5 reasons to watch WWE Elimination Chamber 2018

This Sunday at 8 p.m. ET, WWE will bring us the Elimination Chamber match, twice, at its eponymous pay-per-view. Titular pay-per-view? Either way, there is a chamber, and there will be eliminations, and for the first time ever, WWE’s women will participate in their own EC bout.

Also Ronda Rousey will officially sign her contract to join RAW which is a thing that is happening and will take up time, I guess. Maybe we’ll be lucky and it’ll also help set up an angle and isn’t just some weird attempt at getting people to buy tickets so they’re in the same building as Ronda.

It’s probably the first thing, but hey, it could go either way. They really love Ronda.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall five reasons to watch the 2018 iteration of Elimination Chamber.

Seven wrestlers instead of six isn’t the reason to watch the men’s Elimination Chamber match — sorry, WWE, but not all of your historic firsts are a Big Deal just because they’re first. However, the seven dudes in the ring are all wonderful and a collection of WWE’s most over talent on RAW on the men’s side, and therefore, there should be an exciting reason to tune in to Elimination Chamber this Sunday here.

Also, it will determine the opponent for WWE Universal Champion Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania 34, so there’s that whole thing.

There is Seth Rollins, who wrestled for over an hour straight on RAW this week, pinning Roman Reigns and John Cena in the process, and making a real case for having Lesnar to himself. Elimination Chamber will also feature Reigns — who has unfinished business with Brock — and Cena, who is desperate to find his personal Road to WrestleMania. Elias, who has feuded with Cena and is a rising star in WWE, will make his Elimination Chamber debut. Miz, the current Intercontinental Champion who has been incredible whenever he’s on screen for a long time now, will get a shot to hold two titles if he can win. There’s Finn Balor, the first-ever WWE Universal Champion, who has been waiting and waiting for a chance to get back to that strap.

And then there is Braun Strowman, who at 6-foot-8 and 385 pounds, literally towers over the rest of the competition.

Braun is the favorite to win, in the sense that he’s the wrestler everyone wants to win. When I say everyone, though, I don’t mean WWE: that wrestler is likely Reigns, who has that aforementioned unfinished business with Lesnar in what would be a rematch of WrestleMania 31’s main event. You can make a case for nearly all of these performers to win the rights to face Lesnar, giving us a compelling main event at WrestleMania 34, and while only one can win, seeing what else is born of this moment is worth paying attention to as well.

I’m torn here. It’s great that WWE’s women are getting an Elimination Chamber match, but the build to it was lackluster: unlike with the men, who had to fight to gain entry into the match, the women were all just tossed in and champion Alexa Bliss has to defend her championship against them. These are all women who lost the first-ever women’s Royal Rumble a month ago, and with some exceptions haven’t done anything that suggests they deserve a second chance like this.

This is what SmackDown’s Becky Lynch was talking about when asked about women main-eventing WrestleMania someday. Obviously, women should be able to be the main event of Mania. But you don’t just do it to do it, to say you’re doing it. Give them the story, give them the build, and make it so the hook isn’t just that it’s happening for the first time.

All of that said, I’m very excited to see Alexa Bliss try to negotiate her way out of losing her championship by making temporary alliances with wrestlers too naive to realize she’s going to turn on them in an instant. The only real shame is that Nia Jax isn’t in this match, but, about that...

Nia Jax and Asuka have one of the low-key better women’s championship matches at NXT, and that was back when Nia was a whole lot newer to wrestling than she is now. (If you have a WWE Network subscription, you can watch that match here starting an hour and 10 minutes into the show.) Now, we’ve got an imposing force in Jax taking on the still-undefeated Asuka, winner of the women’s Royal Rumble and holder of a guaranteed title shot at WrestleMania 34.

The match itself should be dope — Nia has really taken to being the biggest, strongest wrestler in the room, and Asuka is Asuka. Throw in the stipulation that Nia Jax will also get to wrestle for the RAW Women’s Championship at WrestleMania 34 if she manages to end Asuka’s undefeated streak, and, well, now you’ve got some tension.

For one, Asuka losing seems impossible at this point, but... it’s Nia, so maybe she will. And even if Nia wins through shenanigans or whatever because someone like her buddy Alexa Bliss interferes in order to avoid facing Asuka one-on-one at Mania, it’s possible that Asuka chooses to challenge SmackDown’s champ, Charlotte Flair, instead... which would leave us with the one-on-one Nia vs. Alexa match the former has been promised by her buddy for some time now.

Will it go down that way? I don’t know! But it’s given me a lot to think about, and that’s half the fun. The other half of the fun is these two beating the heck out of each other.

ahahah I’m just kidding I’m not looking forward to that even a little bit

And that’s a good thing! It takes some time for Elimination Chamber matches to play out, anyway, just by their nature. The match begins with two competitors in the ring, and the other four caged away in the corners. Then, the competitors are slowly released one at a time, changing the landscape of the match over and over again, until all of them are in the ring and beating each other up and forming and breaking alliances and being slammed down into metal grating. It’s a good time.

With just five matches scheduled (and one Ronda Rousey segment), it feels like both the men’s and women’s Elimination Chamber matches should get lots of time. And time is what these matches need, as you have to build up each competitor and tell individual stories, especially since, while the matches are determining one winner, they are also helping to prepare for other WrestleMania season stories.

Miz is Intercontinental Champion, for instance, and there’s a good chance he infuriates someone in this match in such a way that they start to feud over that title, assuming Miz isn’t winning the whole thing here on Sunday. Maybe Cena loses in some devastating way that doesn’t necessarily get him a feud going with one of these competitors, but points him on the path to the Road to WrestleMania he craves okay I can’t do this it’s going to be Undertaker, okay, Cena is going to face Undertaker, this is the worst-kept secret in 2018 when people are like taking photos of Taker at the gym, which only happens when he’s getting back into ring shape.

Anyway, you get my point. The women’s match should help setup that division’s future stories, too, maybe for a tag team match that gets more competitors on the WrestleMania card, or giving us some insight into allegiances for a women’s version of the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal, otherwise known as The ‘Dre.

It’s unclear just how it’ll go, but figuring it out is one reason to watch on top of the whole “these matches should be good” thing.

I was hoping you didn’t notice that, but fine, fine. I’m actually intrigued by whether WWE is going to just give us Ronda Rousey on stage signing a contract and then call it a day, hoping seeing her face is enough, or if Rousey is going to begin her own path to WrestleMania with this segment. And just who she’ll be teaming with or facing off against (Stephanie McMahon?), if we could get any concrete hints of that, would be wonderful.

And really anything that makes the whole “Ronda is full-time!” thing feel like reality instead of just a thing being said to make any skeptics back off of her and WWE would be solid as well.