Review - WWE Royal Rumble 2023

The Royal Rumble has always been one of those events that, even when WWE is in its creative doldrums, has been able to generate intrigue and excitement, and attract the attention of lapsed fans and the mythical “casual fan”. It’s a sign that the promotion is starting to get its ducks in a row and direct their weekly television booking towards formalising the Wrestlemania card, and most of all, it has the potential to be full of surprises and fan-service. In more recent years, it’s also been something of a more contentious space - a creative battleground where WWE have too often seemed dead-set on stubbornly booking against the best wishes of their audience, where hand-picked contenders are prioritised over sentimental favourites. While lingering goodwill towards Triple H as an ostensibly more “fan-friendly” creative guiding hand likely went some way to prevent that feeling from hijacking this year’s event, there’s nothing worse in the eyes of many of WWE’s fans than a “hand-picked” babyface - the result of WWE having booked its own management as the biggest heel in the company for 25 years, and routinely told their fans that “we know better”. Sometimes that’s true, but you don’t say it.

There’s an age-old question on wrestling’s social media circles - if you want to get somebody into wrestling, what match would you show them? It’s a flawed premise, because it assumes nothing of the “somebody” in question, and puts the impetus solely on the wrestling fan. That produces all kinds of oddball suggestions, to my eyes, that come from deep within the wrestling bubble - half-hour matches built on melodrama and assumed knowledge of wrestling tropes, that would surely bore the pants off anyone who’s never previously expressed an interest in wrestling; the same impetus that sees the bubble regularly assume that comedy wrestling and unusual characters are what’s likely to turn off a first-time viewer, when in reality nothing turns people off faster than a po-faced commitment to taking a fundamentally silly genre very seriously. How to win someone over on wrestling is entirely dependent on who that “someone” is and what tastes they bring to the conversation, not just treating them as a passive vessel for you to fill with your own opinions. SPOILER ALERT for a 22 year old movie, but at the end of High Fidelity, John Cusack’s character has the realisation that creating the perfect mixtape for his girlfriend isn’t a matter of compiling all the songs he wants her to like, but all the songs he knows she will like.

That’s where Royal Rumble matches come in. A Royal Rumble match in good company can be the best way to introduce anyone to the idea of professional wrestling, because it demands very little of the audience - the rules are simple to understand, and spelled out in advance, and every couple of minutes or thereabouts you’re introduced to a new character, and a freshening up of the in-ring action. By the end of a good Rumble, your hypothetical first-timer will have been able to pick their favourite, root for them to win, and will, if the match has been structured dynamically enough, have seen a broad tasting selection of what wrestling has to offer. There’s a reason the 2001 Rumble is held up as one of the all-time greats - it runs effortlessly from comedy to drama, and runs the gamut of the styles of wrestling offered by the WWF of the time, with a fun little Hardcore division interlude to break up proceedings. It’s almost the platonic ideal of a Rumble match.

So what of 2023’s offering? WWE made the perhaps unusual choice of opening with the men’s Rumble match - it’s not something I’m going to lose sleep over; the WWE-informed received wisdom of which matches have to headline (see: fan complaints any time anything other than a World Title match main events a show) should always give way to what best manages the flow of an event, and audience engagement. It was clear that this show was due to end with a significant bit of storyline development, and that meant the WWE Title match was best positioned to headline. It is still odd, though, to have a show named “Royal Rumble” featuring two Royal Rumble matches, and neither of them headlining, but there was good reason for it.

On to the men’s Rumble match itself. It felt like modern WWE in microcosm, and perhaps says more of me than of the company, but it was “good” in the way that the majority of WWE’s wrestling is - they have a roster made up of some of the most skilled wrestlers in the world, so if their matches are bad it’s usually a result of booking or production decisions rather than the actual wrestlers involved. Unfortunately, they tend to be “good” in the manner of decorative art or a commercially successful yet creatively unfulfilling blockbuster movie - everything is in its right place and technically sound, but it’s all very perfunctory, with little in the way of heart.

I don’t like to criticise Rumble matches - or wrestling shows in general - for the lack of “surprises”. A surprise is, almost by definition, something that the company never promised you or actively promoted, and I’m not aware of WWE having sold this year’s Rumble based on the match’s history of surprise entrants. It’s unreasonable to blame a promotion for not delivering you something that they never suggested that they would, and besides, I think “surprise” is one of the most overrated storytelling beats that wrestling can deliver. Surprises have their place, but they are not the sine qua non of storytelling that so many wrestling fans seem to believe they are, and leaning too heavily on them results in counterintuitive and unproductive booking, working against the natural flow of a story. It’s not surprising that Luke Skywalker would destroy the Death Star, or that the Hero should slay the dragon and save the princess - avoiding a course of action because it’s “obvious” is poor storytelling, because often the reason why a path is obvious is because it’s the correct choice.

The Rumble can be a little different, though - surprise entrants, cameos, and nostalgia acts have been a regular part of the match for years now, and we’ve come to expect it. This year, if Triple H is truly still at the wheel with no oversight from Vince McMahon, could have been an opportunity for him to really stamp his mark on one of WWE’s biggest events and signature matches - for years, there has been a relatively small pool of recognised WWE “Legends” and approved surprises, midcarders of yesteryear that are good for a laugh or a brief crowd pop of recognition, and what better way to mark out the dawn of a new era than to spread their net wider? Even more than usual, the lists of rumoured surprise entrants was extensive in scope, and more than usually ambitious.

WhatCulture predicted a Rumble entry for Stone Cold Steve Austin, while wrestling fans and news sites alike almost unanimously shrugged off stories that The Rock won’t be appearing at Wrestlemania and continued to believe that he would be showing up. Hometown boy Shawn Michaels was speculated after a story briefly circulated that he had been considered for a Wrestlemania match with Kevin Owens. Less ambitious speculation included Wade Barrett, while wilder suggestions from some of the less reputable news sites, perhaps egged on by Shinsuke Nakamura being permitted to work Pro Wrestling NOAH, guessed at Rumble appearances for the likes of Jay White and Minoru Suzuki. What we got was a brief nostalgia appearance for Booker T, and “surprise” returns for Logan Paul and Edge. The latter being someone who has managed to “return” in three consecutive Rumbles now.

It’s hard to hold it against WWE for not delivering on some of the more outlandish of those suggestions, but the match did leave me with the sense of opportunities missed. What I found more disappointing, though, was the lacklustre structure of the match itself. A good Rumble match should feature a coherent through-line from beginning to end, multiple stories interweaving, and interactions between wrestlers that would otherwise rarely come into contact with one another, while also providing catalysts for new rivalries, callbacks to old ones, entrants timed perfectly for maximum crowd engagement, and that sense of a “tasting platter” of different characters, styles and approaches to wrestling that I alluded to earlier, and this match was lacking in a lot of that, particularly the latter point; a result of the increased homogeneity of wrestling, particularly in WWE.

Opening the match with Gunther and Sheamus, recalling their Match Of The Year candidate at Clash At The Castle, was a solid move, and I would have been happy for both men to go the distance, spending the match knocking seven shades of shit out of each other while others wrestled around them. As it happened, only Gunther made it to the end, but impressively so, clocking up a record time of almost 72 minutes and looking like he could have gone for another thirty. But that approach of having recent rivals paired up repeated itself throughout the match, with multiple entrants followed close to immediately by either a storyline rival or tag team partner - Kofi Kingston in at 4, joined by Xavier Woods at 6, Brock Lesnar at 12 followed by Bobby Lashley at 13, Rey Mysterio (who didn’t enter the match) at 17 followed by Dominik Mysterio at 18, Finn Balor at 20, Damian Priest at 22, and Edge at 24, Omos at 26 followed by Braun Strowman at 27 and Ricochet at 28. It felt like the match had been booked for those showdowns between rivals, with no thought given to how to pace things to allow space to breathe - after a disappointingly brief showdown between Brock Lesnar and Gunther, we had little time to even wonder who might be a meaningful challenge for Brock Lesnar, as Bobby Lashley entered before Brock had even got going, and that pattern repeated throughout the match. Back to the idea of surprises - did Lesnar returning on RAW prior to this match serve any purpose that would not have been better accomplished by keeping his entry a surprise here?

For all its faults - and, again, it was far from a bad match, just a superficially “good” one - there were some excellent moments; Dominik Mysterio has really come into his own as a weaselly little shithouse, and I loved Gunther’s entire run, and his closing stretch against Cody Rhodes was one of the better Rumble endings I’ve ever seen, wrestling an extended match together, but also built around the psychology of attempted elimination, rather than giving in to the temptation to just have a miniature singles match punctuated with a throw over the top rope. They incorporated pretty much every near miss and elimination attempt spot you could think of, and did all they could to work against the assumption that the result was a foregone conclusion. It was a typically WWE bit of weird psychology and match structuring to have the heroic and inspirational babyface enter the match last (though I understand the various reasons why that was the case), while the dastardly heel he had to vanquish had survived in the match since the outset, for over an hour, without the dominant performance of a monster heel, nor the cheating and loophole-exploiting of a sneaky coward - all the result of WWE’s aversion to allowing their heels to actually cheat or generate heel at all - but both Cody Rhodes and Gunther were exceptional, and did everything in their power to avoid drawing attention to that peculiar bit of booking. While Cody’s path to Wrestlemania is obviously set, and he’s been primed for main event stardom since his return to WWE - and, any other year, his six month injury lay-off could have been the best thing to happen for him, allowing him the benefit of a second big return, rather than appearing on TV every week and risking outstaying his welcome - I can only hope that Gunther is amply rewarded for a superb performance, and that this match was a sign of big things in his future, rather than him just being the warm body selected for the role. One thing WWE’s booking is consistently guilty of is not following up on star-making performances - and they’re only truly star-making if you actually follow through and make a star!

The less said about the Mountain Dew Pitch Black match, the better. I can’t see how even the most blinkered of Bray Wyatt fans can enjoy this. It was a gimmick that rendered the match difficult to watch, against a wrestler that has never been presented as a serious threat - one weakness of Triple H’s booking being his tendency to think that the audience will buy someone as a star because he treats them as one, without necessarily putting in the groundwork to make them so; LA Knight shedding his former “Max Dupri” gimmick name to return to the LA Knight moniker would only have carried any narrative significance if the wider audience were invested in “LA Knight” in the first place, and we weren’t particularly. It’s typical of Triple H’s “you liked NXT, right?” and “remember when this guy was good?” booking, that falls just short of having half of the roster wake up in the shower to the realisation that the last five years were all a dream.

Throughout this feud, I’ve not been able to shake the idea that the only reason Bray Wyatt has been feuding with LA Knight - who has had no meaningful storyline on WWE’s main roster prior to this - is because nobody with any clout will agree to work with Wyatt, who here was wrestling on a televised/PPV event for the first time since Wrestlemania in 2022, and for the first time since returning to WWE in the closing moments of Extreme Rules back in October. That’s three solid months of Bray Wyatt appearing on television for spooky, self-indulgent myth-making and rambling promos, without anything that resembles actual wrestling, and in that time - after returning at the end of a PPV, and his return promos being heavily promoted as main event segments - only managing to start a feud with a wrestler who has rarely so much as troubled the midcard, and all for a match that clocked in at barely over the five minute mark.

Having not learned from The Fiend, this match was marred by terrible lighting and a confused gimmick, and relied on vague “horror” imagery at the expense of logic or quality wrestling. In another context, the reveal of Bray Wyatt being daubed in UV face and bodypaint could have been an impressive moment, but it was difficult to take seriously when surrounded with glowing green and purple lights, Mountain Dew branding, and kendo sticks lit up like lightsabres, or with the collected memory of every other go-nowhere splash of spooky imagery that Bray Wyatt has treated us to. After the “match”, the announcers sold shock and horror at the change in Bray Wyatt’s face - he had put on a mask while the cameras weren’t focused on him - and it highlighted an inconsistency of commentary that plays into why Bray Wyatt’s take on wrestling simply doesn’t work; the commentary varied drastically from selling Bray Wyatt’s antics as genuinely supernatural and horrifying, and laughing at the entire enterprise and treating the match’s presentation with the contempt it deserved. When “Uncle Howdy” finally appeared, before missing a stunt dive with accompanying pyro, surprise return commentator Pat McAfee treated the character as the joke it undeniably is - on one hand, I should be annoyed that WWE’s own commentators aren’t taking the stories they’re telling seriously, on the other hand, it’s this story.

And Uncle Howdy is at the heart of all of this. A mystery for the sake of a mystery, either a disembodied alter-ego of Bray Wyatt (the commentators repeatedly referred to Bray’s “inner turmoil”, and I question how much you can call his turmoil “inner” when he repeatedly physically manifests aspects of his own psyche, but that’s already more thought given to the internal logic of this character or story than most of the people have involved in writing it have likely given it), or yet another separate entity within his magic, spooky world. As with everything Bray Wyatt, if he’s a literal demon, or a magical manifestation of Bray Wyatt’s “inner turmoil”, it only makes me wonder why nobody else on the roster seems concerned with the fact that their entire understanding of the world has been upended; who cares about fighting for the Intercontinental Title any more now that you know that demons are literally real, and one of them comes to work with you every Friday?

The core problem of Uncle Howdy, though, comes down to why Bray Wyatt’s never-ending masturbatory story is simply unfit for professional wrestling as a medium. Even shedding the wider implication that the supernatural is somehow real within the confines of WWE, the problem is that Bray Wyatt’s stories leave no space for other participants. The story of Bray Wyatt and Uncle Howdy is a story about Bray Wyatt. LA Knight is an empty husk in this story, who could have been replaced by any other wrestler with no impact, because the story is Bray Wyatt vs Bray Wyatt. It’s not unreasonable to question why anybody would want, or agree, to work with Bray Wyatt, when every story and every match serves only to indulge his own worst instincts, and does absolutely nothing for his opponent. The best wrestling matches have at their heart a question, and that question is, at best, born of how two different characters will interact, and ideally the answer to that question should benefit both participants, and further both of their stories. A Bray Wyatt match is not interested in exploring anything other than the convoluted “lore” of Bray Wyatt, which we have now seen more than enough of to know that it’s a Hot Topic grab bag of horror movie clichés and nonsense, with no consistent through-thread, and no end. So why care about any of it?

What makes it frustrating is that Bray Wyatt is undeniably creative, and capable of solid wrestling matches and charismatic promos, when not bogged down by the accumulated weight of being Bray Wyatt. His absence from WWE could, and should, have been an opportunity to shed that baggage and figure out what works, but instead he’s returned worse than ever. I honestly dread to think what Wrestlemania has in store, though I expect it will be Bray Wyatt vs. Uncle Howdy in either an overwrought and pretentious cinematic match, or 2023’s answer to The Undertaker vs. The Underfaker.

Even at the lowest rungs of the ladder of independent wrestling, the most frustrating kind of wrestler to deal with is the guy who has a million and one ideas for himself, and none for anybody else. The stories are increasingly elaborate, yet they never call on him to lose, they never rely on working with or even interacting with any other specific characters, they don’t engage with anything else the promotion they work for is trying to accomplish, and are often at odds with the creative and stylistic direction of the promotion as a whole. They have ideas that help nobody but themselves, and they just keep on coming, and don’t understand why they keep getting turned down. Somehow, Bray Wyatt has managed to break that pattern and find someone who will listen, and that someone is the largest wrestling promotion in history. It’s genuinely mind-boggling. The alternative is even scarier to contemplate - if there are any, imagine his ideas that get turned down.

There’s a joke in an episode of Frasier, where at his radio call-in show, a listener reels off a long list of psychological ailments they believe themselves to be suffering from, and Frasier tells them that the truth is far worse, that he has diagnosed them as a Psychology student. Stricken with the curse of knowledge, the student has picked up a cursory knowledge of any number of psychological issues, and started to identify their symptoms in themselves - I’ve been a Psychology student, and spent enough time around them in my professional life, to recognise the truth at the heart of that joke, and doubtless anyone reading this has seen its sibling phenomenon on social media or TikTok; the most mundane of human thought and behaviour being branded as either surefire signs of neurodiversity, or a “trauma response”, to gift fifteen year olds in pursuit of an identity with an aid for self-diagnosis and egocentric labelling. But there’s another kind of student that can be just as waylaid by new knowledge, and can just as mistakenly believe themselves to have uncovered hitherto unknown depths of human experience - and that’s the Film Studies student. Again, I was one, I know what I’m talking about. The Film Studies student has watched a few late night movies on Channel 4, they’ve broadened their horizons just a little bit more than their peers, but not enough to realise that they’re still hopelessly out of their depth. They’ve learned the bare bones of film theory and film-making techniques, and feel like they’ve stepped through the Looking Glass. They are convinced that some of the most trite clichés are actually transformative acts of creation - “what if we took a kid’s story, but made it dark and scary, what if it was really about drugs and abuse?” - they have just enough media literacy to know how to put all the pieces in the right place, but not enough to know how to make them work, they have a cargo cult understanding of narrative, they believe that watching movies that were only watched by 6 million people rather than 8 million marks them out as free thinkers on the very avant-garde of creativity, and they think that every single idea that occurs to them is the first time that idea has ever been thought of by anyone. The best of them grow out of it, realise that there is far more that they have yet to learn, and either commit themselves to further study and self-exploration, or forget about it all and get on with their lives. The worst of them continue to believe themselves to be superior beings, and grow up to be Ernest Cline, or Bray Wyatt, utterly convinced that a surface-level understanding of pop culture marks them out as exceptional, and that the rest of the world can’t see through the inherent superficiality of their ideas. In another life, if Bray Wyatt hadn’t have been a wrestler, he’d have come up with Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey.

It would be bad enough if that’s all there was to Bray Wyatt, but he also has to infect another person’s career. Alexa Bliss was a promising, talented young wrestler, until Bray Wyatt decided - after years of fans blindly speculating, with no understanding of what was then quite simplistic “lore” and backstory, that any new female wrestler with sufficiently dark eyeliner might be Bray’s “Sister Abigail”, a character that we were repeatedly told was canonically dead - that his Fiend alter-ego needed a female sidekick, and settled on Alexa, seemingly for no reason other than a superficial resemblance to Harley Quinn. Since then, Bliss career has been sidelined by a connection to Bray Wyatt. She became a conduit for the worst excesses of Wyatt’s characterisation and, even after Bray was released by WWE, was shackled to spooky bullshit and a haunted doll. After a concerted effort to move away from that characterisation of Alexa Bliss, and the bargain basement horror movie aesthetic, Bray Wyatt returned and has started the whole cycle all over again.

So a match between Bianca Belair and Alexa Bliss, two extremely talented wrestlers, for the Women’s Championship, was overshadowed by the unnecessary incursion of a male wrestler’s self-indulgent storyline. The question at the heart of this match wasn’t, “does Bianca Belair have what it takes to beat Alexa Bliss?” or vice-versa, but “will Uncle Howdy show up?”. Uncle fucking Howdy. Because one wasn’t enough, the Mighty Boosh baddy had to be a factor in two consecutives matches. The match was short - less than 8 minutes - and never really got into an effective third gear, largely because of the spectre of Uncle Howdy and Bray Wyatt dominating the story; not to mention Bray having just killed the crowd’s energy in the previous match. Belair won, and we had no time to consider what an achievement that was or what a star the Women’s Champion is, because the focal point of the story had to be yet another meaninglessly cryptic Uncle Howdy video. It never ends.

On then to the Women’s Royal Rumble. For the first time since the introduction of the women’s match, WWE had a deep enough women’s roster to actually fill the majority of empty slots, with only three surprise entrants (Nia Jax, Michelle McCool and Chelsea Green) outside of the expected number of NXT talent. The downside is that so many previously released women have been brought back since Triple H took the reins that very few of them seem to have been given any coherent character or motivation beyond “remember her?”, and that really showed in the lack of reaction to many of the entrants in this match. It’s disheartening, this far into her run with WWE, that Candice LeRae’s entrance was met with commentary discussing what Johnny Gargano had been up, LeRae never really being permitted any meaningful character development in her own right and away from that relationship. Tegan Nox, meanwhile, resulted in commentary pointlessly arguing over the term “Shiniest Wizard”, with Corey Graves insisting that Muta’s Shining Wizard was better - whether that’s right or not, why is the lead colour commentator putting over somebody who doesn’t work there at the expense of somebody who does?

It was another good match that lacked much in the way of heat or emotional investment. Becky Lynch’s time in the match brought an energy that was otherwise lacking, but it was surprisingly brief. Other highlights came from Asuka calling back to her pre-WWE career with some impressive facepaint, Piper Niven having an impressive run, booked as a serious threat, and finally dropping the Doudrop name, and Chelsea Green making more out of a 5 second stint than most wrestlers managed with an extended run.

As with the men’s match, the closing stretch was inventive, and more compelling than much of the rest of the match, and Rhea Ripley was a deserving winner, though how she got there was confusing. After the Judgement Day were booked as a conniving, cheating gang in the men’s Rumble, and Rhea got involved there only to take a Spear on the ramp from Beth Phoenix, not only was Rhea able to overcome the attack from Beth (which she was still selling during her entrance), she was able to win the entire Rumble match from the number one position, with no help from her stablemates. It was a strange and inconsistent approach to booking a heel win, while having the number one entrant make it all the way to the end of both Royal Rumble matches only served to make neither achievement look as impressive, exceptional, or noteworthy as they were. One of the benefits of having two separate Rumble matches in one night should be that there’s more freedom to take risks, try new ideas, and avoid reusing the same old booking tropes, yet this show felt like no thought had been given to differentiate the two matches, with many of the same beats hit across both matches.

And then on to the main event. With this headlining over both Rumble matches, and the spectre of Sami Zayn’s involvement hanging over the match, there was a real palpable sense that something had to happen, which has been a rarity on WWE shows in recent years.

The match itself was - I feel like a broken record - good, while unremarkable. Roman Reigns’ big match formula pretty much guarantees a level of drama, but a slowed down pace that rarely translates to excitement, and Kevin Owens was generally able to hold up his end of the bargain, but everybody knew that the real story was coming post-match.

I don’t need to spell out the post-match, I’m sure you’ve seen it. It was WWE overblown melodrama that, in other hands, could have been trite and formulaic, especially with Roman Reigns’ post-pandemic tendency towards explicitly verbalising his every emotion and motivation rather than allowing the physicality of a match to speak for itself, and trusting the audience to follow the story. Instead, this was - as much of the Bloodline story has been - an example of WWE having lucked into a story compelling enough, and with the right people involved, to work against their own worst instincts. Sami Zayn has a knack for wrestling storytelling and performance that’s matched by very few others, and often that translates to him behaving like a real human being might actually behave - it’s that kind of understated, relatable performance that leads many to debate whether or not he’s a suitable main event attraction, which I think misses the point entirely.

What WWE got right here was not rushing the story to get Sami in the Rumble, and allowing it to play out at a logical pace. If Sami were to have immediately stood up to Roman during this match, or if Roman had immediately turned on Sami, it still raises the question of why we’re expected to root for Sami - he has been taken advantage of by the Bloodline for months, but he has also actively sought their acceptance, and if the Bloodline turned on him without the right build-up, it would just make Sami look like a bit of an idiot and a sap for ever trusting them. Instead, WWE did something extremely rare for them, and actually remembered their own recent history, realising that the dual heart of this story doesn’t lie with Roman Reigns and Sami Zayn, but with the friendship between Zayn and Owens, and with Jey Uso. The Owens/Zayn friendship, just as much as the Bloodline’s legitimate family connections, ends the story a much-needed sense of reality and believable history, that evokes the Hart Family Drama stories of the mid-90s, an absolute favourite and personal wrestling booking touchstone of mine. But Jey Uso is the key. It was Jey that first attempted to stand up to Roman Reigns, and who was first browbeaten down into doing his bidding instead. Now, having finally come to accept Sami Zayn, and seeing Sami gather the courage to stand up for himself, Jey has seemingly realised that he had been making a huge mistake all along. The story doesn’t just sit with Sami turning on Roman, or Roman turning on Sami, but the web of relationships that span all of the Bloodline, and how severing one of those connections impacts on the group as a whole.

It’s always difficult with a long-term, undefeatable champion, to get them to a position where they can be believably beaten without costing them their aura or credibility. The dissolution of The Bloodline may well be how Roman Reigns gets there - stretched too thin trying to keep his family together, and losing his back-up, could leave him more susceptible to a big loss when it counts. For the first time in a long while, I’ve come out of a WWE pay-per-view with genuine intrigue about what might happen next.

However, “what happens next” feels like it could be the warning to take away from this pay-per-view as well.

In setting up an altercation between Rhea Ripley and Beth Phoenix, that points to the future direction for those two wrestlers - whether a singles match or a tag team match with Edge and members of The Judgement Day - that’s more interesting than whether Rhea is going to challenge Bianca Belair or Charlotte Flair for the Women’s Title; in both of those cases, it would be a story starting anew, whereas this show has us amped up for a story that we’re already invested in. The same thing has happened across the main event and the men’s Rumble. We know that Cody Rhodes is now going to Wrestlemania to challenge Roman Reigns, but the show ended by making us want to see nothing more than Sami Zayn get his own back at Roman’s expense. There is, of course, a pay-per-view between now and Wrestlemania, and Elimination Chamber in Montreal would be a more than appropriate place for hometown boy Sami Zayn to gain a measure of revenge, and for fellow Canadian Edge to team with his wife Beth Phoenix against Rhea Ripley and Finn Balor, but the Royal Rumble should feel like it’s getting everything in order for Wrestlemania, and instead we’re left wanting to see matches that almost certainly won’t take place there. It’s a dangerous balancing act, to satisfactorily continue Sami Zayn’s story with Roman Reigns and The Bloodline without sidelining Cody Rhodes’ journey to the main event of Wrestlemania, but also to not feel like Cody Rhodes is taking an opportunity that should rightfully be Sami’s. Triple H may be given more leeway than the WWE of old when it comes to widespread audience rejection of “chosen” top babyfaces, but it’s a gamble that might not pay off - if the plan for Wrestlemania, as it seemed like it was when this story began, is for Sami Zayn & Kevin Owens to face The Usos, that feels like an underwhelming endpoint for a story that has dominated WWE television and received hyperbolic critical praise; it’s a step on the journey, but it shouldn’t be the ending. Perhaps Sami Zayn’s story doesn’t need to culminate at Wrestlemania, perhaps it doesn’t need to involve the WWE Championship, and perhaps a win over Roman Reigns later down the line will be just as emotionally satisfying a narrative, but all of that flies in the face of WWE’s long-held conventional wisdom that the main event of Wrestlemania is the place for this kind of narrative catharsis. Holding off on Sami Zayn until it’s too late might just be the biggest creative mistake WWE could make this year.

It’s particularly frustrating given that Roman Reigns is currently holding two championship belts, and Wrestlemania is two nights long, yet there’s seemingly no expectation that he will be working both nights. It feels like the most simple and obvious solution to have Reigns defend one title on night one, and another on night two. It adds to the story of Reigns being stretched thin, and being defeated by circumstance. A loss to Cody Rhodes on night one could leave him sufficiently out of sorts to allow for him to lose a match against Sami Zayn that, in other circumstances, he might have won. I can already picture The Usos coming down to ringside to step in, only to think better of it, and leaving their “Tribal Chief” to get what’s coming to him. Hell, have Sami and Cody work double-duty too if it adds to the story - Sami could have to get past Solo Sikoa, while Cody Rhodes can revisit his feud with Seth Rollins.

Ah, yes, remember that? Cody Rhodes was feuding with Seth Rollins, and it was Rollins who attacked him with a sledgehammer in his last appearance before going on the injured list? You’d be forgiven for forgetting all about that, because there was nothing on this show that could have reminded you. Rollins and Rhodes were in the Rumble match at the same time, and far from Cody being hot-headed and out for revenge, the two actually performed a double-team move together. Sure, they fought against each other, but with no more intensity or focus than Cody wrestled with anyone else, so you’d be forgiven for thinking there was no history there. I don’t doubt that WWE will revisit it, but it was another example of the Rumble being seemingly haphazard in its booking, with no thought given for emotional investment. While I understand the significance in pulling the trigger on Cody Rhodes now, while the novelty has yet to wear off, perhaps his story rather than Sami’s is the one that could have been given a month or two off, his win over Roman Reigns that maybe doesn’t need to take place at Wrestlemania. He has an existing feud to pay off against Seth Rollins, which could have seen him through Wrestlemania, and then worked himself up towards a World Title shot by Summerslam - by which point, even if Sami Zayn had beaten Roman Reigns at Wrestlemania, I doubt he’d still be champion. I don’t think anybody is seriously calling for Sami Zayn to be the next face of the company with a Roman-esque lengthy title reign, just that the story currently being told calls for Sami to be the one to give Roman Reigns his comeuppance, while Cody Rhodes’ journey to the World Title isn’t one that requires Roman Reigns to be the champion that he defeats.

It’s hard not to think about Daniel Bryan, and the audience rejection of Royal Rumble matches he either wasn’t in or was unceremoniously eliminated from, and how on two occasions they had to change gears and crowbar him into Wrestlemania main event matches that on paper had never involved him. By keeping Sami away from the Rumble match itself, bringing Cody Rhodes in at number 30, and making it clear that Sami’s story would play out elsewhere, WWE managed to avoid that level of hijacking of the Rumble, but if it becomes clear that months of Sami Zayn’s story are heading anywhere other than towards a match with Roman Reigns, I’m not sure they will be so lucky, and Cody Rhodes would be the babyface lined up to take the brunt of that reaction. Heading into the first Wrestlemania on Triple H’s watch, does he really want to risk repeating the mistakes that he was the on-screen public face of first time around?