Here Comes The Hard Part. Kofi Kingston’s First WWE Championship Defense Set.

The first of perhaps many. Back at WrestleMania 35, a lot of things changed. There were some great moments on the show, but the best of them all might have been Kofi Kingston becoming the new WWE Champion. It was a very long time coming and the moment worked better than anyone could have expected. Now that he is champion though, people are coming after the title and now we know the first challenger.

This week on SmackDown Live, a title match was confirmed for Money In The Bank as Kevin Owens will be Kingston’s first challenger. Owens turned on Kingston last week and beat him down to end the show after two weeks of being an honorary member of the New Day. Kingston issued the challenge for the match with Owens coming out to accept. The two have never actually had a televised one on one match.

It was a brutal beatdown. Check out what set up the title match:

Opinion: It’s not like this was the biggest surprise in the world and that’s not a bad thing in this case. Kingston doesn’t seem like the most likely long term champion in the world but a successful pay per view title defense would be a nice touch. The segment worked and the match will be good, but even more importantly, a title change isn’t out of the way. Just let them do their thing and it’s going to be fine.

Do you like this match? Who do you think leaves as champion? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his Amazon author page with 28 wrestling books. His latest book is the the Complete 2000 Monday Nitro and Thunder Reviews Part 1.

Get the latest and greatest in professional wrestling news by signing up for our daily email newsletter. Just look below for “GET EXCLUSIVE UPDATES” to sign up. We are proud to offer our popular Wrestling Rumors app and encourage you to download it for an optimized user experience. It is available for Android and also on iOS. Thank you for reading!