11 Ups And 8 Downs From WWE Royal Rumble 2018

7. Cruiserweights Fail To Impress

royal rumble 2018
WWE.com

You would think at a time when the WWE Cruiserweight Championship has become vacant due to the champ being fired would prompt a more aggressive approach to showcasing the division. If you were going to put a match on PPV (or at least the kickoff show), you’d want to garner some interest by showing off the talented wrestlers on 205 Live.

But that’s not what happened.

We got a six-man tag match pitting Lince Dorado, Gran Metalik and Kalisto against Jack Gallagher, TJP and Drew Gulak. They went through a match that was more ground-based than you’d expect, only picking up the pace and adding some high-flying moves toward the end. By then, it was too late to salvage a middling match.

It’s a shame, because you know these guys are capable of so much more, and this could have been a reset of sorts. Instead, it was a time-filler of a match put on in a mostly empty arena.

Advertisement
Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.