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The Greatest Royal Rumble came up rather quickly in the wake of WrestleMania 34. For a WrestleMania that was stacked with solid storylines and blockbuster match-ups I believe it didn’t exactly deliver. This is where The Greatest Royal Rumble comes into play.
Emanating from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, WWE treated us to a night full of one-off big name matches, endless title bouts, WrestleMania-worthy moments and a 50-man Royal Rumble all in the span of five hours. Now let’s talk about what separated GRR from WrestleMania this year, and what made it better.
Timing
Compared to WrestleMania, GRR took up two less hours of programming. This, in itself, is a huge difference. By the fourth hour of WrestleMania, I was absolutely exhausted. There’s not that much that can be done about that though. I had to get over my exhaustion and power through the last few hours of a show that I genuinely lost interest in from how tired I was. This can play into a larger conversation, but WrestleMania may be too damn long.
GRR on the other hand, while still long and tiring, clocked in at less time overall. In addition the 50-man rumble really helped the last hour and a half fly by for me. Just like a regular Royal Rumble, even though it’s an hour, there are some nice surprises peppered in throughout, making the hour ebb and flow throughout. In addition to surprise entrants in this Rumble, we got some great moments, including Titus O’Neil’s meme-tastic trip and slide. The lead up to the rumble was wrought with championship matches, but overall it was certainly not as tiring as the show of shows for me.
One-Offs
Something that made GRR really special were the few non-title bouts on the card. Though these matches may just have been an effort to get big names on the card to please the Saudi crowd, with no actual storyline implication, it was still fun to see John Cena vs. Triple H and The Undertaker return to action in a casket match against Rusev. Neither of these matches made much sense in the grand scheme of things, but they sure were fun to watch.
HHH and Cena kicked off the show in a big way and, although I thought the match itself was nothing exceptional, there’s something to be said about the first entrances on a show being HHH and John Cena. The crowd certainly got into the show off the bat. The casket match was also fairly okay to me, but we did get to see The Undertaker outside of WrestleMania, which was a nice treat. Though Rusev was buried, along with Aiden English in the finale, you have to imagine that just having a spot in an Undertaker match in 2018 is an honor.
Next Page: Comparing WWE’s WrestleMania 34 & The Greatest Royal Rumble (cont.)
