WWE made a last minute change to this year’s WrestleMania 42 card when “The Demon” Finn Balor’s match against Dominik Mysterio was changed from a standard singles match to a street fight. In an interview this week with Chris Van Vliet, Balor said the change was made to help cover for limitations he was working through due to injury.
It started a few weeks before WrestleMania when Balor suffered a rib injury on Raw while trying his best to avoid becoming the next Top Dolla.
“Dom was having a match against
Penta on Raw, like three weeks before Mania. I do the run-in. I come back. I beat up JD. I beat up Dom. I throw him over the top rope. I’m gonna do a dive over the top rope. I’m in street clothes.
So as I’m running, I’m wearing one of my baggier t-shirts. And I go, oh, I haven’t done the dive in a while. And I wonder, is this t-shirt gonna get snagged on the top rope? Am I gonna get stuck like Top Dolla, you know? This was going through my head as I’m running against the ropes.
So as I’m coming back, I see the boys outside the ring, and I said I got to jump extra high, and I got to tuck faster than I normally tuck. Because I normally kind of extend a little bit. I tucked early, and as I tucked, I popped a rib. In the air, not on the landing…I remember the boys caught me great, put me down. I stood up. I fired up like this and I said, ‘Fuck, I popped a rib! Fuck!’”
It was a race against the clock at that point to see if Balor would be able to work the match at WrestleMania. They ultimately changed it to a street fight so he could use weapons instead of fancy athletic Cool Moves.
“The problem with the rib recovery is you can’t do anything. There’s no rehab. You can’t do anything, really. So it was kind of touch and go. That was kind of a factor into why the match was changed to a street fight, because I was able to rely more on the toys, like the weapons and stuff, than have to actually [do] wrist locks, and twists, and rolls, and stuff like that.”
Does it make more sense now why Demon Balor vs Dirty Dom turned out the way it did at WWE’s biggest show of the year? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, Cagesiders.
