Over the past few years, the current Women’s World Champion Rhea Ripley has been a regular feature on WWE programming. In 2023, she’s been one of the most active top talents on the roster who uninterruptedly worked on Raw, Smackdown, and NXTs. Definitely, her presence let alone a championship defense was expected at the latest WWE PLE, Summerslam 2023 which won’t be the case.
For the past few weeks, WWE was building up a Women’s World Championship match between Rhea Ripley and her former best friend from NXT, Raquel Rodriguez so that a match between the two could be booked at Summerslam.
However, WWE then booked The Nightmare to get involved in a brawl with her possible next challenger on the Raw before SummerSlam where she brutally injured the latter’s leg. This caused the match to be delayed due to Rodriguez’s storyline knee injury.
It was then confirmed that WWE has delayed Rhea Ripley vs. Raquel Rodriguez and Becky Lynch vs. Trish Stratus and that these two matches won’t go down at SummerSlam this weekend. With that, the reigning champion among these four has also created an unfortunate record.
Summerslam 2023: Reigning Champion Unhappy After Being Left Off WWE PLE
Rhea Ripley to be absent from two straight PLEs
As pointed out by a fan on Twitter, Rhea Ripley has now become the first female WWE Superstar in a decade to not compete at SummerSlam or defend her belt at Summerslam despite being a champion. The last person to have this negative achievement in her WWE career was Layla in 2011. Also, this will be the second WWE Premium Live Event in a row at which the Women’s World Championship won’t be defended.
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rhea ripley becomes the first diva in over a decade to not have a match at summerslam whilst being the women's champion
layla held this previous record in 2012 pic.twitter.com/u6dLhycp6C
— sai! (@meteoras) August 1, 2023
This comes even after The Wrestling Observer Newsletter noted that Rhea Ripley was still slated to wrestle at the biggest party of the summer despite there being a set of matches to be inserted into the card, just a few days ago. This was the reason why WWE wanted her story to play out with Raquel Rodriguez,
“The only match not announced is Rhea Ripley vs. Raquel Rodriguez for the World women’s title. We were told that as of last word, it was still on the show, although they are doing a knee injury angle with Rodriguez.”
As of this writing, there’s no update on when the scrapped title match will be booked but it appears that next month’s Payback PLE will remain a valid option to arrange the match.
