Review for WWE Royal Rumble 2016

I feel like I am always saying this, but I love the Royal Rumble, but the last few years it has become harder and harder to enjoy the match that I love so much. This year WWE upped the ante by forcing Roman Reigns to defend his WWE World Heavyweight Championship. By them doing this WWE did one of two things.

1.) It made it so that everyone had that chance to become WWE Champion
2.) It stole from me the one time when WWE had long term planning for a match, because the winner of the Royal Rumble traditionally will go on to meet the Champion at Wrestlemania.

For me, this was one of the most disappointing PPVs I have seen in a long time and the sad thing about this, is that if we forget about the Rumble the actual undercard is pretty good. The Usos against The New Day for the Tag Belts was fine, though I do find that the antics and skits of The New Day are starting to wear a little thin on me. Kalisto against Alberto Del Rio for the US Championship was fine, but nothing special.

Now, the Divas match between Charlotte and Becky Lynch was fine and much better than a lot of the recent matches. However, the ending was far more interesting than anything that actually happened in the match and maybe more could have been made of this.

Match of the Night was without a doubt the Last Man Standing match between Dean Ambrose and Kevin Owens for the Intercontinental Championship. The interplay between the two was fantastic and this felt almost like a throwback to the kind of matches that Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart were infamous for.This could easily have been the main event and I would have been happy with that.

But it wasn't...

Instead, we had this awful Royal Rumble match which really didn't need to end the way it did. I don't need to worry about spoiling the ending as WWE has seen fit to put Triple H holding the belt victorious on the front of the cover. This is not something I have commented about for a while, but when you consider how much of a surprise it was supposed to be for The Game to be in this match it seems such a shame that they would spoil this for any future viewings.

Throughout the match there were a few highlights including the debut of AJ Styles who had been a huge star in the likes of TNA and New Japan. I was only sad that his elimination was such a throwaway moment that it didn't matter. The dominance of Brock Lesnar was great to see and he did seem like the only one who could legitimately be a contender and that is one of the main issues I had with this match. I watched seeing people like Tyler Breeze, Sami Zayn, The Miz, Titus O'Neill and you knew there was no chance they were winning.

Even the likes of Rusev, Chris Jericho and Big Show never looked like they were going to win. The other issue was simply the lack of surprises or entertaining moments and even the usually entertaining escape from elimination by Kofi Kingston was a little predictable. Only R-Truth thinking he was in a ladder match was slightly amusing. The lack of any true surprised apart from AJ Styles and Triple H at the end was also disappointing.

The fact that the WWE put the belt on Triple H just annoyed me to point I'm not even sure what they were trying to achieve, not forgetting that this is the fifth FIFTH!!!! title change in less than three months? Instead of allowing Roman Reigns to win and showing him to be a dominant champion they again pulled the rug from under in. I must remind WWE that this is the man you want to build the company around for the future and with the loss of Seth Rollins and John Cena to injury it might not be wise to bury your future star?

Royal Rumble 2016 would have been a great PPV if it had not been the Royal Rumble. The undercard was fine and I will go so far as to say the Ambrose/Owens is a Match of the Year contender and if you want to watch that then it will no doubt be on the Best PPV Match set later this year. I will not say I can recommend this, but if you are a completest then there is still much to enjoy here.