Why Did Randy Orton Miss The European Tour?

Time off for a good career. As you might have noticed, the WWE’s schedule of late has been all over the place. In about six weeks, they’ve been on their usual schedule, had WrestleMania 34, gone to South Africa, gone to Saudi Arabia for the Greatest Royal Rumble, had Backlash, and now they’re on the European tour. Well most of them are at least, but there’s one major name missing and for a pretty good reason.

Maybe he didn’t want to deal with this again.

This Day In History: A reunited Shield Triple Power Bombs Randy Orton on a table: WWE Payback 2015

According to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Randy Orton has stayed home from the European tour as part of his reduced live events schedule. Orton, thirty eight years old, has been working a reduced house show schedule since last summer. Despite wrestling a lighter schedule for the house shows, Orton is still active on the main roster and was challenging for the United States Title at Backlash earlier this month. He should be back on the regular television shows soon.

In case you need some Orton RKOing people out of nowhere.

Opinion: I mean, it’s not like Orton hasn’t earned the right to not work as much over the years. The problem is Orton isn’t exactly interesting at this point and his performance at Backlash was almost unforgivable. The guy has been around so long that it’s hard to say what it would take to freshen him up, but maybe the vacation will help him out a little bit. You can only get so much out of the same guy over and over again and it’s been showing with Orton for a long time.

What do you think of Orton’s recent years? How can he get back to top form? 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 26 wrestling books. His latest book is the WWE Grab Bag.

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