Charlotte Flair goes into 2022 as SmackDown women’s champion

Toni Storm has had one strange main roster run with WWE.

After weeks of vignettes teasing her arrival, she finally appeared, won a match, and then disappeared again. It took quite a while for her to pop up again, and she was instantly thrown into the deep end, put into a program with Charlotte Flair over the SmackDown women’s championship.

That’s good!

They did a terrible job telling the story, however, and Storm was positioned poorly each week, from getting pie faced and standing there doing nothing about it, to acting like she won the title when she finally managed to pie face Flair in return. Charlotte treated her like she was never a threat to begin with, and that played itself out when they had a match for the title on Friday Night SmackDown this week.

Said match opened the show, and Flair repeatedly chided Storm for not being ready for her, antagonizing her to get her good and pissed off. It looked a lot like this:

That’s in line with Flair’s entire presentation but it’s an interesting play when the end result of the match was the heel going over. It not look great for Storm, all told.

There’s a new hill to climb.

Meanwhile, Flair marches into 2022 as champion, still on top of the women’s division in WWE, at least on the blue brand.

Get complete SmackDown results and coverage of this week’s show right here.