Welcome to another edition of Wrestling Inc.'s retro reviews, where we take notable wrestling shows from the past and apply our universally celebrated loved/hated format! This week, we've got Saturday Night's Main Event coming up, a card that includes a big-time women's tag title match! In honor of that, we thought we'd revisit the show in which the current incarnation of the WWE Women's Tag Team Championship made its debut inside the Elimination Chamber!
Of course, this show is notable for more than just Sasha Banks and Bayley reviving the idea of women's tag team wrestling in WWE. It was also a crucial stop on the road to what would become known as KofiMania, as Kofi Kingston rode a sudden tsunami of fan support all the way to a world title at WrestleMania 35. We'll definitely cover that here in fact, there were six total matches taking place in Houston's Toyota Center on this particular evening, and we're going to cover all of them! So strap up and strap in as Wrestling Inc. brings you three things we hated and three things we loved about WWE Elimination Chamber 2019!
I'm not sure the Elimination Chamber was the ideal environment for the crowning of the new WWE women's tag team champions after the titles were finally brought back to the promotion; I always prefer tournaments to any match involving 12 people for this kind of thing. That said, I don't think this match could have been structured much better, and by the end I found myself genuinely enjoying it. The eternally underrated IIconics were phenomenal as cowardly heels, while Nia Jax and Tamina Snuka were believable in the powerhouse role the combination of the two as the IIconics hid (unsuccessfully) from Jax and Snuka inside their Chamber pods was excellent. Some of the other teams were underserved and I don't think Fire & Desire were necessarily ready for their roles as the runner-ups who lasted the entire time, but that didn't really matter, because at the end of the day, the stars of the show did stars of the show stuff.
Those were obviously Sasha Banks and Bayley, the people who lobbied for the women's tag belts for a year and were finally rewarded by becoming the inaugural champions. They had a different story to tell in the ring the Boss and Hug Connection has always been a fragile alliance prone to betrayal, and Banks was selling a shoulder injury but after Banks scored the submission win with a unique version of her finisher, the story was all about the fact that they had finally arrived at this moment. WWE wisely lingered on the emotion of the victory afterward, and the entire thing ended up being extremely poignant.
Neither Banks and Bayley nor the women's tag titles have always gotten their just due the titles would ultimately become the catalyst for Banks walking out on WWE entirely and reinventing herself as Mercedes Mone but on this night, their crowning victory was about as perfect as it was ever going to be.
Written by Miles Schneiderman
I was in the building for Royal Rumble 2019, and I remember my own shock and dismay when Shane McMahon and The Miz dethroned The Bar for the WWE tag titles. Nothing against either guy, but they both suck and I dislike them. So while I was somewhat gratified to see them lose the belts immediately to the Usos (who I like and who do not suck), I still didn't really need to see an entire tag title match based on the Miz/McMahon storyline. Babyface Miz is even worse than Heel Miz and 2019 Shane McMahon is Shane McMahon in 2019, so any sense of entertainment was basically out the window from the moment Maryse announced she was pregnant again.
Everyone remembers where this storyline goes, unless you've managed to successfully forget, in which case, congratulations. The point is, there was a Shane McMahon match in 2019 that briefly co-opted the tag titles for a storyline with Babyface Miz, and I simply cannot. Glad they didn't last long as champions, but I can't do anything but hate a match where Miz & Mac entered with the tag titles around their waists. Congrats to Maryse though.
Written by Miles Schneiderman
Subversion can be a good thing; presenting a very abundantly obvious outcome while leaving the window open for something else entirely. And wrestling has embraced that ideal several times throughout the years perhaps too much, with scores of disqualifications, screwy finishes and interference having seeped deep into the fabric of modern wrestling. So the occasional time a company actually follows up on a promise can be a little bit of a welcome treat.
Enter Elimination Chamber 2019, Finn Balor's pursuit of the Intercontinental Championship held by Bobby Lashley. Balor by this point had just "taken Brock Lesnar to his limit" at the Royal Rumble for the Universal title, which of course just meant that he had gotten a few more near-falls than the average squash match. And given he had failed to win the Universal title from Roman Reigns beforehand, and also the IC title in a litany of contests including a WrestleMania triple threat in 2018, he was drifting further and further away from the blue-chip prospect that had won the Universal Championship in his first attempt in 2016.
So he really needed to the win the next title he chased. The issue being, that title was held by Lashley, and there was a need to keep him credible at the same time. The booking for both guys at this time had really left much to be desired and the pair of them were in a state of upper midcard rehabilitation. But Lashley had also been paired with someone who, unfortunately, was never going to get a fair shake at the top of the main roster: Lio Rush. Thus, Balor challenged both Lashley and Rush in a two-on-one Handicap match for the IC title, with the caveat that he could win the strap by pinning either man.
This was killing two birds with one stone even if the proverbial birds refused to die in the weeks following as Balor did actually win the title by pinning Rush, simultaneously strapping up "The Prince" and lighting the fuse for Lashley to turn on his partner. It can be rare to see a stipulation designed for an obvious outcome actually followed through on, and this was one of those welcome treats.
Written by Max Everett
2019 saw the first-ever women's main event at WrestleMania, pitting WWE Raw Women's Champion Ronda Rousey against WWE SmackDown Women's Champion Charlotte Flair and the Women's Royal Rumble winner Becky Lynch. The rest is history, "The Man" cementing her place atop WWE with a not-so-great pinfall on Rousey. Today, anyone who watches "WWE Raw" each week gets to see the fallout from Lynch's coronation.
But there had to be a build to that moment, and you can always leave it to WWE to make things as convoluted and nauseating as possible. One such example came at Elimination Chamber, a Raw Women's Championship defense against Ruby Riott now known as Ruby Soho in AEW and on the independents. Rousey in wrestling had always been ... limited. Undoubtedly a judo machine, a world champion in mixed martial arts, and a perfectly credible competitor when mixing it up with the best of the best in wrestling, she would be a little more exposed when working with someone like Riott.
That and surely a litany of other reasons beyond her control ensured that this match was given less than two minutes to breathe, and that's a bit harsh for two people working a throwaway singles match on TV; this was a championship match on pay-per-view. Not only is that super counter-intuitive in terms of trying to make the challenger look like a credible challenger (because if she isn't a credible challenger as this match made her seem, then why would you book the match in the first place?) but there is also the fact that this did nothing to stave off any complaints arising as to Rousey's ability to actually work a match while being presented as a world champion.
Gable Steveson was an Olympic gold medalist and couldn't really translate that to wrestling, Francis Ngannou was UFC Heavyweight Champion but got slept when he faced Anthony Joshua in boxing. Even Brock Lesnar, one of the rare athletes to conquer professional, amateur wrestling and MMA rather earnestly, had a completely failed stint in football. All those cases were relatively quickly exposed and were not booked into holding a world championship heading into WrestleMania season. Rousey had the title in a bit of a stranglehold, in part because the company reallywanted fans to change their minds and green light Flair being the one to beat her, and this title defense was a symptom of that problem.
Written by Max Everett
Remember before how I said that everyone remembers where the Miz/Shane McMahon story was going after this? The same cannot be said of Baron Corbin vs. Braun Strowman, nor of Corbin's alliance with Drew McIntyre and Bobby Lashley. I remember nothing about this not the before, not the after, and hopefully before too long, not the present.
I do sort of appreciate the symmetry of Lashley ditching his small friend Lio Rush for two bigger friends in Corbin and McIntyre, but that's about all I got for this one, folks. This was 10 pretty boring minutes of WWE-approved no disqualification wrestling between two guys whose 2019 incarnations weren't really that interesting, and it ends in a big ol' schmozz finish that sees the monster babyface who you want to see smoosh people himself getting smooshed. There's basically no better lasting image of Vince McMahon's booking tendencies in the late 2010s.Both in the past and the present, it's really bad and nobody cares. Let's move on.
Written by Miles Schneiderman
It took over 10 years and a very unfortunate injury to Mustafa Ali for it to happen, but Elimination Chamber 2019 marked the first time that the immensely gifted Kofi Kingston got an opportunity at the WWE Championship.Now, given my own personal tastes in terms of wrestling and my long-held belief that Bryan Danielson is the greatest wrestler of all time, it feels egregious to say this, but this was the right time for Kingston to get the opportunity because Bryan had never been seen as an infallible main-eventer in the eyes of the company.
Simply put, Kingston was getting over in his title pursuit and for the first time ever there was someone management saw in a similar light. Think about how Bryan came into WWE, how he eventually won the WWE title, lost the WWE title, refused to die despite the company's insistence that he would never again hold the WWE title, and then hadn't really had the chance to reign with the WWE title when he did win it because he was forced onto the sidelines. He was always a WWE World Champion in spite of the company.
Sure they relented in the face of pressure, but as has been seen time and time again, breaking into the main event is very different to staying in the main event. In fact it was Bryan's own experience pursuing the WWE Championship that informed this "KofiMania" run, Kingston getting organically over to the extent that anything else would have been panned at the "Show of Shows." It was a rare stroke of genius to feed into that with Kingston making it to the final two of a six-man field including AJ Styles, Jeff Hardy, Samoa Joe, and Randy Orton. And then the rug-pull win for Bryan over Kingston to retain the title served to advertise the WWE Championship match at WrestleMania.
The match itself was as good as one could imagine from sticking six of the best wrestlers in the world inside a steel structure. But the story, both deliberately crafted and organically contextual, helped to bridge it into the perfect WrestleMania prequel. I cannot stand the way in which Kingston's reign ended, and that really speaks to the aforementioned point about getting to the main event as opposed to staying in the main event. But the build to and the eventual moment was the stuff that draws me to professional wrestling.
Written by MaxEverett
