiting the size difference, she would arguably have gained more.
Giulia would have lost without becoming diminished.
Legend would have beaten somebody dangerous rather than somebody the match had abruptly instructed us not to consider dangerous.
Everybody wins.
Instead, WWE created one of professional wrestling’s strangest recurring arguments, where fans end up debating whether somebody has been “buried”; other fans point to their championship history as evidence that they haven’t; and everyone somehow forgets that wrestling is principally an exercise in making people feel things about fictional combat.
On July 31, the feeling was mostly confusion.
Perhaps that was the intention.
Probably not.
Giulia remains a proper star because wrestling audiences can remember what they have seen beyond the narrow boundaries of one company’s current television plans. Stardom happened. The STRONG title reign happened. NXT happened. WWE cannot simply press delete on all of that because SmackDown needed to reach the next segment.
But it can slowly persuade people that none of it matters.
That is the danger.
Lash Legend deserved her victory and deserves the opportunity that comes with it. Giulia deserved something more valuable than winning.
She deserved to be treated as someone worth beating.
Two minutes was enough to decide the match. It wasn’t enough to justify it.
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