WWE’s 2021 Royal Rumble has come and gone, and we get to sit back and rank the Superstar entrants, the hits and the misses this year!
WWE’s Royal Rumble 2021 was Sunday evening, and we once again got to enjoy the men’s and women’s events. Now, we can get into the fun stuff, ranking the Superstar entrants, the top hits and misses.
WWE Royal Rumble 2021: Ranking Superstar Entrants Top Hits & Misses
For both the men’s and women’s matches, we had plenty of entrants known ahead of time. However, as with pretty much every year, there were a chunk of slots not announced.
For the men’s match, we came in with less than 10 open slots. For the women’s match, the number was nearly half of the entrants.
So, of all those we knew, and those who surprised us…what were the hits and misses?
WWE Royal Rumble 2021: The Misses
Right off the bat, there’s one thing I want to throw out. I don’t envy the booking of these matches, because while many fans want to see the younger Superstars get a shot…many of us love the nostalgia, too.
With only 30 spots, that is a challenging balancing act. What made things even harder in 2021’s Royal Rumble was the lack of a live audience.
It’s that reason that we knew ahead of time that Edge was in the Rumble. That’s likely also why Braun Strowman showed up on SmackDown.
In a normal year, one or both returns would have likely not happened until the Rumble itself. That they happened the week prior, those aren’t really misses.
More, it’s acknowledging that things are still very different. Hopefully the 2022 Rumble will be back to normal.
With that said, there were some misses-both in who was in the match, and who actually was not.
On the women’s side:
R-Truth, for one. Fine, Truth was not formally in the match, but I was not a fan of having him come down and have the title defended in and around the Rumble match.
Alicia Fox, for another. I was not a fan of how her last run wound down, and she was tied to the R-Truth sideshow…could have done without.
Jillian Hall and Victoria…I mean, I get the want for nostalgia acts, and with the pandemic there may have been tougher challenges to get talent on the show…but I’d rather have seen Trish Stratus or Beth Phoenix.
Speaking of other, perhaps better, choices? No Lita this year.
And speaking of pandemic issues, we knew we’d have no Mia Yim, due to her positive test.
Perhaps WWE was looking to spread things around to the female Superstars of the past? But, it did seem like a few of them had some issues with some spots not being so crisp, among other things.
Also, considering the number of NXT talent involved, it was worth pointing out that we had no Candace LeRae, Raquel Gonzalez or Io Sharai, to name a few.
On the men’s side:
Right off the bat, I admit I have fewer gripes with the men’s list, and here’s one major reason why. We had fewer open slots heading into the show, which meant most of the participants were from the active roster.
My bigger missing gripes are actually of talent we could have seen but did not. As in, couldn’t someone like Shelton Benjamin have had a better match than the ever so brief appearance by Hurricane Helms?
Helms was probably my biggest miss. The others I’d point out were those not in the match, like Benjamin, MVP or long shots like John Cena and Brock Lesnar.
Also, no Wyatt or Fiend, which I think was at least in part to allow Orton and Edge to function as a major storyline without any significant interference.
