13 Ups And 16 Downs From WWE Royal Rumble 2019

4. Odd ‘Surprises’ For Women’s Rumble

Kairi Sane Charlotte Flair
WWE.com

Last year’s women’s Royal Rumble featured a smattering of surprise entrants to fill out the 30 slots, which added to the fun of the first all-women’s Rumble.

We got 10 legends and Hall-of-Famers entering the fray, as well as two members of the NXT women’s roster. That might have been a little high, so this year’s Rumble dialed it back to six non-main roster entrants.

However, all six were NXT wrestlers: Kairi Sane, Io Shirai, Rhea Ripley, Candice LeRae, Kacy Catanzaro and Xia Li. Throw in that Lacey Evans and Nikki Cross have been called up but haven’t been assigned to a brand yet and there were eight women not on Raw or SmackDown’s rosters in the match.

And yet no Hall-of-Famers or legends entered this year’s match. Maybe WWE felt like they burned through the big surprises last year and again at Evolution last fall, or maybe they felt that the focus needed to be on the current superstars. But it felt like they weren’t really trying for star power here, which was somewhat disappointing.

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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.