Bayley did not wait for the bell.
That seems worth establishing immediately, because Bayley is ostensibly the good guy here.
Lyra Valkyria was still trying to get into the ring when Bayley attacked her, turning the final seconds before their match on the September 21 episode of Raw into something closer to an ambush. There was no sporting pretence, no circling each other while the referee solemnly explained the rules. Bayley simply decided she had waited long enough.
Fair enough.
I wasn’t immediately sold on this feud. There was something about Lyra and Bayley being dragged back towards one another that initially felt more functional than essential, another rivalry assembled because WWE needed two very good wrestlers to have something to do.
Then the pre-match video package played.
Then Bayley jumped her.
Then they started hitting each other.
Maybe I was wrong.
This Has Become Surprisingly Nasty
Once the bell actually rang, the match retained the aggression of everything that had happened before it.
Bayley even looked dressed for the occasion, in red-and-black gear traced with silver and finished with gold boots. Lyra, meanwhile, looked enormous through the shoulders. Somebody has been spending a lot of time in the gym and making sure the protein tub doesn’t expire.
More importantly, she wrestled like it.
There was a beautiful monkey flip early on before Valkyria climbed to the top rope and launched herself into a high leg drop, getting ridiculous height before crashing down onto Bayley.
Then came a superb leg lariat.
This was the version of Lyra that is easiest to become invested in. Not simply the technically excellent wrestler who can construct a good WWE television match almost automatically, but somebody increasingly capable of looking physically imposing while doing it.
She dragged Bayley into the corner and placed her on the top turnbuckle, looking for a superplex.
Bayley knocked her down.
Lyra came back.
Bayley knocked her down again.
This time she followed her opponent to the mat with the flying elbow.
It was physical without becoming clumsy, angry without losing the wrestling underneath it.
And that is probably the most encouraging thing about this feud.
San Antonio, Please Wake Up
Unfortunately, somebody forgot to tell San Antonio.
The Frost Bank Centre crowd felt strangely cold at points during a match that deserved considerably more noise. Perhaps that is the curse of good television wrestling. WWE produces so much of it that audiences occasionally react to genuinely impressive sequences as though somebody has just successfully parallel parked.
Lyra returned from the commercial break with a twirling DDT.
She attempted a moonsault. Bayley escaped.
Then Valkyria produced perhaps my favourite move of the entire match, hoisting Bayley into a modified gutwrench powerbomb and planting her onto the mat.
Incredible stuff.
Bayley responded with the Bayley-to-Belly almost from nowhere and suddenly had a close near-fall of her own.
By this stage, another thought had started creeping in.
Neither of these women really deserved to lose.
That is usually a good sign.
Because this no longer feels like a rivalry that should be resolved by another twelve-minute television match. There is enough irritation here now, enough history and enough willingness from both women to make things uncomfortable, that it probably needs something bigger.
Give them a steel cage.
Give them an Iron Woman match.
Give them something where all this hostility has somewhere to go.
And Then It Just… Ended
Instead, they went to the announce table.
Bayley sent Lyra over it before both women eventually ended up standing on top. For a moment, Valkyria looked destined to go through the thing.
She escaped.
Bayley unloaded with kicks. The referee intervened. Bayley went back for more anyway.
Again, the supposed babyface was behaving with the restraint of somebody who had just discovered restraint was optional.
Then came the finish.
Lyra slipped through Bayley’s legs and shoved her forward, sending Bayley throat-first into the ropes. Bayley ricocheted backwards. Valkyria caught her.
One.
Two.
Three.
Wait, that’s it?
It was a clever little sequence in isolation, and Lyra appeared to have acquired a fairly substantial handful of Bayley’s ring gear somewhere in the process.
But after everything that preceded it, the finish felt far too quick and far too clean.
The match had spent its time convincing us these women were becoming increasingly difficult to separate. Then it separated them in a few seconds.
That is the frustration.
Not because Lyra shouldn’t have won. Not because Bayley needed protecting from the concept of losing a wrestling match. But because the ending belonged to a less intense match than the one they had just wrestled.
Now Give Them Somewhere to Go
Still, that disappointment says something rather nice about Lyra Valkyria vs Bayley.
I wanted more.
Not in the polite wrestling-review sense of wanting another match because these are two talented performers. I want to see what happens when WWE gives this increasingly strange, increasingly hostile relationship a stipulation that can contain it.
The most interesting thing about their Raw match wasn’t the monkey flip, the huge leg drop, the gutwrench powerbomb, or Bayley deciding that attacking somebody before the bell remains perfectly acceptable behaviour for a good guy.
Somewhere along the way, this stopped feeling like a programme WWE put together and started feeling like two people who genuinely needed to settle something.
The finish didn’t settle it.
Good.
Maybe it wwasn’tsupposed to.
