Fortunate Injuries

By Scott Keith on 20 August 2024

I have been thinking about some of the injuries to top of the card people recently especially after Jacob Fatu’s possibly worked injury. It seems to me that you would want to keep him and Roman apart from each other as much as possible to build up to a potential confrontation between the two. His injury at summerslam effectively accomplished this.
It got me thinking about CM Punk. I think one of the reasons his feud with Drew has been so effective is that they have been unable to physically fight each other for months and have had to focus on building the feud without it for all this time. It also conveniently pushed Punk out of a role at mania when we were looking at potential matches for him Cody Rock Drew etc. I would say that for a top guy being out for half a year, this was a fortunate injury.
You can also make the argument that the logic could be applied to Rhea Ripley’s injury. I think her injury was the best thing that could have happened to her story with Liv. It gave Liv time in the story to work her way into judgement day and Dom’s heart.
Summerslam was the natural spot to have these two matches and it would have been hard for these characters to be around all the time without physical contact breaking out. I think about Rollins current that takes him out of the Drew Punk story and I think it’s a well timed hiatus. I also think it’s interesting that in all of these cases we never saw a precise video where any of these wrestlers suffered the exact injury that put them out.
Two questions do you agree that these injuries were able to make each storyline better? Also do you think there is a chance of HHH using the injury excuse as a way to write out a wrestler for convenience sake or is he just a good booker that can think of ways to use injuries to service the story?

I think the most “convenient” in recent memory was Cody's torn pec, because it gave the visual of him fighting like a top babyface and then got him away from TV for the period of time when WWE is traditionally the coldest. It was dead perfect timing.

There's always this paranoia among wrestlers that you have to work through injuries because people won't remember you and you'll lose your spot, but in fact it often ends up that the opposite is true. You get some time off to heal and then come back fresher with a big reaction. Just look at Britt Baker. Hunter seems to understand that too.