WWE reportedly made a major change to one of their original plans for this past Monday’s RAW show in Ottawa, Canada, according to the Wrestling Observer Radio.
Dave Meltzer reported that his sources stated that this change involved the promo segment between Cody Rhodes and Paul Heyman. Meltzer reported that WWE officials originally had planned for Rhodes’ promo to be longer in length than what had actually took place but they were “very concerned” backstage over the possibility of the crowd interrupting Rhodes’ promo with “Sami Zayn” chants.
This concern reportedly led to WWE officials making the decision to have Paul Heyman’s scheduled interruption take place earlier than was originally planned in order to avoid Rhodes having to deal with these potential chants by himself.
Meltzer reported that this was the reason why Rhodes’ promo segment with Heyman ended up feeling flat compared to their segment last week.
“They didn’t kill the story by having him loose. When Cody was out there…the stuff with Cody and Heyman…they were very concerned about Sami chants, which is one of the reasons why they got Heyman out there in seconds.
They did not want Cody in there by himself because they thought that, I mean it didn’t happen, but boy they did everything in their power to make sure they kept that moving, they did not allow the audience a chance to start chanting or anything like that, it was just back-and-forth. It was designed to give the audience no chance to chant that because of the feeling that if they did it would hurt Cody’s momentum. And perhaps it would, and then it could create that groundswell which is exactly what they don’t want right now, but it didn’t happen. It was a little on the flat side.”
Transcript h/t: WrestlingNews.co