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SAN ANTONIO — It’s not every day that The Shield walk into a fight and don’t come out the winner, so it says a lot about Dolph Ziggler & Drew McIntyre that they held off two of The Hounds of Justice — Dean Ambrose & Seth Rollins — to retain the Raw Tag Team Championship … even if they resorted to some rule-breaking when things truly got dire.
Ambrose & Rollins came into the match looking to prove themselves as workhorses, and while they certainly worked hard, the champions worked smart, staying juuust on the right side of the rulebook while employing a timely array of distractions and interferences to stop the challengers from reaching full steam. When Ambrose chopped McIntyre down to his knees, Ziggler jumped the ropes to start a commotion that helped the Scotsman escape. When Rollins had Ziggler lined up for a suicide dive, McIntyre tripped him up in the ropes, and The Showoff pounced with a DDT.
As the match began to go long, strategy seemed to go out the window, with Ambrose throwing hands at anything that moved (he had eyes for McIntyre in particular) and Rollins answering Ziggler’s counters with counters of his own in an athletic showcase. Eventually, the champions managed to work their way back to their initial game plan, though they were far less subtle this time around as McIntyre blatantly rushed the ring and struck in the middle of a Rollins sequence, obliterating The Kingslayer with the Claymore while he was hoisting Ziggler up for the Falcon Arrow. The Showoff fell on top of the KO’d Rollins to earn the three-count, ending a bout that may well have remade the Tag Team division as Corey Graves said — yes, it was that good. But even if the game has changed, the titles stay where they are.