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What's the story?
Rusev didn’t actually get to celebrate a lot in this week’s SmackDown Live as the ‘Bulgarian Brute’ could not get onto the team that would take part in the Survivor Series 5-on-5 clash against RAW.
The Bulgarian lost his match against Randy Orton but later on, he congratulated the fifth member of the SmackDown team, John Cena.
In case you didn't know...
Survivor series is billed as the only night where Raw and SmackDown wrestlers face each other in a number of clashes and the biggest one is the traditional 5-on-5 match.
Team SmackDown had one spot remaining and Rusev could have been included had he beaten "The Viper".
Sadly that was not to be, despite a lot of support from the fans, and later Shane McMahon revealed that "free agent" John Cena would be the fifth member of the team.
The heart of the matter
Rusev had been on a bit of a push recently, well, at least he was back to winning matches but he could not get the job done against Orton.
That didn’t stop the "Bulgarian Brute" from congratulating Cena and he even tweeted his support out to "The Champ".
What's next?
Things have taken a major twist thanks to AJ Styles picking up the WWE Championship after beating Jinder Mahal.
Cena was expected to play a role in the Brock Lesnar -- Jinder Mahal fight but now it will be interesting to see just what happens on next week’s SmackDown Live episode.
Author's take
It would have been great to have Rusev onto the SmackDown team but obviously, Cena is a bigger draw than the Bulgarian but then again, what does Rusev have to do to make it big in the WWE?
Cena messing up the Jinder-Lesnar fight would have led to a number of sub-plots, even with a title bout at WrestleMania against "The Maharaja" but now the WWE has once again made a complete hash of things.
This must be really disappointing for Rusev especially when he was part of the invasion that attacked a number of RAW stars a couple of weeks ago but this is just the way the wind blows in the WWE now.
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