Last week’s edition of WWE Raw took place at the Amway Center in Orlando, Florida. It was a New Year special show where multiple such comebacks happened. The Universal Champion Brock Lesnar was among one of them to confront his challenger at Royal Rumble. He is none other than Braun Strowman who also returned on the show.
These two being present under the same roof hinted we will see a physical brawl. This would mark a proper start to the Universal Championship feud. However, we did not witness any such thing on WWE Raw. Paul Heyman cut a usual promo before bringing out Brock Lesnar. He roamed around the ring for once before leaving.
Braun Strowman was standing in the middle of the ring calling out Brock Lesnar. But the beast incarnate was not willing to fight on the show.
There’s a big reason why the creative team had to dodge any sort of physical confrontation. WWE continued to keep him away from competition that included Royal Rumble title match.
Dave Meltzer discussed the topic on Wrestling Observer Radio. He confirmed that the monster has not recovered from the performed surgery. This might be the reason why he lost the title chance at Royal Rumble. Finn Balor captured the spot all of a sudden on WWE Raw.
At WWE TLC, the roster helped him to win a match against Baron Corbin. Braun Strowman did not even have to perform one single move except for the pinfall count. This earned him the championship opportunity at Royal Rumble against Brock Lesnar. The match between these two was about to go down on January 27th at the Chase Field Arena in Phoenix, Arizona.
We were less than 20 days away from the championship match at Royal Rumble where the doctors did not clear the challenger. This put a question mark on the mega match at the inaugural PPV of the year. The expectation was that he will be okay to compete by that time. But maybe, WWE officials did not want to keep the match’s status in jeopardy. So they inserted Finn Balor into the context and letting the monster enough time to get healed.
