It's Friday night. This is your WWE SmackDown, an AEW Rampage reviewer, as I call it, the

Smack Page review for Friday, August 12, 2022. I am the Salomonster. WWE went out of

its way tonight to make the Intercontinental Championship feel important. It was the last

time we could really say that. It was the last time the Intercontinental title was built

up throughout the entire show, and they headlined SmackDown with an Intercontinental Championship

match. Doesn't happen very often. This is what happens when you have a part-time champion,

of course, who doesn't appear all the time on TV. We have the US title. You have to build

it up on RAW. SmackDown has the Intercontinental title. You've got to build up your secondary

title on that show as well. And you would watch SmackDown tonight. You would never know

that the Intercontinental Championship was a secondary title. You would think that this

is, as Michael Cole called it, the Workman's Championship, the most prestigious thing in

this entire company. I love it. I love what they did with that title tonight. Triple

H has done so far. Still early, but Triple H has done a very good job, I think, of trying

to emphasize the secondary championships. We had a video package tonight dedicated to

all of the legends who have held that title before over the years, going back decades,

all the big names, and not so big names. They hyped up the match throughout the entire

show, and they gave us Gunter and Shinsuke Nakamura as our main event tonight. A match that

they gave a lot of time to. That is what they headlined SmackDown tonight with. I thought

they had an excellent match, but that was not the only highlight of SmackDown. Tonight

was also the night of return. This is what Triple H has been doing ever since he took

over his head of creative. We have had numerous people return to the company, numerous former

faces from NXT, who got their first push in NXT under Triple H, many of whom were cut,

...