That was rather sudden. WWE presents a lot of shows during their week and there are a lot of wrestlers that are supposed to appear on those shows. However, sometimes wrestlers cannot make their scheduled appearances for one reason or another. In worse case scenarios, this can be due to some kind of medical issue, which was the case on Saturday night.
Finn Balor did not appear as advertised at Saturday’s Smackville special when he was scheduled to face Shinsuke Nakamura for the Intercontinental Title. Nakamura faced and defeated Ali instead. According to Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful.com, Balor was hospitalized with a stomach flu earlier in the week. Balor is currently scheduled to face Bray Wyatt at Summerslam.
I dunno, but he had been hospitalized with a stomach flu. https://t.co/GIZyS1tkwg
— Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful.com (@SeanRossSapp) July 28, 2019
There was a match in its place. Check out the replacement match:
Opinion: That’s rather annoying but given that it is an illness and not something related to a bone or a muscle or something like that, there is a good chance that this is going to be something short term. Balor is scheduled to take a hiatus from WWE after Summerslam anyway so you might want to get used to not having him around. Hopefully he’s fine enough soon, which sounds like it will be the case.
What do you see next for Balor? Was Ali a good replacement? 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 History Of In Your House.
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!