The Royal Rumble is this Sunday everybody! Just a couple days away now, can you feel the anticipation building?! One of WWE’s grandest and longest standing traditions… one that was doubled a couple of years ago! Two Rumble matches, one for the men and one for the women, and I’ll be looking at the favorites for each side in this little mini-series! Including one half of the Women’s Tag Team Champions, Asuka!
Remember, you can vote for the last two names to get looked at with the polls found here! Voting closes at the end of the day, so there’s not a lot of time left!
Asuka – Relevant Stats
- WWE Debut: 2017 (Debuted in NXT in 2015)
- First Rumble appearance: 2018
- She won the 2018 Women’s Rumble match.
- This will be her second Rumble appearance.
- She has amassed three total eliminations.
- She is a one time WWE SmackDown Women’s Champion.
- Current betting odds: +3300
Alright so first things first… I kinda messed up here. I uh, made sure not to include Daniel Bryan or Lacey Evans in these polls because they’re challenging for their respective main titles on Sunday, and so probably won’t even be involved in the match. But for some reason I put Asuka on the list, even though she’s also on a collision course with Becky at the Rumble. Granted, her betting odds at winning are still better than a lot of people who will definitely actually be appearing. Buuut not as good as Lacey’s…
I kinda blame this on how oddly few women have been announced for the Rumble match as of this writing. Legitimately, we have 25 names declared for the Men’s Rumble and 5 declared for the Women’s. That’s weird. And it forces you to fill in a lot of the blanks yourself, and when you do that, naturally you’re inclined to include a bunch of the biggest names. Kairi was an obvious inclusion too so I think I lumped them together a bit in the list as well…
But yeah there’s no 4D Chess here, there’s ultimately not a great reason for Asuka to be here when Bryan and Lacey aren’t. But I promised her in that opening post, so I’mma deliver. Plus… Becky herself did lose to Asuka last year and join the Rumble to win the thing anyway, so surely the inverse can occur as a bit of an ironic echo, no?
How 2019 Went For Asuka:
A hell of a lot better than her 2018 went, that’s for sure! Asuka was a dominant force on NXT, absolutely unstoppable for her two years there. She put together an undefeated streak that actually surpassed Goldberg’s, and did so without fudging the numbers the way WCW did his! But as much as I loved the streak, I was very nervous about the thought of the main roster getting it’s hands on. I was anxious when she left NXT still unbeaten. And for good reason, the people on Raw and SmackDown usually hate winning streaks with a passion. That much is clear in their booking any given week, really.
Sure enough, it didn’t last long after her October call-up, even after she won the inaugural Women’s Rumble. 168 days into Asuka’s run on Raw, Charlotte broke the 914 day streak at WrestleMania. As far as that goes, it was probably the best conclusion she was gonna have, but still unfortunate that it had to happen so quickly. And she sure did spiral a bit after that. Her utter failure to take the SmackDown Women’s title off of Carmella of all people, thanks to the aid of James Ellsworth of all people, did a lot to destroy her aura, seemingly purposefully.
But she did close out the year by finally taking the title that December, and thus, went into 2019 as Women’s Champion. And at the 2019 Royal Rumble event, she scored a huge victory in retaining against Becky Lynch in what had to be considered a huge upset at that point.
Asuka would lose the title to Charlotte that March however, just missing out on her chance to headline WrestleMania.
At the Show of Shows she ended up relegated to the women’s battle royal. Afterwards came her pairing with Kairi Sane which at first was a tad forced, feeling like a compromise of sorts. Kairi had been teaming with Io Shirai when they plucked her out of NXT with zero warning. It seemed like Triple H had managed to convince Vince not to take Io as well, so instead Kairi just replaced her with Asuka on SmackDown, thus the Kabuki Warriors were born.
They pursued the IIconics – who were bound and determined to never defend the Women’s Tag Titles – for much of the year but the feud never really resulted in a big blowoff match. Instead Royce and Kay abruptly lost to Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross instead. The Kabuki Warriors went on to challenge Alexa and Nikki at Hell In A Cell where the Kabukis were suddenly heels. Asuka debuted her new gimmick on this night as well, spitting mist to take the tag titles in a move straight outta the 80s.
The turn was sudden and largely ineffective in the sense that it only got people to love them more, but regardless they found a lot more chemistry with one another after that. The twosome are legitimately one of the best tag teams in the company right now, and have easily taken the still very new titles to the biggest heights we’ve seen yet. They closed out the year by winning a TLC match against Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch in the main event of the last PPV of the decade.
So where does that leave her chances?
Well… she’s challenging Becky Lynch now! So the Rumble win is kinda unnecessary. I do expect Becky to retain though, which leaves Asuka open to violently insert herself into the match, just as Becky herself did when the roles were reversed the year before.
What would her story be?
If it does somehow happen that way, it’s easy to picture where things go from there. She moves to SmackDown to challenge Bayley. This wouldn’t even really be an issue since the Women’s Tag Titles are technically still considered cross-branded anyway. The result would be that the Kabuki Warriors feud with Sasha and Bayley over tag and singles titles alike. So yannow, a continuation of what we just saw with Becky and Charlotte to close out 2019. Except Bayley and Sasha Banks are actually a tag team!
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