4 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE NXT TakeOver: WarGames 2020

2. Io, Undermined

WWE's way of eliminating the babyfaces' advantage in the women's WarGames bout was to have Io Shirai continually fail to enter the ring, forcing her to go to extreme lengths to finally have an impact on the bout.

They succeeded only in making the NXT Women's Champion look like a prize fool.

Imagine the dumbest person you've ever met, multiply them by Ryback, then sprinkle a dash of Drake Wuertz's social media activity on top, and you have Io in this match. She passed up the opportunity to enter the bout and regain the advantage in favour of pulling plunder from beneath the ring. Sidelined for an unordinary long time, she unwittingly handed Raquel Gonzalez a kendo stick, then went back to the weaponry when she could have entered. Several minutes of this elapsed. Eventually, Shirai realised she could scale the cage wall... and got knocked off.

Cool.

Io later got into the bout by diving from the top with a trashcan over her head, but looked like a total dummy in the finish as well, willingly scaling the cage wall to allow Gonzalez to powerbomb her through a ladder and take the fall.

NXT succeeded in establishing Shirai's next challenger here, which is good. Making the champion of your supposedly immaculately-booked women's division look like a dolt to get there? The opposite of good.