5 milestones WWE's women can strive for next

After years of being misused on the main roster, WWE’s women are now among some of the most popular characters on Raw and SmackDown Live.

Ever since the #GiveDivasAChance hashtag trended in February 2015, WWE has afforded their female performers more chances, more storylines and more special match types that they weren’t involved in previously.

We’ve seen Sasha Banks and Charlotte Flair compete in Hell In A Cell and Ironman matches and Carmella and Nikki Bella competing in a No DQ match. Alexa Bliss and Becky Lynch also battled in Tables and Steel Cage matches, and 2017 saw the first-ever women’s Money In The Bank ladder match.

So, after two history-making years of women’s wrestling, what’s the next logical step in the Women’s Revolution? In this article, we look at five milestones WWE and their female Superstars can strive for next.

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#1 Elimination Chamber match

There ha — Women have never competed in the Elimination Chamber

An Elimination Chamber PPV has not yet been announced for 2018 but, assuming there is one, it would be the next natural progression in the Women’s Revolution for them to compete inside the steel structure.

After all, we’ve seen too many multiple-woman elimination matches to count on Raw and SmackDown Live over the last 18 months, so why not make it more exciting by having them eliminate one another in the first-ever women's Chamber match?

Providing the PPV takes place a month before WrestleMania next year, as it has done in six of the last eight years, perhaps the storyline could tie in with what happens in a potential Royal Rumble match.

Maybe the winner of the Rumble could choose to face whoever comes out of the Elimination Chamber as champion, setting up a WrestleMania 34 meeting between two women who had already made history in the first few months of 2018.

It will be amazing to watch the women compete in this gigantic structure which was created 15 years ago when we got to see the first ever Elimination Chamber match in 2002.

#2 Main event another PPV

Charlotte Flair and Sasha Banks headlined Hell In A Cell

When Charlotte Flair vs. Sasha Banks was the last match on the card at Hell In A Cell 2016, it looked to be a sign of things to come that WWE was prepared to headline more and more of their PPVs with Women’s Championship storylines.

However, we haven’t seen a single women’s main event on a PPV since then. The only time a rivalry was so intense that it perhaps deserved to go on last was when Asuka defended her NXT title against Ember Moon at TakeOver: Brooklyn III, but it went on second-to-last instead.

Looking to the near future, the only realistic opportunity for a women’s match to headline a PPV is if/when Ronda Rousey makes her WWE debut, but even then it’s likely to be at WrestleMania, and the chances of Rousey main-eventing over stars like Roman Reigns and Brock Lesnar are slim.

#3 Royal Rumble match

There has never been a women's Royal Rumble match

Rumour has it that, for the first time in history, we could see two Royal Rumble matches in January 2018 – one for the men and one for the women.

A couple of years ago, WWE didn’t have enough women on their roster for a Royal Rumble match. However, including the female competitors from NXT and the Mae Young Classic, they now have more potential candidates for a 30-woman Rumble than they know what to do with.

The winner of the historic match could be allowed to challenge for either the Raw Women’s Championship or SmackDown Women’s Championship at WrestleMania 34, with the two holders of the respective titles sitting at ringside watching the battle unfold.

As yet, nothing is confirmed, but a women’s Royal Rumble match in 2018 would make the event one of the biggest in the pay-per-view’s 30-year history.

#4 One-on-one WrestleMania match

By the time WrestleMania 34 comes around, it will be 11 years since two women had a one-on-one match at the event. The last time it happened was back in 2007 when Melina defended her Women’s Championship in a short match against Ashley Massaro.

That statistic is, quite frankly, embarrassing for WWE, and it has to change at next year’s event in New Orleans.

NXT has had more meaningful women’s feuds in the last three years than WWE has had in the last decade, and it’s because they resist the urge to put every woman on the roster in their TakeOver events.

The likes of Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch, Sasha Banks, Bayley, Paige and Asuka made their names from appearing in high-profile one-on-one matches in NXT, whereas WWE throws as many women as possible into matches on their biggest show just to get them on the card.

It’s good of WWE to do, in a way, but it would certainly be better to see an important women’s rivalry culminate at the “Showcase of the Immortals” instead of seeing six women put into a match that we’ve already seen countless times.

#5 Another Money In The Bank match

The outrage that followed the first-ever women’s Money In The Bank match was, let’s be honest, a little bit over-the-top.

A man, James Ellsworth, essentially won the match by grabbing the briefcase for Carmella, but when Triple H is asked to justify the logic behind the ‘controversial’ storytelling in media interviews, you know people are taking it all too seriously.

As previously mentioned, 2016 saw Sasha Banks and Charlotte Flair compete in WWE’s first-ever women’s Hell In A Cell match, while Becky Lynch and Alexa Bliss had a Tables match at the TLC PPV.

Fast-forward to 2017 and neither match types were given to the women’s storylines at this year’s respective PPVs, so it’ll be interesting to see if the 2017 Money In The Bank match was a one-off or if we’ll see it again in 2018.

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Edited by Rohit Nath