8 Ups And 12 Downs From WWE Royal Rumble 2021

11. Wacky Tag Partners Just Can’t Get Along

Nia Jax Shayna Baszler
WWE.com

Yes, we know: The Royal Rumble is every wrestler for themselves. And what better way to show that axiom than to have tag partners square off?

But having Nia Jax and Shayna Baszler tee off on each other just two hours after winning the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship? Can we get a little more cliché?

While this actually makes sense in many ways – they have been an Odd Couple since the beginning – it’s the fact that you know this is going to become the storyline going forward on Raw that drives this “down.” We’ll have to spend Monday talking about how they can’t get along – tag champs who are at odds with each other, which would mean both tag champs on Raw aren’t on the same page.

They could have done this five different ways to be less obvious, almost accidental or matter-of-fact, but this was just the usual, and worse, you just put the tag titles on partners who now will be talking about how they can’t get along. Wonderful.

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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.