On the October 14th episode of WWE Raw, The War Raiders (Erik & Ivar) made their return to WWE television.
It was their first match since September 2023 due to an injury to Erik. Ivar continued as a singles talent, but we was sidelined with an injury in April 2024.
The duo returned as the War Raiders, using their name from NXT, as opposed to the Viking Raiders, which they used when called to the main roster in 2019.
Speaking to Chris Van Vliet on Insight, Ivar discussed their return.
“When I had this opportunity to do the singles run and it was going well, I had a conversation with Triple H where he said, 'Hey, how about we start pulling back off of the heavy Viking stuff, slowly peeling some of those layers off so we can tell more stories with you.' I’m like, Oh, that’s great. So as we started to do that I got hurt again. Then Erik and I were ready to come back. I think we were actually scheduled to return in Calgary at Raw. At the last second, they pulled our travel and said that we’re gonna hold off for now. Oh man, here we go. They’re like, 'No, nothing bad. We want to hold off. We want to have better creative for you.' And then the next week, we got a phone call, 'Hey, how do you guys feel coming back as The War Raiders?' And we were like yeah that sounds good. That sounds really good," said Ivar.
WWE Raw from Calgary took place on September 9th.
Asked if their was thoughts of using Hanson & Rowe, which were their names when they joined NXT in 2018, Ivar replied, "I think at this point we spent five years in the main roster as Erik and Ivar, especially with the Ivar singles run. That’s how we’re known. I think it would have felt like an erase of everything we’ve done. I don’t think we want to erase everything that we’ve done on the main roster. We’ve done some great things including singles run, our Raw Tag Title run that we had, all the stuff that we did with The Street Profits, whether people liked it or not, it’s our history. I loved every second of it, and I don’t think we want to erase that.”
The War Raiders won the WWE World Tag Team Championships on Monday's WWE Raw, defeating Judgment Day (Finn Balor & JD McDonagh).
Fans can find their comments on winning the titles by clicking here.
