Well, that’s one way to end SummerSlam.
Night two of SummerSlam was a surprisingly stacked six-match affair, with gold on the line in every bout. After the shock of Seth Rollins’ cash-in on CM Punk and World Heavyweight Champion win, Sunday’s festivities were challenged with keeping the positive momentum going in front of the New Jersey crowd at a packed MetLife Stadium. The matches delivered their part, although the booking and the lack of morality from WWE brought the show down.
Naomi vs. Rhea Ripley vs. Io Sky for the WWE World Women’s Championship
All three women in this match are on the best runs of their respective careers
Naomi’s heel work is a revelation. She’s always been an underrated in-ring competitor, but her recent work in the tag division with Bianca Belair and her subsequent heel run have been the best character work she’s ever done. Her win at Money In The Bank was the perfect choice, and she’s repaid that faith in spades. Ripley remains possibly the most over wrestler in WWE, and has elevated her game in the ring with a handful of classic matches already this year. Sky continues to prove why WWE was right to invest so much in her and should remain a focal point of one of the women’s world title divisions.
Naomi’s entrance, led out by her father on guitar, was a beautiful moment to start the show. These three made magic, continuing WWE’s streak of triple-threat excellence. I’ll never tire of Ripley ragdolling an exceptional seller like Sky or Naomi, and the powerbombs hit hard tonight. While the sneaky heel stealing the win and pulling the tights was a little less than the preceding match deserved, it played well into Naomi’s character and kept Ripley and Sky looking strong. Overall, it was the best match of SummerSlam.
Final Rating: **** 1/2
The Wyatt Sicks vs. Andrade and Rey Fénix vs. #DIY vs. Fraxiom vs. Motor City Machine Guns vs. and The Street Profits for the WWE Tag Team Championships
These six teams did The Hardy Boyz and The Dudley Boyz proud.
WWE mistreats both men’s tag divisions. While RAW’s division has a dearth of credible teams worthy of a title feud, SmackDown’s division is criminally underutilised. They showed as much on the SmackDown after WrestleMania 41, where MCMG, The Street Profits, and #DIY put on a TLC title match that was better than most matches during Mania weekend. This match doubled the teams and the chaos. This fun car crash had a somewhat lackluster crowd going wild for the vast majority of it. It was a great choice to have six teams, nearly the entire SmackDown tag division. It put over how stacked the division is and allowed them to have the frenetic pace this match needed.
Candice LeRae deserves credit for a nasty bump to the outside, breaking a ladder in half. Montez Ford was the MVP, as his athletic talents and showmanship are perfect for a match like this. His dive over the ring post and jump from the ring post to the ladder were awesome from Ford. He continues to show that he deserves a real shot at singles gold at some point. The Wyatts’s retained due to overwhelming numbers, a common thread in their run as a group, and everyone involved in the match should be proud of themselves.
Final Rating: ****
Becky Lynch vs. Lyra Valkyria for the WWE Women’s Intercontinental Championship
The second-longest match of the night sure felt like it.
The feud between Becky Lynch and Lyra Valkyria, while a bit convoluted, has so far done its job. It re-established Lynch as a top name in the women’s division, helped Valkyria build a relationship with the WWE fanbase that she was lacking and elevated the struggling women’s IC title scene. Unfortunately, this match wasn’t what it should’ve been. The no-DQ stipulation felt appropriate, but they didn’t take advantage of the stipulation and put on quite a tame match.
The kendo stick spot with Valkyria hanging from the ring post looked great, and Valkyria’s use of a fire extinguisher was a fun surprise, but much of the rest of the match was a slog to get through. Even ignoring the botch with the rope tie, something commentary didn’t want to do, too much of her time tied up was just uninteresting to watch. Their technical wrestling was excellent, no shocker when talking about these two women, and really should’ve been the basis of the match instead of the more hardcore focus.
Bayley’s involvement was inevitable. Bayley costing Valkyria the match was a fine choice, but the overall booking of Bayley in this feud is strange at best and outright disrespectful at worst. At least we get two good things out of this strangely booked feud: a Bayley vs. Lynch match for the IC title and Valkyria starting her ascent towards one of the world titles.
Final Rating: **3/4
Solo Sikoa vs. Jacob Fatu for the WWE United States Championship
Solo Sikoa just isn’t working.
WWE has tried to make him a main player since the night after WrestleMania 40. He’s been leading some version of a Bloodline spinoff for over a year, and he hasn’t grown into the role. He was consistently outshone by Jacob Fatu when the latter was still in the group, and Sikoa continues to have lackluster matches in situations that seem almost impossible to do so. Unfortunately for him, he isn’t effective as a heel either. I don’t want to see him lose, I don’t want to see him.
Fatu did his best to save the match; he was a ball of fire like usual, and his post-match moonsault from the top of the cage was awesome. Unfortunately, Sikoa didn’t hold up his end of the bargain and slowed the match to a crawl. Sikoa controlling large parts of the match, without involvement from MFT, was a poor choice. Jimmy Uso’s involvement was fun, and the finish was fine but underwhelming. Talla Tonga plays a great enforcer, and the rest of MFT play their roles well, but the group is stagnant. Sikoa hopefully can pick his game up in the future, and Fatu should be seen as an early Rumble favorite after the inevitable OG Bloodline and MFT War Games match happens at Survivor Series.
Final Rating: **
Dominik Mysterio vs. AJ Styles for the Intercontinental Championship Match
This match should’ve gone a bit longer, only because these two work so well together.
Dominik Mysterio is the Eddie Guerrero reincarnation we never knew we needed. He and AJ Styles ran through a few of Guerrero’s signature sneaky spots. Mysterio used the ref to his advantage like the old Latino Heat, but Styles countered him at every turn. The two showed excellent chemistry as well, chaining together crisp technical wrestling between shenanigans. Styles is one of the best wrestlers in the world, and Mysterio keeps getting better every match. Mysterio will soon be one of the top wrestlers in the company.
The finish played off a spot Guerrero did in a match with Kurt Angle decades ago. Syles held Mysterio in the Calf Crusher until the latter slipped out of his boot. Mysterio then used his loose boot to knock out Styles and get the pin. This was a great sprint of a match, and both men have done well in this feud. While a longer rematch would be nice to give these two a chance to steal the show, this match was exactly what it should’ve been and continued Mysterio’s ascent as the dirtbag that fans can’t help but root for.
Final Rating: ***3/4
John Cena vs. Cody Rhodes for the Undisputed WWE Championship
This was the match they should’ve had at WrestleMania 41
The titanic clash between the faces of two different eras of WWE. John Cena and Cody Rhodes went for 37 minutes, 15 more than their WrestleMania match, and didn’t feel nearly half as long as their colossal disappointment of a Mania match. While they were still methodical in their layout of the match, the spots flowed together much better. Both men were on their A-game. Cena turned back the clock to his US Championship open challenge era with this match, and Cody flourished in the big match WWE main event style like he has for the past few years. The main issues came with the booking of the story leading into the match and the match itself.
Booking
WWE should be commended when they pull the plug on things that aren’t working, but it shouldn’t be forgotten how we got here in the first place. Cena had an all-time turn at Elimination Chamber in March, followed by a wet-fart of a run as a heel. What could’ve been a generational heel run amounted to two half-decent promos spread across months of programming, one meme and one disappointing match after another. Then, inexplicably, they drop everything on the SmackDown before SummerSlam, and Cena turns face once again. The worst part of it all, his reason for turning again boiled down to, “because I want to.” The blame falls on The Rock and Travis Scott for this story petering out the way it did, but the creative team and Cena needed to do more to make this work.
The booking within the match itself was also lackluster. Rhodes teased a heel turn during his promo on SmackDown and in the video package before the match. However, quite frankly, fans should’ve known better. AEW fans spent months praying for Rhodes to turn heel, only to have his rah-rah schtick thrown back at them. Homelander Cody Rhodes is a pipedream at this point, and honestly, that’s fine. If he’s happy, the fans don’t turn on him and WWE wants to present him like this, that’s fine. What’s less fine was the faux moral dilemma of using weapons in a STREET FIGHT. Cena’s refusal to use the belt and Rhodes’s waffling on using the metal end of the turnbuckle, but then neither having a problem using the rope to choke each other out, just doesn’t work.
Brock Lesnar
If some questionable booking within an overall good match was the worst thing I could say, that would be great, but the return of Brock Lesnar post-match can’t be ignored. Lesnar’s grandiose return, with pomp and circumstance at the end of the second biggest PPV of the year for WWE, combined with HHH’s recent comments regarding the Vince McMahon allegations, is a slap in the face to every woman watching and every woman in the back. It would be easy to talk about how creatively bankrupt this return is. I could write about how Cena feuding with Lesnar, 11 years after the infamous squash, is uninteresting trite, unfitting of Cena’s final days. That all pales in comparison to the moral implications of this move. It’s a horrendous way to end the weekend of festivities. WWE continues to find ways to overshadow the work of the performers in the ring.
Final Rating: ***
Final Thoughts
SummerSlam is WWE’s second-best event of the year behind Evolution 2 in terms of match quality. It’s a major step up from what’s been a lackluster year for WWE PLEs. This should have been the event that got WWE back in good graces with their fanbase, to quell a lot of noise on the goings on outside the ring and some of the lackluster booking throughout 2025. The performers on screen and in the ring did everything they could to do just that. Many of the wrestlers deserve their flowers for their exceptional work. That exceptional work becomes harder to recognize when the company they work for continues to do things to take the focus away from the performers.
I wish I could say this is a uniquely dark and evil incident for WWE. Unfortuantley, between Vince McMahon’s relationship with Jimmy Snuka, Pat Paterson and the ring boy scandal, the Janel Grant lawsuit, The Fablous Moolah’s systemic abuse of female wrestlers, the handling of Ashley Massaro’s rape, the systemic bullying and abuse of NXT recruits perpetrated for years under Bill DeMott, the dumping human waste onto Sunny on live PPV, publicly cozying up with Donald Trump’s burdgeoing fascist regime amid his numerous sexual assault scandals and ties to notorouis sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein and countless other incidents that would take a lifetime to cover, this is who they are. This is what WWE is. Then. Now. Forever.
Night Two Final Grade: *** based on match and story quality, dud for the return of Brock Lesnar
Overall SummerSlam 2025 Grade: ***1/2 based on match and story quality, dud for the return of Brock Lesnar
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