The Viking Raiders defeated Alpha Academy in a “Viking Rules” match during the July 17th, 2023, edition of WWE RAW.
Chad Gable provided some behind the scenes details regarding the match during an appearance on Corey Graves’ “After The Bell” podcast. He said,
“We had our time allotted, and we knew what we had, and it got cut, like so often happens with what we do. It’s a live TV show, this stuff happens. You’re always prepared for that going in. This was that one time where, and I’m always professional, I do my best to maintain professionalism. We were told, ‘your time is cut, we have to get rid of some stuff.’ I was like, ‘No. We’ll do it. We’ll make it work.’
“We won’t be unprofessional and steal other people’s time, but we’re going to do what we planned because this is awesome and people deserve to see this. This whole story we’ve told, where we crammed a lot of stuff into 60-second backstage segments or 45 seconds here to tell a story as quick as we can about me coaching Maxxine and they get 30 seconds to respond. That stuff all worked so well that we got given more time to build to this payout, so we’re going to make the most of this payout. We deserved it, and I felt like we earned the right to do all of our art that night and deliver the masterpiece we got in eight minutes of Raw. I think we did it. It was a moment where I was like, ‘We’re not going to get rid of anything or change anything, let’s just do it.’ It worked out.”
