Did WWE’s latest event truly live up to the hype and be so amazing that we will now refer to it as The Greatest Royal Rumble? Well, the pay-per-view is in the bag, meaning it’s time for a look back on what happened with another Smack Talk Pay-Per-Viewpoint post-show and reaction/review.
As far as my overall thoughts on this event goes, it can be summed up with a simple statement of “glorified house show.”
In some ways, this isn’t necessarily bad, and in other ways, it’s very frustrating.
On the negative side of things, it’s bothersome to sit through an hour long pre-show that attempts to pay lip service to feuds that aren’t feuds, matches with zero build and other matches that might not be all that interesting to begin with.
The only title change that took place was the guaranteed one, which was something easy to predict, as the only other option that could have transpired would have created tons of extra problems to have to fix in the process.
When it came to something like Shinsuke Nakamura vs. AJ Styles, it just gave off this impression of wanting to stall because Backlash is next week and WWE didn’t want to think of a better option to go with for either of these events than to repeat the same thing that we had already seen at WrestleMania. (Side note: I’m not saying Nakamura vs. Styles should have been a one-shot, but if the plan is to have him win the title at Backlash, why not have Styles in a match against someone else where he could defend the title and Nakamura could attack him afterward or something, and maybe Nakamura is in the Royal Rumble and Styles interferes to get him eliminated as payback?)
You’ve heard my thoughts about Roman Reigns vs. Brock Lesnar a thousand times. No need to go down that route again, other than to say it was the same thing as it always is, and that’s not intriguing at all.
That intermission being in the middle of some lesser segments didn’t help, either, but we thankfully had a fun Intercontinental Championship match and what I feel is a really solid Royal Rumble itself.
I thought the main event was rather entertaining and booked pretty well, too, overall, which surprised me.
I’m a huge fan of how Daniel Bryan was given the ability to surpass Rey Mysterio’s record, as well as how Braun Strowman not only surpassed the Roman Reigns “most eliminations” record, but also won the whole thing, as I was rooting for him more than anybody else.
He really needed that victory, as he had yet to win anything of value other than the Raw Tag Team Championship that he immediately relinquished and it was more of a gag than anything else. This helps give him more legitimate clout instead of just the potential of being a top guy. At the very least, he has this accolade to fall back on as proof.
This whole thing felt a bit too much like propaganda to me, though, which was unsettling in a few ways, and I’m not excited about what the next event they have here is going to be.
I’m sincerely hoping it isn’t another 50-man Royal Rumble in 2019, as I’m hoping for something different. Likewise, I’m also hoping this next event isn’t 6 hours long with an unnecessary pre-show, and it has some weight to it, instead of being what I felt like was just a random live event that happened to have a bit more gimmicks attached to it than normal.
Then again, every live event does seem to have at least one steel cage or street fight type match, doesn’t it? That’s something to ponder about.
All in all, I guess this was a success for what WWE was hoping to do, but for a 6 hour show, I felt like this took up a lot more of my time than it was necessarily worth, and the positives were outweighed by the negatives.
But holy shit, at least we got that Titus O’Neil botch, and that might have been worth absolutely everything else!
For more opinions on the show as a whole, check out the latest edition of the Smark Out Moment wrestling podcast SMACK TALK as the panel reviews Greatest Royal Rumble with our immediate reactions following the event before the dust has fully settled.
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