What’s the story?
A 6-woman tag match featuring the women from Smackdown Live was announced this past Tuesday night for the Royal Rumble pay-per-view on Sunday. But in an article done on WWE.com about the match, the match is now scheduled for the Rumble Kickoff Show.
In case you didn’t know...
Instead of Smackdown Live having a Women’s Title match on the card, they decided to have a tag match that converges several feuds at once.
Nikki Bella and Natalya have been going after each other every chance they’ve gotten for the past several weeks. With fights ranging from the parking lot to merchandise stands to ringside, these two former best friends and Total Divas stars have spent the past month in an intense rivalry that seems to be nowhere close to resolving itself.
Becky Lynch has had months of issues with Smackdown Women’s Champion Alexa Bliss and her newly found ally, Mickie James. James, dressed as La Luchadora, has kept The Irish Lass Kicker from regaining her SmackDown Women’s Title on several occasions, and this past week on SmackDown Live, James and Becky came to blows.
However, the fight eventually turned into an ambush as Bliss and James continued to get the best of Becky Lynch.
Also this past week on Smackdown Live, Naomi was supposed to take on Natalya. However, Nikki Bella attacked Natalya as she was making her way to the ring in retaliation to Natalya attacking her earlier in the show. Naomi and Natalya’s match was cancelled, but that didn’t stop Naomi, who is just returning from an injury, from challenging anyone in the back to a match. Out came Alexa Bliss, who instead of answering the challenge, instead mocked and made fun of Naomi, letting her know that the women’s division on Smackdown Live now belongs to The Wicked Witch of the WWE.
All this culminated in an announcement that all six of these women would be involved in a tag team match this Sunday at The Royal Rumble.
The heart of the matter
When the match was announced Tuesday night, many people wondered if they were actually going to keep this match on the main show. Seeing as the Raw Tag Titles and the compelling match between Sasha Banks (one of the most popular superstars on the roster) and Nia Jax was already scheduled for the Kickoff Show, it didn’t make much sense to have this match make the main card.
Plus with two hours to fill on the Kickoff, just two matches wasn’t going to help fill enough time to make the show intriguing for viewers.
What’s next?
With this match being moved to the Kickoff Show, Raw now has two matches and Smackdown has one on the two-hour show. However, Smackdown’s women’s division will not be featured on the main card, as Raw has Charlotte defending her title and PPV win streak against Bayley.
It will be interesting to see, moving forward, how WWE handles these dual-brand PPV’s and which matches make the main shows, which make the Kickoff Show, and which don’t make it at all (for example, American Alpha).
Sportskeeda’s Take
It will be interesting to see how each woman handles the emotions of being in the ring with their biggest rivals but in a tag team match. Nikki and Natalya have proved that they will fight anywhere at anytime and the fireworks between Lynch, Bliss, and James have just started it seems. Even though the match has been moved to the Kickoff Show, it will surely be exciting to see what happens when these rivalries and feuds meet head on Sunday night at WWE’s 31st Royal Rumble PPV.
