Tag Team REPLACED In WWE Women's Tag Team Championship Tournament

NXT duo unable to compete, Toxic Attraction subs in. How did they fare?

by Scott Carlson
Gigi Dolin Jacy Jayne Toxic Attraction
WWE.com

Nikkita Lyons and Zoe Stark's WWE main roster debuts were shelved Friday night, as the NXT duo was replaced in the WWE Women's Tag Team Championship tournament at the 11th hour.

The two NXT standouts originally were announced for the eight-team tourney -- the only NXT wrestlers to be tapped for the main roster title hunt. but Friday afternoon, Shawn Michaels announced on Twitter that Stark & Lyons were not able to compete and were being replaced in their match against Natalya & Sonya Deville by former NXT Women's Tag Team Champions Toxic Attraction.

Gigi Dolin and Jacy Jayne managed to pick up the win on SmackDown, meaning they will advance to face Raquel Rodriguez & Aliyah in the semi-finals of the tournament. There's no word on whether this promotion to the main roster is permanent, or if Toxic's third member, NXT Women's Champion Mandy Rose, will be joining them anytime soon.

In his announcement, HBK said Stark has sustained an injury in her NXT Women's Championship match against Mandy Rose. Dave Meltzer of Wrestling Observer Newsletter tweeted that she suffered a concussion during the bout.

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Michaels also said Lyons was "medically unavailable" for the match, which is why both women were being replaced. While no further details were given, many immediately speculated that this was possibly a reference to Lyons allegedly not being vaccinated, since SmackDown emanated from Canada (more specifically, Montreal), which has more stringent vaccination requirements.

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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.