6 Ups And 5 Downs From NXT TakeOver: Chicago

1. Asuka Overdone

asuka nxt
WWE.com

Have you ever cooked a steak for too long and tried to salvage it with BBQ or Worcestershire sauce? That is what it looks like NXT is trying to do with Asuka’s NXT Women’s Championship title reign.

For nearly 14 months, the Empress of Tomorrow has run roughshod over the NXT women’s division, defeating Emma, Bayley, Nia Jax, Mickie James, Peyton Royce, Billie Kay, Liv Morgan, Ember Moon, and now Nikki Cross and Ruby Riot. NXT has basically painted itself into a proverbial corner, with Asuka defeating all comers and leaving them with no viable challenger to take the title off of her, even though that probably should have happened by now.

Asuka is a great performer, and her new heelish personality helps breathe a little new life into things, but watching the triple threat title match Saturday night, it never felt like Riot or Cross were going to unseat Asuka. The multi-person match felt more like an artificial way to insert doubt into whether she could hold onto her title (the BBQ sauce in the earlier analogy) and to freshen things up.

If Ember Moon is going to unseat Asuka, it’s got to be coming soon, right? Maybe at TakeOver: Brooklyn III?

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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.