WWE SmackDown sets SummerSlam stage with Punk-Rhodes clash, Lash Legend qualifies

WWE rolled into Green Bay on the final Friday of July with SummerSlam just days away in Minneapolis, and the show crackled with the kind of energy that comes when a wrestling card knows it's building toward something. The night needed to settle one last piece of the puzzle—a spot in Sunday's Interim Women's Championship match—and it needed to remind everyone why the biggest matches on the horizon actually mattered.

Finn Balor opened the show, and what began as a seemingly scattered segment snowballed into something genuinely compelling. Balor walked the crowd through his own SummerSlam history, recalling the moment a decade earlier when he won the Universal Championship at his first appearance at the event, only to vacate it the very next day due to injury. He never climbed back to that height. The segment could have ended there, a nostalgic trip down memory lane, but Sami Zayn arrived with a promo that cut deeper—unfiltered anger about the Cody Rhodes and CM Punk situation, the corporate machinery grinding away, the hypocrisy of it all. Zayn wanted a triple threat match, at minimum. He leveled accusations at Punk that echoed criticisms the wrestler himself had once voiced from the other side. Balor and Zayn traded barbs, each insisting the moment belonged to them, until Gunther emerged from nowhere and the segment exploded into physicality. Adam Pearce waded in to separate them, and in doing so, he applied his finishing submission hold to Gunther for the first time in three years. The crowd responded. Security moved in. The whole thing left multiple threads dangling, multiple reasons to care about what comes next.

Elsewhere on the card, Baron Corbin's return immediately positioned him as a challenger to the U.S. Championship, a move that felt like it was designed to shake up a title reign that had already begun to feel stale. Corbin's presence had already disrupted other storylines—Carmelo Hayes had been sidelined by the fallout—but the feud seemed to be exactly what the champion needed to reignite his own momentum.

CM Punk and Cody Rhodes closed the show with a segment that kept things straightforward. They framed their rivalry as a clash of philosophies: business versus personal loyalty. Both men began their promos with oddly synchronized interruptions—each stopping mid-sentence to comment on being in Green Bay on a Friday—a moment that felt less like organic wrestling theater and more like the corporate machinery Zayn had just spent the evening criticizing. Punk reminded Rhodes of his own old line about returning to WWE to make money, not friends. He was willing to lose friends if it meant keeping the title. Rhodes threw the first punch after Punk laid down his championship, and the two brawled across the announce table in a go-home angle that was effective if not particularly inventive. It teased more violence to come.

The night's most troubling moment came in the Interim Women's Championship qualifier. Lash Legend defeated Giulia in roughly three minutes, a clean loss that felt less like a match and more like a dismissal. Giulia had recently turned face by ditching her previous alliance, and many expected her to advance. Instead, she was buried quickly. Legend is a talented singles performer and deserves her spot in the title picture, but the speed and decisiveness of the loss suggested the company had already moved on from Giulia, despite her being one of the most skilled women on the roster. It was a stark reminder that booking decisions don't always reward the most talented performers—sometimes they simply erase them.