:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/68853024/Asuka_bio__6b5bfe14193b2907e8c387e6247f5434.0.jpg)
Just this past Monday night on Raw, Lacey Evans announced she is pregnant. WWE played it up on television in such a way that it felt like a storyline but reports immediately made the rounds saying she is indeed expecting. Naturally, this would mean she couldn’t wrestle at Elimination Chamber, where she was scheduled to take on Asuka for the Raw women’s championship.
For reasons that are still unclear, WWE never once acknowledged this. Throughout the entire week, they continued promoting the match, and it was just a couple hours before showtime before they finally removed any mention of it from the company website.
The only time this came up at Elimination Chamber was during the Kickoff show, when the panel decided to debate the father of Lacey’s baby before getting around to wondering what this means for Asuka. Peter Rosenberg remarked “let’s not forget who Asuka is, no one wants to see Asuka.” Booker T said “trust me, somebody is going to step up.” Charly Caruso closed by saying “that’s something we’ll be waiting to find out. Of course there will be developments throughout the evening as to who Asuka will be facing when she puts her Raw women’s championship on the line.”
Then the show happened and she wasn’t mentioned.
This has been a bizarre run for Asuka with the Raw women’s championship over the past few months, as she’s been a supporting character in multiple other stories for the likes of Charlotte Flair and Alexa Bliss, even taking losses to Bliss and Naomi along the way. Sure, you could argue it wouldn’t do much good to throw her out there for an impromptu match on pay-per-view but to not even acknowledge the situation on the main show after teasing updates on the Kickoff is a strange one.
You can check Twitter to see how fans are reacting to it.
(Spoiler: they aren’t taking it well.)
We’ll see where things go tomorrow night on Raw, though there’s every reason to believe the focus will be on Lacey’s baby and Charlotte’s issues with her father instead of Asuka and the Raw women’s championship.