Brock Lesnar faced off against Braun Strowman for the Universal Championship at WWE Crown Jewel. He beat Braun Strowman with 5 F5s in very quick fashion and became a 2-time Universal Champion. But that totally went against what everyone expected and it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
On Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer discussed the match and explained what the match was actually about, which the announcer team didn’t do a particularly good job at. This is what he said:
“So this is the story they wanted to tell that Baron Corbin hits Strowman in the back of the head with the belt and Lesnar give him F5 after F5 — over the top ropes — then finally with the 5th F5, you know he was pinned.”
“So the story was that [Strowman] was down and out before the match started and Lesnar’s F5 couldn’t beat him, no matter how many he did it took so many to beat him. Most people saw this as: ‘What the f*ck, this was a squash match why’d he get no offence in?’ The idea was for him to get no offence — that was the mentality because they thought if he got offence it would weaken him because he got beat.”
“The idea was not that he got beat or squashed — the idea is that he kept surviving the F5 over and over again until it was too much and he had to take one over the top rope and to the floor which was nuts because he wasn’t moving too well before the match even started. because when he walked down the ramp — the two things noticeable was he’s moving really slow, you could see he had some knee issues — although that played nothing into this he’s going to be wrestling on this tour and all that I can see that. The other one is that you could see he’s not going to win the championship. It was all over his face when he walked down.”
“The idea was again, he got no offence on Brock because if he would have gotten offence, the story is, ‘What if it was a fair fight and got offence on Brock?’ I think a lot of people watching it didn’t understand that story which is not your fault for watching it because I didn’t understand it either until I was told the story when it was over. So the fact is that the announcers didn’t tell that story and that’s on them because it’s the job of the announcers to get the match over.”
In the meantime, we have Brock Lesnar vs AJ Styles to look forward to at Survivor Series. We sincerely hope Braun eventually captures the Universal Championship, which has been long due to him.
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h/t to Ringside News for the transcription.
