6 Ups & 3 Downs From WWE WrestleMania 42 - Sunday (Results & Review)
2. Dropping The Ball
The anointing of Trick Williams as the new United States Champion should have been an incredibly easy story to tell, especially with Sami Zayn trending toward heel and Trick becoming a de facto babyface week by week.
The template already existed: Bret Hart versus Steve Austin at WrestleMania 13. Sure, they weren’t going to do a bloody submission match, but it wouldn’t have been hard to have Sami gleefully and brutally attacking Trick, leaving the upstart to appeal to fans for help.
They even had Lil Yachty and Williams’ parents on the outside for Zayn to torment for heat. They got it right with Sami wiping out Yachty with a throw into the barricade and the brainbuster on the apron, but then they just abruptly rushed to the finish, with Yachty getting involved to put Sami down (undercutting Sami’s heel attack) and Trick countering the Helluva Kick with a Trick Shot for the win and the US title.
This sub-nine-minute match should have been so much more, with Trick suffering for long enough and Sami reveling in the punishment to get fans to solidly turn against him, successfully executing a double-turn.
Instead, the title win was an abrupt, anticlimactic moment that still got a nice pop, but it could have and should have been so much bigger.