Clash At The Castle feels like a much bigger deal now than it did when it was announced, primarily due to the main event match between Drew McIntyre and Roman Reigns. These two have been on a collision course since WrestleMania 38, when The Head Of The Table beat Brock Lesnar to unify WWE's two prominent men's championships. It's a bout that's been moved around on the calendar—at one point, there was a rumor that the match would headline Hell In A Cell—but the date is set in stone now. On September 3, Reigns and McIntyre will battle in front of more than 70,000 people in what will be WWE's first pay-per-view caliber show in the UK in more than 30 years.
Roman Reigns is in the middle of a run of a lifetime. He's been Universal Champion for 724 days and counting, and he's finally gotten over with fans after almost a decade of trying. Vince McMahon always wanted to make him work as the babyface heir to John Cena's unseeable throne, but that never worked. The shift to The Tribal Chief gimmick and the Bloodline stable has done wonders for his career, and Reigns has never felt like a bigger deal than he does now. Then there's McIntyre, who carried the WWE Championship through the company's dark and fanless days in the ThunderDome. He was a world champion who had once been fired by the company, only to climb back to the very top of the mountain. Yet there wasn't an audience on hand to cheer for him when he triumphed and lifted that belt above his head at a surreal WrestleMania 36.
McIntyre not getting that thunderous ovation live in front of a packed stadium removed the gravity from what should have been a career-defining moment. Usually, beating Brock Lesnar at the Showcase Of The Immortals is a career-making event, but that wasn't the case for McIntyre. He'll always be a former WWE Champion, sure. He never had that WrestleMania moment, though. The kind that brought Cody Rhodes back over from AEW. The kind that acts such as CM Punk still likely crave. "Deserves" probably gets thrown around too much in the professional wrestling business, but McIntyre deserves to hear a live crowd roar as he gets his hand raised in Cardiff.
All Roads Lead To Home For Drew McIntyre
Things tend to happen for a reason. Trite as it may be, McIntyre missing out on his WrestleMania moment would make a win at Clash At The Castle even sweeter for him and his fans. Hailing from the United Kingdom, it was there that he grew into the superstar he is today after WWE fired him back in 2014. It could be argued that McIntyre and his fiery promos are what put EVOLVE on the map for fans in North America.
Once he returned to WWE, he'd grown into the superstar Vince McMahon had envisioned all those years ago. Only it was made more remarkable because he had to find it on his own. The WWE hasn't programmed McIntyre. He spent time in NXT to learn the ins and outs of how to work on television, of course. But he's his own wrestler, through and through. If Triple H and WWE want to move on from Reigns as champion while creating a megastar in McIntyre, Clash At The Castle is the place to do it. No one else at any other time has made more sense when it comes to dethroning Roman Reigns.