It’s been nearly a full month since Adnan Virk first took over as Monday Night Raw‘s play-by-play commentator, and his performance has already received some criticism from certain parts of the WWE fanbase. Renee Paquette (formerly Renee Young) has spoken numerous times about the year she spent as Raw’s second color commentator alongside Michael Cole and Corey Graves and, in a new interview with Wrestling Inc., she told fans to not be so critical of Virk given the difficulty of that role.
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“It really messes with you because it’s not like I went in there being like, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ I didn’t know what I was doing,” Paquette said. “They asked me to come in and commentate on Monday Night Raw, so, what am I gonna say? No? No, of course I’m going to go do my best and try to figure it out, and I will give credit to WWE big time here is that they let me stay in. Everything that I had done in WWE at that point, people have been so gracious to me, and the fans have been really really cool to me and accepting of me, so that’s been awesome. I stepped in there, and it’s like, ‘Actually, we hate you.’ I’m like, ‘No, that’s not what I wanted,’ but you gotta grow. You gotta try things, and it’s fine. It’s tough to be in a position like that, and it’s tough to feel like you don’t want to do a bad job.
“I don’t want to do a disservice to a story that is being told on television. Everyone’s putting in so much hard work. So everyone just wants to do a good job, and everyone’s just really mean to everyone on commentary. Give the guy a break. He’s figuring it out. It just sucks. There’s no way around it,” she said. “Also, everyone just lives in that mind frame of ‘oh, we just JR. We just want Jerry The King Lawler.’ People want what they’re familiar with. As much as we crave change and we’re looking for change, we also are freaked out by change.”
Virk will make his pay-per-view debut this Sunday with the WrestleMania Backlash event. Check out the full card for the show below:
- WWE Championship: Bobby Lashley vs. Drew McIntyre vs. Braun Strowman
- WWE Universal Championship: Roman Reigns vs. Cesaro
- SmackDown Women’s Championship: Bianca Belair vs. Bayley
- Raw Women’s Championship: Rhea Ripley vs. Charlotte Flair vs. Asuka
- SmackDown Tag Team Championships: The Dirty Dawgs vs. Rey Mysterio & Dominik Mysterio
- Damian Priest vs. The Miz (Lumberjack Match)
