Welcome to the ring, it's rich and atom.
Breaking down the fights with flair and passion.
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And welcome back to Finishes and Factions.
Does the Royal Rumble 2025
What an absolute barn burner of a PLE this was.
This week it will just be myself Adam
as my normal co-host Rich is off with illness
but we will get straight in.
Me and Rich already did live watch along versions of the women's
and the men's Royal Rumble match which you can already find
uploaded. This is coming to you at touch late
which we'll apologise for. We were hoping Rich was going to recover enough
to record but he is well on the road to recovery
and will be back shortly so we just need to
keep some good thoughts going for him and he will be back soon.
In the meantime we have the rest of Royal Rumble to cover.
The wrestling world does not stop so you guys are going to have to
make do with just me this week.
As we already know the Royal Rumble came to us on the 1st of February
in the Indianapolis, Indiana in the Lucas Oil Stadium.
This was the 38th Royal Rumble
in history with a 70,000 plus
fans in attendance.
This was actually the third biggest WWE gate in history
which is a phenomenal amount.
We have two matches to cover. We've got the Cody Rhodes vs Kevin Owens
match for the
WWE Championship
and we've got the 2 out of 3 falls match for the
Motor City Machine Guns facing off against current champions
DIY.
We start off the pay-per-view with an in-ring promo where Stephanie
McMahon comes out and does the normal bit of are you ready?
What an honour it is to be in Indianapolis
talking about WWE's growth
and we had
Stephanie was out promoting her new show
Steph's Places where I think the general premise is that
she goes into superstars houses as a
snoop around and report back sort of thing.
We then went into a Pat McAfee VT where he goes through the
Royal Rumble concept. Those that have been here before
will know. Those that haven't done it before
watch the VT. 30 men, 30 women enter a ring
to start every 2 minutes somebody new enters.
I think we covered this at the beginning of the Royal Rumble episodes
themselves so please do go and have a listen.
We then went straight into the women's Royal Rumble
again we covered that one. We saw that we had
a whole bunch of big names in attendance at the Royal Rumble.
The Godfather bought the whole train
to attendance in the
Lucas Oil Stadium as well as
Mickie James one of my personal favourites from over the years.
Kurt Angle had some fantastic outings in the Royal Rumble
previously was in attendance as well with his daughter who's
also an amateur wrestler. Could we see her in
WWE in years to come? We'll only have to wait to find out.
We also had a few non-wrestling names
in the crowd. We had Marcus Freeman, the Notre Dame
head coach. Rich would be able to probably
talk you through more about that than I would unfortunately I am not an NFL
fan but feel free to google Marcus Freeman. I know
I did just to find out the bits that I know about him
which is that his name is Marcus Freeman and he's the Notre Dame head coach.
That's about as much as I know about the man.
We also had Stephen Amell whose most notorious
role is for his role in the DC TV series
Arrow. He also had some brief stints of
wrestling fame as well where he's wrestled, I believe he's wrestled
WrestleMania but I didn't go into the detail for that one.
We then dived straight in to the
first traditional match of the night. So we got the
women's Royal Rumble out the way. We all know how that one ended.
We then got match two which was for
the WWE Tag Team Championship
and was a two out of three falls match.
Now this is a unique match type. We don't see this very
often outside of the Heritage Cup and the idea
is that whoever scores the best
two out of three, it's a best two out of three match where they
can submit pinfall. It's the
accepted falls of the match and it's
whoever walks out with it with the most at the end
is declared the winner. Now
we started with quite a lengthy VT recap which are quite well known
for, which are quite well known in WWE's PLE
PLE's where they recap the history of what
brought us to this point. This was the Motor City Machine Guns
Championship rematch as far as I'm aware. They lost it
to DIY before the Netflix era began and
it showed, I was actually quite
quite a
surprise. They showed a wide shot where during this match there were quite
a few empty seats. Now I don't know if this was people that hadn't arrived yet
if they had. They'd already missed a good majority or
if it was people who had just come to watch the Rumble matches and weren't really that
fussed about these other championship
matches which will have huge ramifications on storylines to come
which, or maybe just loads of people decided to go and take a bathroom break grab some
refreshments but really odd to see so many empty seats
in the arena. But what a match this
was. I mean Motor City Machine Guns seemed to take control pretty early
on which is very much their MO as it goes with
the Royal Rumble or with their matches sorry
and we see
Motor City Machine Guns pull out a lot of their classic moves early on
in the match which to me didn't really seem like a
it didn't seem like a good way
or a good sign as we see
Motor City Machine Guns pull out these classic moves like the suicide dive
through the ropes and everything along those lines once they're on a
winning streak once they're about to finally secure that dub
and we saw these early on so I think this sort of told
the tale of the tape as we saw it if you looked into it in that much detail
but yeah I mean
this became personal really quickly as we know from previous weeks
gone by. DIY have done everything within their power
to try and rig the match endings that they've had
and most recently as this week
has gone by they've had an 8 man tag team match
where they teamed up with Pretty Deadly somebody at a team that they've used
to their advantage on a number of different occasions
but no such luck this evening at the end of that match
they Pretty Deadly said you're on your own you get this done
and we'll go from there
but first full came pretty quickly
was awarded to DIY after
I will be honest a genius fake tag manoeuvre
between Tomasso Ciampa and Gianni Gorgano
where Alex Shelley's
focus on Gorgano where Ciampa was the legal
man so yeah they got
DIY showed early dominance in this match
which was actually quite nice to see as we tend to see
the challenger coming out quite quickly in this
quite quickly in these match types trying to really
wear down the champion so for the champions to
for the defending champions to pull that first full
was a really nice thing to see
I mean there were some other rather underhanded tactics
that were used during this match
Ciampa ducked under the ring to sneak up on Saban
to
yeah sneak up on Saban then distracts the ref
who doesn't see Shelley tag Saban and Saban
sort of argues while
Shelley bless him is absolutely laid to waste by the defending champions
I mean
Shelley does get his own back on Ciampa with a
phenomenal DDT on the apron which
is bound to have rattled Ciampa's
Bell there and then we see
Offer Skull and Bones, Motor City machine guns
secure the second full this brings them to one each
yeah Saban
and the match sort of continues from there so
it comes down to the absolute last full
so Saban knocks Ciampa off the top
turnbuckle into a tree of woe now for
sort of new wrestling fans that are coming to this the tree of woe
is an instance where
a wrestler is hung by the rope upside down
where one of their ankles is hooked in over the top turnbuckle
and they are left pretty much defenceless
while their opponent is able to do pretty much anything they want
it's not a nice position to be in I'm sure but
this is where Chris Saban found himself
and was subjected to a sequence of missile
dropkicks and being
and sort of launching Johnny Gargarra
and just having the tag champions just completely go
absolute ape on them
I've got to admit one of the bits and pieces that I saw here
was Ciampa with a setup for a power bomb
that was converted into a back breaker
for a near fall on Saban which was a
phenomenal bit of business it was really impressive to watch
and only a few more high spots as we end the match here
it's a case that Motor City Machine Guns hit a beautiful
power bomb stroke blockbuster on
Tommaso Ciampa from up high for a near fall on Ciampa
and the headline of this match
realistically Motor City Machine Guns look to have the win but
you see the street prophets who have been out on injury for quite a while now
come running in absolutely assault them
with crutches the same crutches that they've had to be
using since they were put on the injured list and
just absolutely decimate
Motor City Machine Guns and allow DIY to retain
but the street prophets are not done there
they are not showing any allegiance because they go and take that
exact same ferocity to
DIY after the match ends they are coming in
hot off this match and
we will have to wait and see exactly how that all sort of
plays out and comes out in the watch for it
but it will be exciting to see where the tag team championship
goes from here and we'll
be here to report all of that as it comes in
now we come to a section of the podcast that we always do
because WWE always include it in their programming and it's
a fact about where they are
whether that's Indiana
Indianapolis or just the stadium that they're in
they included some facts about Lucas Oilfield
which was that it's hosted a
Super Bowl, the Super Bowl 46 that was in 2012
an NBA All-Star Saturday 2024
they've hosted three final
4s, one CFB national championship
the US Olympic swimming team trials in
2024 were held there, an NFL
combine and an
NCAA men's basketball national championship in 2015
this is an all sport arena
but it's an all sport arena that has the exterior
facade, it's open exposed brick and it's made up of
over 980,000 bricks
I mean just think how much the bricklayers would have got
paid per brick to lay that exterior facade
and of course Lucas Oilfield is the home of the NFL
in NFL's Indianapolis Colts
and again not a huge
football fan, it's something that I don't
know a massive amount about so I'm not going to sit here and try and
wax lyrical around that one
we then treated to see that a few other
former superstars and celebrities are in attendance
we have Ron Simmons, damn
in attendance we've got Rick Steiner
Bob Van Damme, the whole F in show
just a few
former names, I mean some real hard hitting hall of fame is there
and we've got
Bilal Muhammad, the UFC welterweight champion
in attendance as well as well as John Mellon Camp
a Grammy award winning singer songwriter, now I did some research
along John Mellon Camp and I'm not going to lie
I don't know him, I'm never heard of him, I'm sure he is a phenomenal
singer songwriter but I just do not know who that man is
so yeah I'm not going to try and tell you
who he is, what he's written or anything like that just because honestly
I don't think I've ever heard any of his music so
we're going to come to a close
on that particular part, now
the next bit that we come to is the
Men's WWE Championship match
this was a ladder match, now again for anybody
that's new to the professional wrestling world, ladder match is a classic match
type which sees the championship
in this case suspended from the top
from sort of a rigging apparatus above
the ring, the only way to reach this is to
set up a ladder, ascend the ladder
and the winner of the match is the person that brings the title
back to earth, and in this match we saw
Cody Rhodes as defending champion, the American
Nightmare versus Kevin Owens
now we did another sort of
VT recap, because it's a championship match we need to make sure we know
where we're going with it, but this match was
put together, well
this match sort of culminated in Kevin Owens
deluding himself running around thinking he's the champion because he managed to get the
winged eagle title, the historic title
even Cody Rhodes' dad, the late great
Dusty Rhodes American Dream had won back
in his heyday, it was brought out of retirement supposedly for
one night only for a Saturday Night Main Event
Saturday Night's Main Event event
back in December and yeah Cody Rhodes lost
that title to Kevin Owens, but this did not
make Kevin Owens an official champion, no matter what Kevin Owens
was going round professing to everybody
now original stipulations for this match that was both titles were going to be suspended
from both title belts were going to be suspended from
up high, now in Friday Night SmackDown Kevin Owens
decided he didn't like this stipulation, came into the ring
removed his winged eagle
title from the rigging apparatus
and took his toys and went home basically
so he enters the ring with his winged eagle championship
now this is Kevin Owens 10th career
ladder match and yeah
I mean the stipulation was that they were both supposed to be stripped of their
belts, this was broken by KO on Friday Night, now we didn't actually
see Cody Rhodes have his belt returned so
for Cody to walk out with his
belt as well, I mean it only seemed fair but there seemed to be a bit of
discontinuity there for the story I would have thought
they would have kept, I mean I suppose it's part
of the pomp and circumstance of a ladder match that they
take the belt off the champion, suspend the belt above the ring
send it up high, it's all oooh and ahh
but yeah it felt a bit
it didn't feel like there was a lot of continuity in the storyline for me there
now we were told that
Cody Rhodes up to this point had been champion for 300
days and that tonight, and that this
match was his 8th title defense and it was
last defended at Saturday Night's main event in December versus Kevin Owens
which was where Kevin Owens picked up the winged eagle
title and
Cody sort of thumbing his nose
at superstition here on his way to the ring as he decides he's
going to pass under an open ladder on his entrance and
do you know what, I'm not a horrendously superstitious
person as it goes but I actually enjoyed this little bit, it was
quite nice to see because wrestlers
historically if you look back at some of the big names
I've all been very superstitious people
they've all got their own little good luck
rituals that they do before a big match or anything like that
and yeah to thumb your nose at superstition in such a blatant
way is that it would be previously unheard of by
the boys in the back so it was nice to see
but this match started as
we all sort of knew it would, there's been a lot of animosity
building between KO and Cody Rhodes on the
run up to this match and yeah, they don't disappoint
let's face it, it's
different, there are spots where Cody's attempting to
suplex Owens through the ladder
Cody takes a beer off
a member of the crowd and throws it in Kevin Owens face, they are, this is
not a match, this was an absolute
war
they put each other through
nothing is off limits in this match, it is a no DQ
style, ladders can be used as weapons, other things
can be bought in as weapons as well, I mean the ref is only really there to count
a to ensure that the title is brought back down
to earth and that nobody ends up dead basically
it's an absolutely, it has
been in the past an absolutely brutal match type
and we see that Kevin Owens is the first to attempt
a climb obviously doesn't go to plan otherwise this would be a
really short match for a PLE and
ain't no way they're about to do that to us so
yeah, I mean the crowd start chanting about
wanting tables and everything along those lines
it's a mini ladder is playing a massive part, I mean they've got a
step ladder, this thing was never going to be used to obtain the title
this was put there to be used to be
this was put here to be used as a
way to do some serious, serious harm
and do some serious, serious harm
it certainly does, I mean
Cody ends up at one point making a climb, looks like he's going to get
the title, he's hanging from the title, from the top of the ring
and we've seen people win ladder match types
with this in the past, not just in WWE but in other match
promotions as well
Cody attempting a dive in DDT but was
reversed into a powerbomb by KO, I mean these guys
absolutely went hell for leather against one another and I'll be honest
I was here for every last minute of it, I truly enjoyed
this match type and the crowd
seemed really, they were really getting behind it, not just where they chanting
for tables, they were sort of split which surprised me
because Kevin Owens has not been getting the nicest of receptions
up to this point but we've got the crowd chanting let's go Kevin
let's go Cody, yeah just absolutely
mayhem in the Lucas Oil field
yeah, I mean
Kevin Owens being his normal sort of heal, disrespectful
self, I mean props to Kevin Owens, he plays a phenomenal
heal part and really does
the part justice, it's really nice to see
a mox duster
that then uses the ring
on Cody, really sort of suckers Cody
in for it, I mean
KO even goes for his patented package pile driver
which Cody counted with a back body drop onto
an upturned ladder which, oh I mean
it looked brutal when it happened
and yeah, I don't think it did Kevin Owens
any good and will not do Kevin Owens any good in the long run
Kevin Owens viciously slams the back
of Cody's head off a ladder wedge between the bottom
and middle turnbuckle, I mean as I said these guys
absolutely went hell for leather
and then put Plexus Cody onto another ladder and officials come out to see if the match
can continue, there were points at this match where
even WWE officials were like are these guys still alive
are they gonna survive, are we gonna have to inform widows here
and
yeah, I mean at some point we've seen a lot where
I mean if you've watched WWE for a long time you know Kevin Owens
and on again off again best friendship with one
Sami Zayn who comes out to check on his friend
come out to check on his friend, not just Kevin Owens though
because Sami Zayn is also friends with Cody Rhodes and
this has caused some contention between Kevin and Cody
it's a whole twisted
mess of wires trying to get into this for it
Kevin Owens eventually ends up getting some colour
after being bounced repeatedly off that reinforced
announced desk as they keep sort of harping on about
I think they're trying to really put across the point that we're not gonna see that many
superstars go through the announced desk anymore
and Cody
at this point in the match they are beaten, they are broken
it's a wonder that either of them are still standing at this point
Cody hits a desperation, Crossroads
Kevin Owens
ends up hitting a low blow to Rhodes
KO tries the package pole driver again which is reversed
into an Alabama slammer through the
ladder off the announced desk and this was the scene
that if you've seen social media since the event you will have seen
so many times before this is Kevin Owens being
absolutely folded in two
intertwined with this ladder and
the man wasn't moving, he genuinely was
not moving and this was the point in the match where
Rhodes re-enters the ring
and climbs the ladder, brings down the title to retain
and remains the WWE
heavyweight champion
and yeah it's a case that
Rhodes even went as far as to say
you know what this is done, I'm drawing a line under it
celebrates the win over, standing over
Owens's lifeless body and I mean it was a sight to behold
watching Cody Rhodes sort of stand over
this man's lifeless body, not sit
and no hint of remorse in the champion
as well he shouldn't, this got personal, this was visceral
and it was a fantastic story told by both
Kevin Owens and Cody Rhodes
but yeah I mean
two traditional match types in
or two traditional matchups in this PLE
as the Royal Rumble is always there about
the Rumble match so we went
we had a small VT about a new developmental show that
WWE are bringing in and
yeah it's WWE Evolve
premiering on Tubi
which is a free streaming platform
so if you guys are interested in seeing the next generation of NXT
go and find Tubi spelt
T-U-B-I and this will be
uploaded on Wednesday night to
the
all Elite Wrestling or as we all know it
AEW
but yeah this sort of brings us to the end of our
Royal Rumble coverage and uh, do you know what?
I've really enjoyed the rumble I always really enjoy the
Rumble but I've really enjoyed the Rumble this year
you've been a few questionable decisions which you will have heard me be very vocal about
And I'm not sure that WWE have done the best thing in some of those decisions.
We'd love, me and Rich would love to hear about what you guys think.
We are in the process of setting up social medias for the podcast moving forward.
But please get in touch.
We've got an email address.
It's finishesandfactionsatgmail.com.
Drop us an email.
Let us know what you think.
Let us know what you think of the podcast, of the matches you've seen.
If there's any matches that we need to go away and watch and you'd like our comment on, drop us that email.
We're looking for ideas for some short form content for some other social media platforms,
which I will be more than happy to take a look at and see what we can do.
Now, the next time obviously we will be releasing an episode is for
Finishes and Factions Does Monday Night Raw.
The Raw that follows the Royal Rumble.
And this is where we will get all of the fallout of tonight and everything else that goes along with it.
But for now, I've been Adam and this has been
Finishes and Factions Does the Royal Rumble.
Thank you for sticking around.
Come back soon to catch some action.