Short And Sweet. What You Saw At Crown Jewel Between Brock Lesnar And Cain Velasquez Was Not The Original Plan.

According to plan….maybe? Crown Jewel has come and gone and for maybe the only time in the history of the Saudi Arabian shows, the reception has been mostly positive. The show was full of mostly entertaining and well put together matches and even included a few surprises. One of the most talked about matches was also one of the shortest, with WWE Champion Brock Lesnar defending against former UFC Heavyweight Champion Cain Velasquez, who took the title from Lesnar just over nine years ago. It was a big time match but it was over in a hurry, which was the case for a reason.

According to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the match was always scheduled to be a short one, though the match was made even shorter due to Velasquez’s knee injury. The match was originally planned to be similar to Lesnar vs. Goldberg from WrestleMania 33 with an exchange of hard hitting moves, but the knee injury was worse than originally expected. Therefore the match was switched to more of an exchange of strikes until Lesnar hit Velasquez in the knee, allowing him to grab a Kimura for the win.

Velasquez has been in need of knee surgery since his most recent mixed martial arts fight earlier this year but has postponed it for his match against Lesnar. At the same time, Velasquez is scheduled to team with Rey Mysterio for a match in Mexico City on November 30, but it is not clear if he will be able to work through the knee injury at the moment. Provided he makes it to the match, it would only be his third to date and possibly his last before he goes off for knee surgery. It is not known when Velasquez would be back in the ring after recovery.

Blink and you’ll miss it. Check out a pretty intense fight:

Opinion: I can’t say I’m surprised at this one as Velasquez’s knee is in terrible shape and a hard hitting, intense match on something like that could have been a disaster. Thankfully he seems ready to go under the knife and get everything fixed, though it could be a long time before we see him get back inside the ring. I’m not sure how good Velasquez is going to be when he’s healthy again, but his match in AAA suggested that he has a lot of tools to be a big star in wrestling. Now if only he can stay healthy.

Has Velasquez impressed you so far? What do you see him doing in WWE? 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 30 wrestling books. His latest book is KB’s Complete 2004 Monday Night Raw Reviews.

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