4 WWE Women’s Wrestling Takeaways: SmackDown Ruins Christmas
By JB Alexander
Credit: WWE.com
NXT Picks Up The Slack
Leave it to NXT to show Raw and SmackDown how to celebrate the Holiday season. If NXT were a person (named Gary, Jerry, or maybe even Larry), then you would have watched Raw, SmackDown, and then NXT this week and shrugged before saying, “That’s Gary/Jerry/Larry.”
The black and gold brand opened up this week with a huge Fatal 4-Way match to determine who will face Shayna Baszler for the NXT Women’s Championship at TakeOver in January. All four women in this match held their own, but it was the “EST” of NXT, Bianca Belair, who pulled out the much-deserved win over Io Shirai, Mia Yim and the soon-to-be main roster Superstar Lacey Evans.
This puts Bianca Belair in a prominent position to help carry NXT’s women’s division going forward as it faces an exodus of stars both female and male at the onset of WWE’s “new era.” Bianca will take her unique hair-whipping style to one of NXT’s biggest annual shows to face Baszler, who has been on an absolute tear. I’ve predicted that Baszler and her Four Horsewomen cohorts Marina Shafir and Jessamyn Duke will be called up to the main roster in 2019, so it should be interesting to see if Bianca can rip the title from Baszler’s grasp early in the year.
I’m also wondering where the heck Kairi Sane has been lately. She’s been mostly missing in action since losing the NXT Women’s Title to Shayna, so could she be in line for a call up to Raw or Smackdown herself? Either way, it looks like NXT’s women’s division should be in fine hands for the foreseeable future.