The Royal Rumble is fast approaching! In fact, it’s coming to us tonight! We are mere hours away from one of the most fun and cherished tradition in all of professional wrestling! A tradition that was doubled a couple of years ago~! 30 men and 30 women will be vying for a shot at their respective top titles at WrestleMania! I’ve been looking at all the favorites to win in this little mini-series, including some wildcards. But few could be quite as wild as one Nikki Cross!
Nikki Cross – Relevant Stats
- WWE Debut: 2018 (Debuted in NXT in 2016)
- First Rumble appearance: 2019
- She has never won a Rumble match.
- This will be her second Rumble appearance.
- She has amassed zero total eliminations.
- She has never held the Raw or SmackDown Women’s titles.
- Current betting odds: +2200
How 2019 Went For Nikki Cross:
During the first week of 2019, Nikki had her final televised match on NXT, completing the rather arduous, weird and lengthy transition from NXT to the main roster. She settled herself slowly into the mix on the Raw roster. But she only really appeared sporadically and never won much when she did show up. She was in the women’s battle royal at WrestleMania where she did not do particularly well.
She was honestly struggling a fair bit to make any headway until Alexa Bliss came into the fold. And boy was that weird for a little bit. I think I described this fairly well in Alexa’s own article, but to recap: Nikki was a naive babyface being manipulated and used by the evil Alexa. Nikki somehow didn’t realize Alexa was a bad person, even though she’d been a top heel of the division for years. But then, over time, she just kinda went with it and started acting like a jerk herself. Suddenly their dynamic was dropped and they were both heels.
And then a couple of months passed, and they were suddenly babyfaces.
I’m all for character evolution, but… they kinda skipped the evolution phase! There was no transition, nothing that motivated these changes. They just went from being a heel/face combo to a heel/heel combo to a face/face combo. No journey, just pure destination. So y’know, the best kind of writing~!
Either way, the tandem certainly worked out for Nikki, though one can argue it’s served as a bit of a demotion for Alexa. But Cross went from struggling to even make the show at all to winning the Women’s Tag Team titles out of the blue on a random Raw episode. They were holding them as they made their blink-and-you’ll-miss-it transition to babyfaces, which ultimately earned Alexa a spit of mist from Asuka when they lost their titles in October.
They were both drafted to SmackDown immediately thereafter, albeit with some weird rigmarole regarding trades. Nikki Cross was by herself for a little bit as Alexa was way for undisclosed reasons, and during that short time, she did emerge as the main challenger to Bayley’s SmackDown Women’s title in the fall. This never ended up making to PPV however and Bayley ultimately thwarted her. Alexa then made her return in time to help Nikki out with her feud with Fire & Desire. Cross and Bliss ended the year beating them fairly handedly for the most part.
Where does that leave her chances?
In some ways, Nikki’s feud with Bayley was left open ended. Their last match did end in a no contest after all. So it’s not impossible that this is the direction they want to go. But I haven’t gotten the vibe that they’re near high enough on Nikki for that. It’s a really a shame, at one point she was the most popular woman on NXT, far and away the most over woman to have never held that brand’s title. They loved Nikki for all her uniqueness and wild energy.
The call-up to Raw and SmackDown has perhaps hindered her as a performer more than anyone else, they’ve taken a lot of what was special about her away. She’s not bad now but, kind of a shell of herself. She’ll never be as over on SmackDown as she was in those days, not with how they present her. Otherwise, she’d be a totally fitting pick.
What would her story be?
As I outlined, she’d almost definitely come back to settle things with Bayley. What would be interesting about this scenario is how Alexa would respond to this. I can only imagine she’d act supportive at first, but secretly resent the hell out of Nikki for winning the Rumble instead of her. She’d back her up against Sasha and Bayley for a while before inevitably turning on her.
This scenario would probably also see tensions arise between Sasha and Bayley too, culminating in a fatal four way at Mania, if I had to guess. This is actually the first time I’ve suggested such a thing I believe, but it’d be fitting for this scenario.
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