This weekend, Shayna Baszler is set to go one-on-one against Becky Lynch for the RAW Women’s Championship.
Many can argue that the match-up was written once Lynch defeated Ronda Rousey and Charlotte Flair in the main event of WrestleMania 35. Since then, this personal feud has been slowly building, first with their face-to-face encounter before Survivor Series 2019, and then Baszler's shocking victory over Lynch and Bayley at the respective pay-per-view.
However, the 39-year-old wanted to make a statement on her return to RAW this past February, and Baszler surely did that by biting the neck of the RAW Women’s Champion after a violent beatdown. To the former NXT Women’s Champion, she wanted to turn people’s heads and leave an unforgettable impression:
"If I was to just come out there and beat Becky up like I did to everyone during the Survivor Series build everyone would have been like, 'oh there's Shayna doing that thing again,'" Baszler explained to Stephanie Chase at Digital Spy. "I knew I had to do something to turn everyone's heads and it got everyone talking and I think it got a lot more attention than if I had just done the usual thing. So no press is bad press. Everybody was watching and everybody saw that clip, even if they didn't see it live, so it did exactly what it needed to."
The fact that her big WrestleMania debut is taking place inside an empty arena doesn’t bother Baszler at all, as the #1 contender believes it opens up a bunch of possibilities to get creative:
"It opens up a bunch of possibilities that nobody would have even thought of if it wasn't this way. It's going to be interesting to see how creative people get. It's obviously going to be very different and not just because there's no audience but this has never been done and now we're free to be as creative as we want with this stuff. I think there is kind of a buzz about, you know, 'what's this going to be like?' I think there's a different sort of excitement to it."
Read the full interview where Baszler talks about the world needing entertainment right now, being a unique challenge for Becky Lynch, and so much more.