On Monday night’s episode of Raw, former Raw Women’s Champion Bayley defeated Nia Jax by countout. The match was hardly memorable, and was another iteration of Bayley fending off Jax prior to her scheduled championship match against Alexa Bliss at SummerSlam. But it appears the bout might have been more eventful than we realized.
A big portion of the match involved Bayley selling a shoulder injury. Now it appears that injury might be legitimate, and her SummerSlam match might hang in the balance. WWE released this video on Tuesday of Bayley being evaluated and tearing up while talking about her shoulder injury after Raw.
And according to WWE.com, she will have to wait a week for swelling to subside before her injury can be fully evaluated and a prognosis given.
The former Raw Women’s Champion was evaluated by medical personnel, but the official diagnosis was inconclusive due to the amount of swelling involved. Bayley has been told to rest the shoulder until next week, at which point doctors are hopeful that the swelling will have sufficiently gone down so that she may be reevaluated and a firm verdict can be reached.
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Dr. Chris Amann told WWE.com, “We’ve determined the injury is shoulder-related, and she will be going under further diagnostic testing later this week to determine the extent of the injury and also establish a timetable for recovery.”
Much like when WWE gave a much longer timeline for recovery after Braun Strowman’s surgery, wrestling fans would be forgiven for taking this news with a grain of salt. Prior to this WWE.com report coming out, however, Bryan Alvarez of Wrestling Observer Radio had a hunch this might be a legit injury. (Transcript via Cageside Seats.)
“Maybe Bayley is just like a tremendous worker and she does a great job selling, but I think she separated her shoulder in this match … Nia was just throwing her to the outside and Bayley landed right on her shoulder and went outside and started selling it, or was really hurt. And then later, Nia gets her up in a double chicken wing, and just drops her right on her shoulder, and [ … ] Bayley rolled outside and just sat there for like 30, 45 seconds. And the referee’s talking to her, he’s fiddling with the gimmick on his belt where he sends word to the back … I mean maybe she’s just really great and this is a storyline, but I’ve separated my shoulder by falling down and landing on the side of it in a match, and I bought this, I’ll just say that. I don’t know if that’s what really happened, but I bought it.”
Storyline-wise, this could be a means to an end of getting either Sasha Banks or Nia Jax back into the mix for that SummerSlam title match. But prior to this injury news, it seemed pretty locked in that Bliss vs. Bayley was the Raw side of the women’s title matches. We’ll wait for more news on this injury and keep you posted.
