WWE Universal Championship Match
Brock Lesnar (c) vs. Seth Rollins
It’s main event time as the opening match for WrestleMania 35 was the closer for SummerSlam 2019, with Seth Rollins challenging Brock Lesnar for the WWE Universal Championship. This turned out to be a great main event that certainly didn’t go the way I expected.
Lesnar attacked Rollins’ injured ribs to start and started with the German suplexes but Rollins landed on his feet and nearly pulled off the upset early with The Stomp. A great counter and a surprising early near-fall.
It then turned into a bit of a beating, with Lesnar continuing to attack the ribs. The spot with him picking up and throwing Rollins around by the medical tape was brutal and likely very painful. But Rollins would continue to counter and this turned out to be a very even matchup for the most part.
That was the surprising part. If Seth was going to win, I thought he would just take the beating for 15 minutes and then miraculously fight back for the victory, but that’s not how it played out. He had Lesnar reeling on numerous occasions, making for a great back-and-forth affair. Lesnar would get the advantage and then Seth would get the advantage. The action on the outside was great and the big splash onto the announce table was amazing.
That led to the final sequence which saw another great near-fall that seemed to signify that there was no way that Lesnar was losing this title. But in quite the swerve, Rollins went for The Stomp again, which was countered into an F5, which in turn was countered again as Seth landed on his feet to hit a superkick and another Stomp for the 1-2-3. Excellent finish to a really entertaining match. That was the best match we’ve seen from Lesnar in years and I thoroughly enjoyed watching these two in the ring together. They’ve got great chemistry and good timing and this was a strong finish to the show.
What’s next: I certainly wasn’t expecting to see Rollins leave SummerSlam with the Universal Championship. But now that he has, it will be interesting to see who steps up next. I don’t see Brock coming back for Night of Champions as I think he’s set for something else. Perhaps the next challenger might just be Drew McIntyre.
It was shocking to not see him during the Shane McMahon match and that was apparently done for a reason. The rumors are that creative didn’t want him to be around while Shane took such an easy loss as they want to keep him looking strong, which is a little funny since he’s been booked so poorly as of late. So he should get through his little feud with Cedric Alexander and move up to the main event.
As for Lesnar, I think he’s done with Rollins for a while. FOX is going to be looking for so many big names for SmackDown Live and I think that’s when we see Lesnar next. If Kofi Kingston gets through Randy Orton, which I think he will, he’s going to have to deal with The Beast at some point. It would make for rating gold.
As I said in the intro, it’s not that the 2019 edition of SummerSlam was bad by any means. It was a good show with some good matches. But it wasn’t great, and it should and could have been so much more. How do you put Roman Reigns on the poster and then not even get him on the card? Or even some kind of segment to address this situation with Rowan and Daniel Bryan, who I think we’re all assuming is the mastermind behind the continuing series of attacks?
There were just too many big names left off the show and that’s not a good thing for the second-biggest pay-per-view of the year. But Seth Rollins and Becky Lynch bookending the show with good matches and big wins was cute, right?
What were your thoughts on the 2019 edition of WWE SummerSlam? What was your favorite match? Please feel free to join in the conversation in the comments section below.