7 Ups And 9 Downs From WWE Extreme Rules 2018

2. ‘Sad And Pathetic’

alexa bliss carmella
WWE.com

For once, Byron Saxton nailed it.

When Asuka held the NXT Women’s Championship, she was an unbeatable machine who ran through every challenger in convincing fashion. She was undefeated for more than two years.

And then the main roster happened.

After losing her title match at WrestleMania, Asuka has fallen to “just another wrestler,” going so far low as to be foiled multiple times by professional toadie James Ellsworth. Carmella defended her SmackDown Women’s Championship against the Empress of Tomorrow Sunday by ramming Asuka’s head into the shark cage that had been lowered because Ellsworth escaped but got caught and dangled from it.

Yes, that’s a real sentence, and that really happened. And yes, you’re dumber for having read that sentence.

There’s “punching above your weight class,” and then there’s Carmella defeating a formerly undefeated Asuka on two consecutive PPVs. Talk about wasting something special just so some people backstage can chuckle to themselves.

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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.