Johnny Gargano will compete on this week’s Monday Night Raw for the first time since making his surprise return to the company last month. Gargano has interacted mostly with Austin Theory since his return, calling back to their days in The Way down in NXT. However, according to PWInsider, his return match will be against Chad Gable of Alpha Academy instead. Gable and Otis were on the receiving end of another attack from Braun Strowman on last Friday’s SmackDown.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Gargano was recently on After The Bell to discuss his return and explained why he didn’t return when Raw was in Cleveland like many fans expected — “It was very fun to be able to literally keep a secret in a time period where that doesn’t happen. Everything leaks nowadays. Everything in wrestling leaks and I remember when I was younger I loved things during the Attitude Era where you’d be watching Nitro or you’d be watching Raw and someone would just show up and you’d be like, ‘What the hell is going on? I can’t believe they’re here.’ The dirt sheets and things like that were around but it also wasn’t as prevalent as it is today with the internet and whatnot.”
“That was the most important thing to me for this secret, for this return was to make it a complete surprise. Obviously, I could have came back two weeks prior in Cleveland but everyone believed that, everyone thought that was going to happen. That’s probably why it didn’t happen. It would have been great, I would love to come back in my hometown, I still haven’t wrestled in that arena, which is mind-blowing to me,” he continued. “It was really important for me to just keep this whole thing under wraps as much as possible. The fact that we were able to do that, the fact that I flew into Buffalo and I was snuck across the border. Snuck legally across the border, we’re not getting in trouble here, snuck across the border into Toronto. A big part of me didn’t want to come back in Cleveland because I knew if I would have came back in Cleveland it would have gotten an amazing reaction but people would have been like, ‘Oh you know, he’s this little kid from NXT and he got the reaction because it’s his hometown.’”
Other matches confirmed for this week’s Raw include a Women’s WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship match between Raquel Gonzalez & Aliyah vs. Damage Control’s Dakota Kai and Iyo Sky. Stay tuned for live coverage of the show tonight!
Update: Theory officially confirmed the match during a backstage segment hours before Raw began. He claimed he wasn’t Gargano opponent, “because my hands are full.”
