Perhaps you didn’t hear, but Sasha Banks and Charlotte Flair recently made history by not only participating in the first-ever women’s Hell in a Cell match, but by being the first women to main event a WWE pay-per-view. Some fans were shocked that Banks lost her Raw Women’s Championship at the event, but the match itself certainly delivered.
But according to someone close to the situation, the match looked a whole lot different in the initial planning stages. During a recent appearance on Busted Open, Ric Flair said that a couple big spots were axed, due to concern for Sasha.
“They took two huge spots out of the match, during the match, because they were afraid Sasha [Banks] was going to get hurt. If the original plan had been, there were two things and I don’t want to say what they were, but you can only imagine. One of them involved a moonsault.”
A couple of other sources had reported earlier in the week that one of the major spots the women wanted to do involved going to the top of the cage and fighting on the roof, but they were told in no uncertain terms by management that that was out of the question. As for the moonsault, a Charlotte dive from halfway up the cage was something that pretty much every wrestling fan expected from the match, so it was a bit of a surprise that Charlotte didn’t get any dive spot at all in the match.
We’ve known for a while that Sasha is injury prone, but it’s a very tricky thing to parse whether it’s awesome that they’re trying to look out for her and keep her safe, or a bummer that she already has a reputation of being easily injured. We’ve seen what that type of stigma can do to a performer like Dolph Ziggler.
