What’s the story?
Ringside News reports that current Raw Tag Team Champions Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows were not originally planned to win the titles at the Royal Rumble. The rumour is that Cesaro and Sheamus were originally supposed to retain the Championships, but the WWE changed this decision at the last minute.
In case you didn’t know
After winning the Raw Tag Team Championships last night on the Royal Rumble Pre-Show, Anderson and Gallows are now four-time tag team champions together. Their first three tag team championships were the IWGP Tag Team Championships of New Japan Pro Wrestling.
Anderson and Gallows almost won the Raw Tag Team Championships a few weeks ago, but Sheamus was disqualified for hitting the referee and that gave Anderson and Gallows the win, but not the Championships.
Cesaro and Sheamus won the Tag Team Championships at Roadblock: End of the Line in December 2016, where they defeated The New Day and ended their record-setting tag team Championship reign.
The Heart of the matter
The WWE has been known to change its decisions at the last second so Anderson and Gallows should consider themselves lucky that this alleged change of plans took place.
If Anderson and Gallows lost their Championship match, there would’ve been nothing else for them to do because they would’ve lost to every top tag team in their division.
What’s next?
There’s no sense of direction with the Raw Tag Team Division, so anything could happen. The WWE could allow Anderson and Gallows to get a nice lengthy reign out of this Championship run or they could simply put the titles on another team and have The Club be transitional champions.
Nothing left to do but watch and wait.
Sportskeeda’s take
While some fans are happy that Anderson and Gallows are the current Champions, it doesn’t mean much this late in the game. The situation with The Club got so bad that fans gave up on them as Raw superstars and were hoping they would go to SmackDown to start over in their tag team division; that notion hasn’t changed despite them finally winning the tag team titles.
For starters, all the momentum that Anderson and Gallows had was wasted in their feud with Reigns and The Usos. Secondly, they’ve lost even more matches since then and have barely beaten any teams aside from Golden Truth and The Shining Stars.
Lastly, pretty much every tag team on Raw has wrestled each other in some variation, so there aren’t any feuds to look forward to.
The only scenario that would be interesting would be a confrontation with Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa, who could debut at some point since they are no longer the NXT Tag Team Champions, but the tag team division in NXT is also skimp so that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
The biggest struggle the WWE has had with the tag team division is sparking interest in any tag team feud on Monday Night Raw and The Club will likely be the next victims of a boring division.
Tweet speak:
Both Anderson and Gallows took to twitter to congratulate themselves on becoming the Raw Tag Team Champions at the Royal Rumble.
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