WWE Royal Rumble review: The road to WrestleMania begins

This year’s Royal Rumble is over, and now we know who’s going to WrestleMania.

Cody Rhodes will get another shot at finishing the story after eliminating CM Punk in the men’s Royal Rumble. He also made it perfectly clear that he’s going after Roman Reigns, pointing at him and shouting “I’M CHOOSING YOU” to close out the show. It was a good finish in a match that, much like the show overall, felt flat at times.

We’ll get into the women’s Rumble in a bit, but the men’s match had better wrestling, though the women’s match had a better finish. Punk and Rhodes wrestled for a long while once everyone was eliminated, and for whatever reason the crowd wasn’t into it. That hurt the momentum of the match, as you would assume Cody Rhodes getting a chance to FINISH THE STORY would be a bigger deal to this crowd. At least they popped when he threw Punk out.

So now the question is: will Rhodes finally win the Undisputed (but not really) WWE Championship one year after failing to do so? I think he should as winning the title at WrestleMania over Roman, finally ending his forever reign as champion, makes all the sense in the world. But given WWE’s track record, you can’t automatically assume it’ll happen.

Bayley was the first to earn her ticket to WrestleMania, last eliminating the returning Liv Morgan to win her first Royal Rumble. The match itself had a ton of missed spots, though it did have the better heat and had a clever finish with the returning Liv Morgan eliminating Jade Cargill, only to immediately get dumped to the floor by Bayley.

With Charlotte out of the picture, it seems clear to me the big title match for SmackDown is Bayley and IYO SKY. They’ve definitely been planting the seeds for Damage CTRL to turn on Bayley for months now, and with her win it’s likely we’ll see the trigger for that feud to begin soon, possibly starting on next Friday’s show.

I thought the four-way for the Undisputed WWE Championship was good but here’s the problem: I did not think at any point Roman was in danger of losing the title. There were a million near falls where they tried to get you to think Roman would lose, but I didn’t buy it. No one bought it. So you had a match where people were just doing stuff, the crowd weren’t really reacting like this to anything important, you had the 10,000th Solo Sikoa interference spot, then yes, Roman won with the spear. Nothing bad about it, but absolutely a match that was nothing of note.

The United States title match probably had the best wrestling out of anything on the show. Logan Paul looked really good at times, his offense is great. But then the finish went down, with the same Logan Paul associate from Crown Jewel (who was eventually named JEFF) introducing the brass knucks, only for Grayson Waller and Austin Theory to interfere and give the knuckles to Paul. Owens grabbed them and hit Paul with the knuckles, but right as the referee counted to three he stopped, pointed to the knuckles, and DQ’d Owens. Hideous finish on a pay-per-view but it’s clear they are getting a rematch, probably next month in Australia or WrestleMania.

That was the Royal Rumble, kind of a middle-of-the-road show where nothing was real bad but there wasn’t a ton that was real good either. WWE is off to Australia next month for the Elimination Chamber before heading to Philadelphia for the biggest wrestling show of the year.

And with that folks, the countdown to WrestleMania is now on.