10 WrestleMania Main Events The Royal Rumble Almost Promised Us
But no, WWE had to dole out Sid Justice.
The Royal Rumble has always done a pretty solid job as the de facto WrestleMania matchmaker.
Over the years, whoever leaves the January show as a World Champion has almost invariably managed to hang onto the gold until WrestleMania, and with the winner of the Rumble match itself being granted a title shot at the biggest show of the year, more often than not we know our WrestleMania main event by the end of the Rumble pay-per-view.
That arrangement has provided us with some awesome match-ups - Bret vs. Shawn, Austin vs. Rock, Angle vs. Lesnar, to name a few - but what if events had played out a little differently? What if had been the challenger who’d left the Rumble as champion, or if the runner-up in the 30-man match had instead emerged the winner?
Simply put; if things had been altered ever so slightly, we could have been treated to some absolute dream matches at WrestleMania.
Looking back at what could have been, this article delves into some alternate timelines that could have been spawned - but we were ultimately robbed of - at the Royal Rumble PPV.
10. Chris Jericho Vs. Daniel Bryan (WrestleMania XXVIII)
Back in 2010, on the first-ever episode of NXT, Daniel Bryan made his WWE debut against then-world champion Chris Jericho. Two years later, we came close to seeing that rivalry come full circle on the grand old stage of WrestleMania XXVIII—except this time, it was Bryan who was holding the gold.
Having beaten Mark Henry and the Big Show in a cage match to leave the Rumble with the belt in tow, Bryan had essentially booked his ticket to WrestleMania. Meanwhile, the recently-returned Jericho was a pre-match favourite to win the Rumble match outright. For the briefest of moments, the stars seemed to be aligning to tie up that story that started two years’ prior on NXT.
Instead though, Jericho fell at the final hurdle. Having made it to the final two of the Rumble, Sheamus then eliminated him to become number one contender, going on to face Bryan for the title at ‘Mania in a match that lasted just 18 seconds.
One silver lining is that this freed up Jericho to face CM Punk in what was an awesome WWE Championship programme - but either way, we still missed out on a possible 'student-becomes-the-teacher' classic.