10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About Rhea Ripley
7. Everything About WrestleMania 36
WrestleMania from inside an empty gym needed noise, and Rhea Ripley and Charlotte Flair certainly provided that in their hard-hitting 2020 opener. But rather than foreshadowing what was one day to come between the two on 'The Grandest Stage', this did almost irrecoverable damage to Ripley's main roster future.
Keen to test her mettle on the show she'd dominated once before, Flair's challenge for the title was ostensibly quite the unique use of her Royal Rumble title shot. All until she started steamrolling through the next generation of talents anyway. Bianca Belair was brushed aside in the aforementioned television match, and much of the same happened to 'The Nightmare' when she came face-to-face with 'The Queen'.
Booked to look levels above the Champion, the Challenger grunted and groaned enough when Ripley hit hard, but otherwise deconstructed, dominated and destroyed en route to her second run with NXT gold.
It was a loss WWE never particularly bothered to try and recover on television, not least when they were brought back together again on television for a wretched series of segments in 2021. But before that...