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UNIONDALE, N.Y. — Had WWE Evolution happened a year ago — had it happened six months ago, really — Becky Lynch might have waltzed into a match at Charlotte Flair's side with a megawatt smile, a snappy pun and a plucky attitude that persisted whether she won or lost. But it didn’t happen six months ago; it happened now. And this Becky Lynch came in with a dead-eyed stare, the SmackDown Women’s Title in her grasp and Charlotte across the ring from her in a Last Woman Standing Match.
And this Becky Lynch didn’t hesitate to capitalize on all three of those things. The Irish Lass Kicker plumbed the hitherto-untested depths of her own sadism to turn the Nassau Coliseum into the ECW Arena, brutalizing her former friend with Kendo sticks and chairs in an effort to keep Charlotte down past the count of 10. Charlotte rose to the occasion (or sunk to Becky’s level, depending on how you look at it), smashing Lynch through a table with a Swanton bomb and threading her legs through a ladder for a torturous variation of the Figure-Eight Leglock.
The longer the match went on, the more it seemed to favor Charlotte, who grew more and more incensed as the minutes tick by. The six-time champion chopped Becky back to the ring when the champ tried to take a walk, rose from underneath a pile of rubble with a red-faced “Is that all you got?!” and tanned Lynch with a Kendo stick as she pursued her around the ring. Becky, visibly running out of tricks, still had one more than her challenger. When Flair set up a table on the outside and laid Becky out for a moonsault, The Irish Lass Kicker instead rose up and powerbombed her opponent through the pine, a maneuver that was narrowly enough to keep her down for the count.
Some, of course, may be surprised at Becky’s cruelty, or even that she retained. After all, she was facing a Flair, and one who has certainly proven herself worthy of the name. But in many ways, everything over the last few months led to this exact match with this exact result: Ever since she turned on Charlotte at SummerSlam, Becky made it very clear that she would do anything to be SmackDown Women’s Champion. In a match where she could do anything, the truth may be that Charlotte Flair never stood a chance.