WWE Royal Rumble 2018 review: What we learned, takeaways, future projections
By Luke Norris
What we learned, what we took away and what the future holds for the superstars of WWE following Sunday night’s Royal Rumble pay-per-view event.
The 2018 WWE Royal Rumble event is in the books, and what a night it was in Philadelphia. With four title matches on the main card, two championship match opportunities up for grabs in the Royal Rumble matches, fun and crazy returns from past WWE superstars and a huge debut, there’s certainly plenty to discuss as we’re now on the road to WrestleMania 34 in New Orleans.
As this is one of the “Big Four” events, we got a two-hour kickoff show that included three matches, starting in the cruiserweight division with a six-man tag match as Kalisto, Lince Dorado and Gran Metalik took on TJP, Jack Gallagher and Drew Gulak. The WWE Cruiserweight Championship was supposed to be on the line at this event but the Enzo Amore situation obviously put a stop to that. A new GM is set to be announced on Tuesday’s episode of 205 Live, which could bring some new life to the entire division, so there really wasn’t anything special going on for this match but these six competitors went out and put on a pretty fun match. Even without Enzo, who I never really enjoyed watching anyway, there’s plenty of great cruiserweight talent on this roster, and that was on display here. The pace was good and the masked men picked up the victory in a solid opener.
Another tag match was up next as The Revival, fresh off a beating last Monday night at the 25th anniversary of Monday Night RAW, took on Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson in another decent match. This was good, traditional tag team wrestling that obviously didn’t have the pace that the match before it did, but overall, I liked the flow here. The Good Brothers still aren’t getting the wins that they probably should, especially now that they’re hooked back up with Finn Balor, but they still looked good in defeat. Karl Anderson sold really well in this match as The Revival took it to him and picked up a nice win to get back on track. I see more matches from these teams coming.
The last match of the kickoff show saw Bobby Roode bring back the US Open Challenge, which was answered by Mojo Rawley. Overall, there wasn’t much to this bout and the outcome was never really in doubt, but it was entertaining enough. I’ve heard rumblings that Mojo was kind of thrown in at the last minute for this match with Roode’s original opponent being put into the Royal Rumble but that’s strictly hearsay at this point. They had the shortest match of the kickoff show and Roode picked up a pretty easy win.
Outside of a pretty great Q & A segment with Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn, that was it for the kickoff show, so let’s get to the main card, starting with those two men battling AJ Styles for the WWE Championship.