8 Ups And 12 Downs From WWE Royal Rumble 2021

4. The Roman Reigns Method

Edge Randy Orton
WWE.com

WWE loves its tropes, and one of them reared its ugly head Sunday night.

During the men’s Royal Rumble, Randy Orton got taken out of the match early on, having to be helped to the back due to a crippling knee injury. We saw him being worked on by the trainers once, and then forgot about him.

Then at the end of the Rumble, when Edge seemingly had won, Orton snuck in and nailed an RKO, then tried to toss Edge, only to have it reversed. The “forgotten non-eliminated wrestler” is a WWE special that we have seen over and over through the years, with Roman Reigns being taken out in 2015, Santino Marella sneaking back into the match in 2011, and so on.

It’s somewhat lazy booking to try to give a “shocking” ending, and while it can work from time to time, we’ve seen it too often for it to shock anymore. Maybe lay off the trope for a few years before pulling it out of the woodwork again.

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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.