Roman Reigns is sitting on the top of the card and WWE really wants people to cheer him. As noted earlier it’s doubtful Roman Reigns and Braun Strowman pulled off a double-turn after their match at Great Balls Of Fire. Even though it would make sense in every sense of story, WWE is apparently booking in a different direction at this point where if it feels good, just go with it.
“So like I said it’s all — there’s a lot of shades of gray here” Meltzer explained. “So I’m not saying that’s good. I’m just saying that’s what they’re doing. I don’t necessarily — when it comes to Roman Reigns it doesn’t really matter because the people boo him anyway. So it’s like — who knows? Who knows how they’ll react. Maybe they’ll cheer him off this (referring to the after match attack on Braun Strowman at Great Balls Of Fire) — I don’t think so, but maybe they will and if they do then maybe they’ve manipulated their audience.”
“At the end of the day that is the idea that ‘somehow, someway we gotta figure out a way to get them to cheer [Reigns].'”
Then Meltzer compared Roman Reigns to a very famous New Japan star drawing similarities to their own unique circumstances.
“Maybe it could be a Naito thing,” Meltzer said. “You know if they’d done this the same thing — if they’d turned him heel two years ago they might be ready — people might be cheering him like crazy today for all we know. Maybe they wouldn’t — I don’t know. But you know that’s what happened with Naito. I mean that was the whole lesson of Naito to me was the whole thing of he was going nowhere as a babyface and [New Japan] wanted him to be a top babyface.”
“[Naito] went and turned heel and low-and-behold his merchandise started selling and he became — everybody started liking him. And now it’s a situation where — when he wrestled Tanahashi it wasn’t, even though the people like him — the fact is people were kinda behind Tanahashi in that match. So it’s like — it goes back and forth there are well.”
“So yeah, we’ll see — but yeah I couldn’t imagine that [WWE was] looking at Braun Strowman as a babyface after this, but we’ll see. But as far as Roman goes, I mean the goal is for Roman to be a babyface… how they get there, I don’t know. If they think ‘everything else we’ve done doesn’t work so we’ll make him a big heel and that’ll turn him babyface,’ maybe they’ll go with that. Although they’ve resisted that for two years too so we’ll have to wait and see.”
If you use any of the quotes from this article please credit Wrestling Observer Radio with a H/T to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription
