The never-ending friction among the members of the Judgment Day continues, and on the June 16 episode of Monday Night Raw in Green Bay, Wisconsin, it was Finn Balor who provided most of the intrigue in a backstage segment.
Finn has been the veteran leader of the Judgment Day ever since the group of mostly up-and-coming superstars turned on founder Edge. He’s been the main voice either pulling the group together towards a common goal or causing dissent and mayhem, first against world champion Damian Priest and, more recently, towards Intercontinental Champion and, apparently, aspiring Judgment Day leader Dominik Mysterio.
While Balor and Mysterio were, once again, getting into it a little bit backstage after Liv Morgan’s outburst towards an injured Raquel Rodriguez prior to Liv’s match against Kairi Sane, the minor squabbles and underhanded comments didn’t lead to any real disputes.
Instead, Finn backed up Dominik when JD McDonagh took issue with being in a match against AJ Styles, whom Dom actually has the beef with. And when Dom told Finn he needed to sit backstage after screwing things up with AJ, Balor literally smiled and nodded in agreement with Mysterio.
Finn Balor loves to disguise his true intentions
But you could see in his facial expressions that his initial reaction to Dom’s statement was disgust, the junior member of the team criticizing and ordering around the first ever Universal Champion.
On top of all that, Balor closed this backstage segment by siting down and offering kind words of encouragement and advice to Raquel, telling her not to take Liv’s anger towards her personally and that it was more about Liv’s situation than anything Raquel did.
Whenever Balor acts like this, it’s time to get worried. Balor, as a heel, is one of the most underhanded, two-faced (literally) wrestlers on the WWE roster. He’s like Randy Orton in the sense that he’s always got something up his sleeve and evil intentions hidden behind his eyes.
When he starts acting obviously outwardly nice in a fake way, it’s scary. It’s eery. It’s an indication that Finn has designs on something bigger and is simply biding his time, making peace in the short term before blowing it all up selfishly in the long run.
Will Judgment Day become something entirely different?
Perhaps Finn is eying a break-off faction from the Judgment Day, taking the two most recent up-and-coming stars from the group, McDonagh and phenom Roxanne Perez, with him now that the on-screen couple of Morgan and Mysterio are quite literally two of the biggest stars in the business.
They don’t need him anymore, on or off the screen. Perez and McDonagh, though, could benefit, and they seem to have much less in-storyline friction with Balor than the others do.
Balor is plotting something. No heel is this understanding and nice all of a sudden, especially when everything else Finn has done in the Judgment Day, including after Priest and Rhea Ripley departed, is rule over and manipulate the group, using his anger as a tool.
The next natural break-up of the Judgment Day is coming, and, with it, will almost certainly come a new faction that makes Liv and Dom even more of a couple while Finn, McDonagh, Perez, and perhaps Raquel either stay put or take on a whole different image to change things up further.
Joe helped manage the pro wrestling site Daily DDT from 2017 to 2019. He has appeared in many wrestling podcasts and has had his work featured by mainstream media sites and professional wrestlers themselves. Joe also covers soccer, writing about Tottenham for Hotspur HQ, Real Madrid for A Trip to Cibeles, and general world football for The Trivela Effect.