13 Ups And 16 Downs From WWE Royal Rumble 2019

2. SmackDown Women Steal The Show

Becky Lynch Asuka
WWE.com

If an opening match can set the bar for the night, then Asuka and Becky Lynch tried to set the bar as high as humanly possible and dare anyone to clear it.

The SmackDown Women’s Championship match was all action from bell-to-bell, with both women hitting each other with stiff kicks, trading submission holds and generally beating the hell out of each other. Lynch hit a Bexploder into the barricade, and another off the second turnbuckle, while Asuka delivered some nasty-looking kicks and repeated hip attacks.

After a submission reversal sequence, Asuka locked in her Asuka Lock, which she then floated into a neck vise with a bridge to get the clean tap to retain.

There are going to be people who said Becky shouldn’t have tapped cleanly, but sometimes there’s no shame in losing to someone who’s just a half-step better. In this case, Asuka eked out a victory over Lynch in a match that could have gone either way.

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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.