WWE NXT TakeOver: Phoenix 3 Biggest Takeaways

Bianca Belair Is A Fantastic Babyface

On the WWE NXT TakeOver: Phoenix pre-show, Kairi Sane made us all cry with her reaction to winning the NXT Female Superstar and Overall Competitor of the Year awards for 2018. Both were well-deserved, as Sane is one of the best babyfaces in the company.

But NXT’s Women’s Division is home to some other great babyfaces, and you can count Bianca Belair as one of them. She came into this match in a high-pressured spot against Shayna Baszler, and Sam Roberts vomited some bizarre lines (that he was likely fed from someone working us) about how Bianca doesn’t “belong” at TakeOver and isn’t “ready” to beat Shayna.

So when Shayna won, it made Roberts’s comments all the more upsetting and annoying…which is par for the course for him.

Digression aside, Belair proved that she does belong, even in defeat. As I wrote earlier, Shayna’s matches do such a great job of boosting a babyface, and Bianca showed an incredible amount of fight in this championship match.

She rose to her feet twice when locked in the Kirifuda Clutch, which was simply unprecedented. She left a mark on Shayna’s mid-section with her hair. She overcome a left shoulder injury to pin Shayna and would have won if not for the referee being down. Hell, she beat up Jessamyn Duke and Marina Shafir, essentially nullifying a HUGE numbers advantage that Baszler seemingly had heading into this match.

Bianca technically won that match, and she did so while injured and down three-on-one. Her crowning moment will come soon, but, more important than that, Belair proved to the NXT Universe that she is someone they NEED to be rooting for; she’s changing NXT for the better.