Sunday’s Roadblock: End Of The Line pay-per-view featured the third straight pay-per-view where Sasha Banks lost the Raw Women’s Championship to Charlotte Flair in her first title defense. Now she’s working an injury angle and, if Monday’s episode of Raw is to be believed, she’ll be moving on to a storyline with Nia Jax, while Bayley will be the next challenger for the title.
On Monday night’s post-Raw edition of Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer elaborated on why the focus will move away from Sasha, and why the hot-potato “history-making” championship swaps took place over the past couple of months. Surprise! It’s because they were a holding pattern for the real feud Vince McMahon wants to do: Charlotte vs. Bayley.
“They were going to do Charlotte [vs.] Bayley before, and they decided to postpone it, because they want the angle to climax at WrestleMania. It’s kind of like, why start the angle before January? [The feeling is to not] start the angle at the weak pay-per-views, get it on the big ones. However it’s laid out, that’s the deal.
“The feeling is that Bayley was more over than Sasha Banks as a babyface, and Vince, as we’ve mentioned before, was not high on Sasha Banks in some ways, so [there were no plans for] long-term championship things [for Sasha]. So the idea was that Charlotte’s the better heel, and the one that’s really built the division — and really, she has. When it comes to that, the money program is between Charlotte and Bayley.”
And in case you were thinking that sounded just a little bit too reasonable, Meltzer also said it was Vince who laid out that really ill-advised Sasha tapout at Roadblock that sent the Iron Man Match against Charlotte into overtime … despite objections from pretty much everyone else in the room.
“Everyone knew that that ‘two seconds left’ tapout was stupid. [They did it] because the key people didn’t know [it was stupid].
“This is the deal: Vince McMahon has this idea that this great ending of this match — they didn’t figure they were in Pittsburgh and that no one was going to care and that the match was going to drag, and people were not going to be making any noise. So he was thinking it was going to be this really exciting thing, and Sasha was about to win and retain her championship. … The idea was, Vince thought [the crowd was going to be counting along], ‘TEN! NINE!’ and Vince thought the whole building was going to just be going crazy, which didn’t happen. And then she was going to tap at two, to deflate the entire crowd.
“He thought it was going to be like the greatest moment, when she then tapped out two seconds before everybody knew she was going to retain the championship. Everyone else [backstage] was like, ‘No! If she’s gonna do it, do it earlier, so they’re tied, and they’re both going for near falls for the last [stretch].'”
Some say Vince McMahon started the women’s revolution!
This, of course, is far from the first time that we’ve heard Vince isn’t high on Sasha, which are rumors and reports that have been around ever since she won her first championship. So take this latest report from Meltzer with a grain of salt if you like. Plans change all the time. And one imagines that, despite the lack of depth in the Raw women’s division, there are other options to have made all this highly-publicized history over the past few months if he really doesn’t care for Sasha all that much.
So basically: who knows! But it’s still pretty disheartening to hear if you’re a Sasha Banks fan.
