There’s an instant atmosphere to this match. Despite Sasha Banks working heel, the crowd are chanting for both superstars from the start because they are quite simply two of the best in the business, as well as being instrumental in the recent evolution of women’s wrestling in WWE.
For a long time women’s matches were given no more than about five minutes, and though there were legendary female wrestlers who carried the torch for decades, the division reached a whole new level when the Four Horsewomen (Bayley, Becky Lynch, Charlotte Flair, and Sasha Banks) started making waves in 2015. Since then, Banks and Lynch have been involved in many firsts, including Banks being part of the first ever women’s main event at a WWE pay-per-view. This hell in a cell match came six months into Becky Lynch’s championship run, a run that began when she pinned Ronda Rousey in the first ever women’s main event of WrestleMania.
Lynch, also known as The Man, was the most over babyface (good guy) in the whole company at this point, and had been for a while. Banks, the Legit Boss, had recently returned from a four month soul searching hiatus, during which she presumably discovered the part of herself that wanted to hit Lynch really hard with a chair until she was granted a title shot. Both women were at the top of their game, and it was time to see which of them deserved to reside at the top of the division as they collided for the Raw Women’s Championship. The result of their collision was an innovative yet brutal hell in a cell match, with spots that no one had thought up in 20 years of the cell’s history.
