Asuka vs Rhea Ripley: Who needs this WrestleMania 37 win more?

WrestleMania season is in full swing with the final card of the two-night event still coming into focus.

But one WrestleMania 37 match that is booked and ready to go will see Rhea Ripley challenge Asuka for the Raw Women’s Championship. The whole thing came about quite suddenly considering WWE seemed to be building towards Asuka vs Charlotte.

The problem with this new scenario is that one woman must win while the other must lose, which is how wrestling matches usually work. In this case, both women really need a big WrestleMania win considering their careers are still stinging from previous losses.

Losing to the Queen at WrestleMania

Asuka and Ripley have one not particularly good thing in common. Each wrestler suffered a poorly booked loss at their first WrestleMania to Charlotte Flair that set their respective careers back several steps. That being said, the context was quite a bit different.

WrestleMania 34 saw Asuka make her WrestleMania debut on the grandest stage of them all. She had moved up to the main roster a few months earlier and won the inaugural Women’s Royal Rumble match. Asuka chose to challenge Charlotte for the SmackDown Women’s Championship.

At that point, Asuka was still on an absolute rampage as her long-running undefeated streak continued. Fans wanted that WrestleMania to be her coronation as the most dominant woman in the company by defeating the Queen and winning the title.

Instead, Asuka suffered her first defeat in what seemed like forever. This began a slide in her WWE career that really only came to an end when she won the MITB Ladder Match in 2020 and became the Raw Women’s Champion.

It’s important to note that things only got worse for Asuka. At WrestleMania 35, she appeared as part of the preshow Women’s Battle Royale, which she did not win. Then at WrestleMania 36, she and Kairi Sane lost the Women’s Tag Team Championships to Nikki Cross and Alexa Bliss.

A similar situation went down at WrestleMania 36. Charlotte won the Women’s Royal Rumble match in 2020, and Ripley asked the Queen to challenge her for the NXT Women’s Championship. Again, fans thought there was no way that WWE would put that title back on Flair.

That was exactly what happened as Ripley lost. Much like Asuka, a high-profile WrestleMania loss left her WWE career spiraling. It’s been a year since that match, and Ripley never regained her footing in NXT. Hopefully, coming to the main roster is the start of bigger and better things.

WrestleMania 37 looms large over the WWE

As the card began to fall into place for the 2021 edition of WrestleMania, Charlotte issued a challenge to Asuka for the Raw Women’s Championship. But before Asuka could answer, Charlotte straight up disappeared from TV.

This apparently was due to the Queen contracting Covid and needing to quarantine at home. But there have also been reports of a rift forming between Charlotte and WWE management over their treatment of her fiancé, the now-former WWE superstar Andrade.

For his part, Andrade claimed in a recent interview that WWE mistakenly thought Charlotte was pregnant. They changed the card based on that erroneous assumption on their part, which may have been jumping the gun a bit.

Whether there is any truth to any of that or not is irrelevant. The reality is that spot has now been filled by Rhea Ripley who will be facing Asuka for the Raw Women’s Championship at WrestleMania 37, which could easily be a show-stealing match.

Who needs the win more?

Both Asuka and Ripley deserved a chance to redeem their WrestleMania losses to the Queen. At this point, that’s simply not going to happen unless a lot changes. But that leaves WWE with the unenviable choice of deciding who will win this match.

Asuka has certainly earned a high-profile victory on the so-called grandest stage of them all. She has definitively been the backbone of the Raw Women’s Division during the pandemic, and not just because she has been the champion for most of the last year.

At this point, one of the few things Asuka hasn’t done in WWE is pick up a win at WrestleMania. While this might sound a little trite, the Empress is due for a win. If WWE continues to book her for big losses at WrestleMania, that will only serve to undercut her character.

On the other hand, Ripley needs to get her career back on track. While this isn’t her first WrestleMania match, it is her first as part of the main roster. Back-to-back high-profile losses will push her even further away from the dominant performer she was before WrestleMania 36.

The best call for WWE at this point might be to have Ripley win the match and the title. This would also be a great chance to take Asuka off TV for a bit, then have her return as a monster, dominant heel once again. WWE could get both wrestlers on a good path with one solid piece of booking.