I think WWE has reached a slightly uncomfortable point with its women’s division.
It has too many good wrestlers.
That sounds like the sort of problem every wrestling company should desperately want, until you actually have to book all of them. Rhea Ripley and Chelsea Green are champions. Tiffany Stratton, Nia Jax, Lash Legend, Charlotte Flair, Tatum Paxley and Fatal Influence are all floating around significant stories. Then there is Jordynne Grace, who seems to have wandered into whatever mysterious cupboard WWE occasionally uses to store exceptionally talented wrestlers it cannot currently find anything for.
And then there is Giulia.
Please don’t get me started on Giulia.
So when Blake Monroe and Giulia were finally scheduled to wrestle on the 21 August episode of SmackDown in Toronto, I was interested.
Very interested, actually.
Giulia against Monroe should be excellent. We already know this because, before they became beautifully lit WWE television characters with entrance graphics and corporate nicknames, they wrestled each other in Stardom. Monroe was Mariah May then, representing Club Venus, while Giulia was one of the defining figures of Donna Del Mondo.
There is history here.
Unfortunately, WWE didn’t appear particularly interested in telling us about much of it.
Blake Monroe Finally Meets Giulia
Monroe’s main-roster introduction has been strange.
WWE has invested considerable television time into establishing The Glamour. There have been vignettes, backstage appearances, extravagant clothes and enough pink to make a Barbie Dreamhouse look like an abandoned Soviet office block.
What there hasn’t been is much wrestling.
Monroe arrived on SmackDown after a successful NXT run that included winning the NXT Women’s North American Championship, and there is very little mystery surrounding her ability. Before WWE, Mariah May had already become AEW Women’s World Champion by defeating Toni Storm at Wembley Stadium.
That programme was arguably one of the best stories AEW’s women’s division has ever produced.
Monroe understands wrestling as theatre. She has spoken openly about not needing to perform 25 moonsaults or increasingly absurd stunts because her matches are built around characters and stories.
I rather like that philosophy.
There should be room in wrestling for spectacular athleticism, but if every match becomes Godzilla and King Ghidorah throwing skyscrapers at each other, eventually somebody needs to remember why they started fighting.
Which brings us to Giulia.
Because I’m still not entirely sure why Blake Monroe hates her.
Monroe attacked Giulia after her victory over Kiana James on 26 June, eventually dropping her with a Gotch-style driver. She later demanded a championship opportunity from Nick Aldis, Giulia interrupted, and Giulia volunteered to fight her.
Fine.
I can follow all of that.
Not exactly War and Peace.
Still, sometimes wrestling can solve these things by simply ringing a bell.
Except WWE didn’t do that either.
Blake Monroe Attacks Giulia Before the Bell
First, Giulia’s new look is fantastic.
Then Monroe attacks her.
Of course she does.
Giulia barely gets down the aisle before Monroe jumps her from behind, immediately turning what was supposed to be a wrestling match into another angle.
And, to be fair, the attack looks excellent.
There is an unpleasant physicality to these two together which immediately reminds you why the actual match sounded so appealing. Monroe sends Giulia into the steel steps and it looks genuinely horrible. Not dangerous in the sense that you want somebody hurt, obviously, but nasty enough that the wrestling briefly stops looking choreographed.
Giulia sells it accordingly.
Monroe continues attacking her around ringside before eventually getting Giulia into the ring.
At this point I’m waiting for the referee to call for the bell.
He doesn’t.
Monroe continues the beating and eventually plants Giulia with the Neutralizer.
Still no bell.
Then it’s over.
That’s it.
Blake Monroe’s heavily promoted SmackDown in-ring debut lasted precisely zero seconds because, officially, there wasn’t a match.
It is almost impressive.
Was This Really Blake Monroe’s Debut?
There is a fairly obvious reason WWE booked it this way.
Neither woman particularly needs to lose.
Monroe certainly shouldn’t.
You cannot spend months introducing somebody as a major acquisition, present her as an enormous star and then have her lose her first main-roster match. Monroe needs victories before anybody should realistically be beating her.
The problem is that Giulia desperately needs victories too.
Her main-roster booking has been baffling.
She lost to Lash Legend in a SummerSlam qualifying match in just 4:42. She then suffered another televised defeat to Michin on Main Event. Bully Ray has publicly questioned WWE’s handling of her, particularly the repeated clean defeats and the lack of opportunities for Giulia to speak and establish herself.
Why book the match?
I understand why WWE might therefore look at Giulia versus Monroe and conclude that neither should be pinned.
But there is an obvious response to that.
This is where WWE’s enormous collection of talent becomes slightly self-defeating.
If Monroe needs protecting and Giulia needs rebuilding, perhaps putting them against each other immediately isn’t the solution. Give Monroe somebody she can beat. Give Giulia several victories. Let them orbit each other for a month.
Then collide.
Instead, WWE advertised a match it apparently couldn’t afford to finish.
Sometimes Wrestling Fans Actually Want Wrestling
The frustrating part is that the segment itself isn’t bad.
Quite the opposite.
Monroe looks vicious. Giulia looks sympathetic without appearing weak. The collision with the steps is excellent. The Neutralizer looks brutal.
If this had been presented simply as Monroe attacking Giulia, I probably would have enjoyed it considerably more.
But it was presented as a match.
That distinction matters.
There is an occasionally tedious argument about modern wrestling fans supposedly caring too much about “bell-to-bell” wrestling. Storytelling matters. Characters matter. Promos matter. Professional wrestling would become exhausting very quickly if everybody simply wrestled 25-minute technical classics every week.
But sometimes you advertise Giulia versus Blake Monroe because people would quite like to watch Giulia wrestle Blake Monroe.
Radical concept, I know.
Instead, after months of waiting for Monroe’s proper SmackDown debut, we received another promise that the real thing is coming later.
Perhaps that is the point.
Monroe now looks horrible in exactly the way a heel should. Giulia has a legitimate reason to want to hurt her rather than merely being mildly irritated by her existence. Most importantly, nobody had to stare at the ceiling while a referee counted three.
The booking protected both women.
I’m just not convinced it protected the audience’s patience.
And there is an interesting irony here. WWE has accumulated perhaps the deepest collection of women’s wrestling talent it has ever possessed. Giulia, Blake Monroe and Jordynne Grace would be centrepieces almost anywhere. Here, WWE occasionally appears to be staring at all these expensive, extraordinary ingredients while wondering what exactly it was planning to cook.
Giulia and Monroe will get another opportunity.
They have to.
Because after Toronto, the question is no longer whether Blake Monroe can wrestle Giulia.
We already knew she could.
And she can wrestle well, that match against Jordynne Grace was awesome.
The question is how many times WWE can promise us the match before it finally allows the bell to ring.
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