Sami Zayn’s one-sided loss at Money in the Bank and subsequent no-show at RAW on Monday may have spooked his fans. As it turns out, their fears are justified.
PWInsider reports that Zayn missed RAW because he’s traveling to Birmingham, AL to be evaluated by WWE‘s medical team. At the moment there are no specifics on the injury, but apparently, Zayn has been dealing with the issue for some time. His quick defeat at Money in the Bank is believed to be related to his injury.
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Per the report, WWE and Zayn planned for him to visit with doctors after the MITB pay-per-view. With so little information, we’ll have to hope that because Zayn was able to wrestle that this injury won’t be too serious.
Zayn has been one of the unsung heroes of WWE since WrestleMania. Following his switch from SmackDown to RAW, he’s been in charge of playing villain to Bobby Lashley’s American hero. WWE entrusted Zayn with doing most of the heavy lifting and the Montreal native was in charge of 90% of the story’s dialogue.
With his cartoonish antics, sarcasm and the occasional obstacle course Zayn proved he can be one of WWE’s most effective heels. Although his MITB match was a glorified squashing, it never was Zayn’s place to win the match. Instead, as the heel, Zayn’s only task was to get people excited for Bobby Lashley.
Now that Zayn has supplied momentum, Lashley has been vaulted to WWE’s main event scene. On RAW he and Roman Reigns shared a few passive-aggressive moments, potentially teasing a program of their own.
For Zayn, provided he’s healthy, he too is due a promotion. While he won’t be sniffing the Universal Championship anytime soon, he’s shown that he can carry an upper-mid card feud. Someone like Finn Balor could benefit greatly from Zayn’s antagonistic ways, or maybe Zayn could jump to the Intercontinental scene. regardless, Zayn has been doing solid word since his heel turn at Hell in a Cell. And more often than not that level of consistency is rewarded by Vince McMahon.
Zayn covered the ups and downs of his WWE career last year in an interview with Fox Sports. He’d go on to offer advice to future NXT stars who find themselves on the main roster.
“I guess I’d just be ready more for the highs and lows. You know, very few people – if any – come in here and just have a very linear trajectory to the top. It becomes very muchโฆ there are highs and lows. You take two steps forward and you take a step back. Five steps forward, three steps back. It’s not a linear, chronological ascension to the top.
You’ve got to kind of get mentally prepared for that. I guess that’d be my advice for anybody from NXT who is going to come up to the main roster. Once you’re prepared to understand that it’s not always going to be smooth sailing, I think it makes the ride a lot moreโฆ I don’t want to say ‘bearable,’ but it makes it a lot easier for you to handle it mentally. For as tough as what we do is physically, the mental aspect can be almost as tough, if not tougher.”
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