At long last, Bayley was going to get her chance at the Women’s crown. Her stage was to be the latest TakeOver event emanating from the immense and beautiful Barclay’s center in New York’s toughest burgh of Brooklyn.
If EVER there was a place that might not smile on Bayley’s lovable sunny-as-San Jose persona, it would be Brooklyn, where the Boston-born Banks would be potentially disliked only for the Yankees’ rivalry with the Sox.
That did not deter Bayley, whose greatest challenge was not only to match Sasha’s in-ring intensity and precision, but to also unlock in her that superstar dynamism that Banks exuded. In the final NXT broadcast prior to the fateful night in the Bronx, Bayley again let Sasha’s taunts get to her. However, instead of retreating like the child scorned as she had in the past, Bayley stepped out of her own shadow and attacked the champ in a stunning show of passion and pride. Those two things a superstar does make.
Last night, the ladies stepped into a ring to wrestle the “co-main event of the evening” surrounded by the largest crowd Bayley had ever performed before. The Brooklyn crowd welcomed her with open arms, a symbol she utilizes to hug the audience back. Her opponent, whose one weakness is her susceptibility to legitimate emotion, hid her eyes behind Kanyes as she rode to ringside in an SUV flanked with man servants.
The two would wrestle a 16-minute contest that used all of Sasha’s foxiness and all of Bayley’s ability to absorb the worst. Unlike Bayley’s good-girl adversaries in the previous two matches, Sasha had no qualms with attacking Bayley’s recovered knee and still-ailing hand. In a particularly vicious show of force, Banks stomped on the exposed appendage as Bayley used it to reach the ring ropes to break Banks’ favorite submission hold – the same hold that had led to her own reign as champion.
For every challenge Bayley overcame, Banks offered a new hindrance. All the while, Sasha rubbed in the fact that she was on Smackdown and Raw every week, and little Bayley was stuck on NXT harboring a futile dream of being the best. The ultimate underdog needed to dig deeper than ever to overcome her final test. Not even her Bayley-to-Belly, performed off of a beautiful set-up against the ropes, could silence Sasha.
As the match approached its searing climax, Bayley countered Sasha’s attempt to take her to the top turnbuckle – a location dangerous to any in-ring performer. With Bayley perched on the apron and Sasha seated on the turnbuckle facing to the ring’s exterior, Bayley performed a reverse Frankensteiner from the top-rope, a move so rarely performed that this writer suspected it from being banned from use in WWE matches. The high-impact move left Sasha disoriented and reeling; the perfect state to fall victim to another Bayley-to-Belly and finally succumb to the color-clad challenger.
