News

Update on Bayley’s injury and anonymous wrestler criticizes WWE’s training drills

Aaron Rift

As previously noted, Bayley suffered a torn ACL while doing training drills at the Performance Center in preparation for WWE’s return to live event touring. Bayley had her surgery and the belief is that she will be out of action for around nine months. Bayley posted the following on Twitter from the hospital…

Dave Meltzer of F4WOnline.com speculated that Bayley could remain on television as a character with her talk show. Meltzer noted the following about last-minute changes being made to last week’s Smackdown…

“The show was thrown for a loop when Bayley was injured and there were other things as well as Vince was rewriting the show at the last minute.”

In a trivia note, it’s possible that Bayley will go a full two years without wrestling in front of a live crowd of paying fans. Bayley’s last match in front a paying audience was on the March 6th 2020 edition of Smackdown and she did not compete at Wrestlemania 37.

A veteran wrestler who asked to be anonymous gave the following statement to Meltzer regarding the training drills that ultimately led to Bayley’s injury…

“I wrestled full time for 15 years. If you are in shape enough to do TV and PPV matches you need zero conditioning or preparation to go back on the road and do live events. My entire regular career I never did a single in ring drill for conditioning. I did cardio at the gym sure but never additional ring time. The only time I did in ring drills for conditioning was when I took post ‘retirement’ bookings and had to have a big match for the first time in a year or so but that’s because I hadn’t had a match in a year and was going to have to do 30 minutes at a top level. When I went from working 1 match a week locally to 7 nights a week. I did zero drills to prepare. The only thing harder about 7 nights a week to once a week is the wear and tear on your body, so doing more wear and tear with drills to prepare makes it worse not better.”