WWE Main Event results: Apollo Crews vs. Riley Osborne

This week’s WWE Main Event was taped at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tennessee before Monday’s episode of Raw.

Another week and another set of NXT stars appeared on Main Event and it produced some entertaining matches for a very expectant pre-Raw crowd.

Duke Hudson defeated Charlie Dempsey (6:37)

This was a fun opener with a solid debut performance from Hudson against an always-entertaining Charlie Dempsey.

While this was Dempsey’s third all-time Main Event appearance, NXT’s Duke Hudson made his first appearance on the show in over a year and did so with a nice win to boot.

Dempsey is probably an acquired taste, but he’s certainly mine. His methodical style and attention to detail are fun to watch especially when he is paired with the right opponent. His Main Event record dropped to 0-3 here with the loss, but in all three matches, has come out looking good.

Dempsey does double underhook suplexes beautifully, but you also have to admire how he can do the intricate work as well as the flashy stuff. He did a neat kip-up in the early going.

It was very much a 50-50 match all the way through. They worked at quite a pace too, never really slowing down, apart from a front-face lock part-way through and the near falls at the end.

In the end, Dempsey sent Hudson to the outside but he used a springboard off the apron into the ring so that he landed behind Dempsey. From here, he used a German suplex to get the win.

Apollo Crews defeated Riley Osborne (6:16)

This was decent, with Crews continuing his winning streak on Main Event. Osborne was able to show flashes of what he can do.

As Crews continued to come back from the injury that took him out of action over the summer, they fed him some cannon fodder in the form of debuting Riley Osborne here. That’s not to say that this was a squash, but it did allow Osborne to flip around all over to make Crews look like a strong force.

The comparisons between Osborne and Evan Bourne during his run in WWE will probably be made if he gets more main roster appearances and that’s certainly no bad thing. He worked hard here and took some pretty nasty bumps for Crews.

Crews dominated Osborne here, including a really disrespectful-looking move where he launched Osborne up for a delayed suplex, but instead of landing on the mat together, he just threw him off and remained standing. The bump Osborne took looked like it really sucked.

When Osborne did manage to get some offense in, he used a tremendous standing corkscrew splash, which frankly puts Crews’ standing moonsault to shame. He even did a top rope shooting star press that he landed on his feet when Crews got out of the way.

Ultimately, Crews nailed him with a big boot and used his frog splash off the top rope for the win. It seems strange that WWE hasn’t given it a wacky name yet because it’s generally his finisher these days. But this was a fun match and Osborne certainly didn’t look out of place.