Sasha Banks-Ronda Rousey Will Steal the Weekend

With a packed Big Four PPV coming up, Kevin doubles down on the Raw Women’s Title match being the show stealer. Let’s see what brings him to that!

Folks, we’ve got one of the biggest wrestling weekends of the year kicking off in just a few short days. Royal Rumble weekend always promises an absolute pro graps bonanza, with NXT Takeover: Phoenix getting us started on Saturday night before the annual Rumble event on Sunday leads us to the official start of the hallowed Road to WrestleMania.

As always, a weekend with this caliber of wrestling lined up always leads to talk. Talk about competitors, talk about predictions, and that age-old question that seems to come up every time we have one of these Takeover-PPV weekends:

What’s going to steal the show?

Which match is going to leave the people talking, breathless with excitement? Which superstars will be talking about over our breakfast Monday morning?

Well, they don’t have me here to leave a question of that magnitude hanging. I’ve got the answer for you right now. As my main man Paul Heyman would be so inclined to say, this isn’t a prediction…it’s a spoiler.

You want to know who’s going to steal the show? I’m going to clue you in on who’s going to steal the whole weekend.

It’s Sasha Banks and Ronda Rousey.

“Kevin,” you say. “What about The Man, Becky Lynch? What about the Rumble matches? What about Johnny Gargano and Ricochet?”

Hey, those guys and gals are all fantastic. Top-notch competitors, no doubt in my mind.

But they aren’t the Baddest. And they sure ain’t The Boss.

This feud has been an absolute scorcher the last few weeks on Monday Night RAW. We’ve seen Sasha Banks really step up and show out for the first time in MONTHS, while Ronda has finally begun to tap into that arrogance and confidence that she should have been relying on since her debut at WrestleMania.

It may have taken her some time, but she’s finding herself. She’s becoming the Baddest Woman on the Planet, just in time for what promises to be an epic collision this Sunday at the Royal Rumble, for Rousey’s RAW Women’s Championship.

So why do I feel like this match is going to stand head-and-shoulders among the rest come Sunday? Allow me to turn an old phrase:

Ruthless aggression.

These two women have shown me something that you don’t always get in the spectacle-driven world of professional wrestling: an authentic, hard-nosed aggression that I’m not seeing in many of these other matches scheduled for the weekend.

To put it bluntly: this doesn’t feel like it’s going to be a wrestling match. It feels like it’s going to be a FIGHT.

These two women don’t like each other. I don’t need weeks of dialogue and scripted mayhem to clue me in on that. There’s a bitterness here, an edge that lends itself well to entertainment.

I sit in front of my TV and I watch these two women jawing at each other or getting physical, and it doesn’t feel like I’m watching something that’s contrived and, for lack of a better word, fake. I feel like I’m watching two real people with real-life beef that just happen to be enclosed under the umbrella of sports-entertainment.

You hear the phrase “big-fight feel” thrown around a lot in wrestling, and in all combat sports. Sasha-Ronda has a big-fight feel, the biggest of the weekend.

Becky-Asuka, though it will be excellent, feels like a wrestling match. Johnny-Ricochet? Wrestling match.

This is more than that. This is a spectacle, an encounter of enormous proportions.

Of course, I could talk about how real it feels, but at the end of the day, it helps that you have two of the best wrestlers in the world, REGARDLESS OF GENDER, duking it out over a prestigious prize.

For the first time, Ronda feels beatable. Sasha feels dangerous, and she’s operating at the absolute top of her game right now. I don’t think the title will change hands, but you gotta believe that there’s a chance. Sasha’s worked her ass off to ensure that that chance exists. And that makes this match that much more exciting to think about.

So get your popcorn ready, kick back and relax. Be sure to tune in this weekend. Because the Boss and the Baddest are going to tear Phoenix to the ground.