Don’t Call NXT Women Like Charlotte Up To The Main Roster

More from NXT

• Trish Stratus on WWE NXT would help elevate that women’s division
• WWE NXT DeadLine 2023 Predictions: Trick Williams Will NOT Become Iron Survivor
• The End of Trick and Melo Gang Will Break NXT Fans’ Hearts
• Dominick Dijakovic is doing his best work in WWE NXT
• Quick predictions for NXT Halloween Havoc Night Two

On Thursday, NXT (R)Evolution gave us a women’s match in the form of Charlotte vs Sasha Banks. Fans were hopeful of a good match, but what we got was better than most people expected.

The match was full of technically sound moves, and both women put on the performance of their lives. The crowd were entirely into it, with “This is awesome” chants and – even more importantly – “This is wrestling” was also chanted throughout the match. Afterwards, it was discussed eagerly amongst viewers alongside the hyped matches of Finn Balor and Hideo Itami vs The Ascension, and the NXT Championship match between Adrian Neville and Sami Zayn.

That’s the important part: for the first time in a long time in WWE, a women’s match is being spoken about in the same terms as men’s.

Compare this to what we got three days later at the TLC pay-per-view. The match between AJ Lee and Nikki Bella was dull and predictable – described by many as their “bathroom break”.

NXT women are respected for their wrestling skills and known for being hard-workers both in and out of the ring; whereas the reputation of main roster women (or ‘Divas’, as they are more derogatorily known) has been diminishing for years – even more so since Total Divas hit our screens last year and ruined any respect the women of WWE had remaining. Most NXT women are trained wrestlers and athletes, but WWE’s main roster females are known for originally working as models and dancers before transferring to wrestling.

In NXT, Charlotte has been pulling off consistently excellent matches. Sasha Banks is becoming more and more popular due to her in-ring skills and brilliant promos. Bayley is great at what she does, and is more over than most men or women on either roster. Fans feel similarly about them to how they felt about Summer Rae, Paige and Emma when they were on the developmental roster. Now, we rarely see Summer Rae or Emma on Raw, and after a lacklustre feud with AJ, Paige has been left with nothing to do except feature in segments with the other Total Divas.

Why would the women of NXT even want to be called up to the main roster?

Live Feed

Bam Smack Pow

With Triple H and Stephanie McMahon in charge of the developmental roster, women are being given a chance to have longer, technical matches that the fans care about. The NXT creative team write proper storyline build-ups for the women just as they do for the men. However, as long as Vince McMahon is in charge of Raw, Smackdown and pay-per-views, women remain irrelevant on the main shows.

Charlotte had a match last Monday on Raw to promote NXT. Although this was not her main roster debut, she came with a similar move set to her father Ric Flair and lost quickly to Natalya. This is a taster of what’s to come when she is called up, which will be sooner rather than later: she will receive the “Tamina” treatment, where she is known as her father’s daughter and not as a professional wrestler in her own right. When Sasha is called up, she’ll be a catty heel with no character development à la Alicia Fox or the Bellas, and when Bayley comes to the main roster she’ll be a joke act who will be quickly forgotten just like Emma was.

Although some of the male wrestlers to be called up to main roster over the past few years haven’t been booked well, numerous have been successful. Think Rollins, Ambrose, Reigns, Wyatt, Harper, Rusev. They have all been called up in the past two years and have been built up to be the future of the company. There are no women who we can say the same for.

More from Daily DDT

• It’s time for Adam Cole and MJF to drop the ROH tag team titles
• Tom Lawlor talks MLW return, AEW opportunity, CM Punk’s WWE return and more
• Eddie Kingston stands to gain the most from the AEW Continental Classic
• Trish Stratus on WWE NXT would help elevate that women’s division
• Randy Orton signs with SmackDown to go after The Bloodline

Until things drastically change with management, the creative team and the way they view women, it’s for the best that Charlotte and the rest of the NXT females stay where they are. They will be wasted on the current main roster – at least in NXT they are given the opportunity to prove that they are equal to the men in terms of wrestling, and they are not viewed as the “bathroom break” of the show.