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Final Card for Sunday’s Slammiversary Event

The following matches are confirmed for Sunday’s Impact Wrestling Slammiversary event:

Title Unification Match
GFW Global Champion Alberto El Patron with Dos Caras vs. Impact World Heayweight Champion Bobby Lashley with King Mo

Title Unification Match
GFW Women’s Champion Sienna vs. Impact Knockouts Champion Rosemary

Fatal 4 Way for the Impact Tag Team & GFW Tag Team Titles
Laredo Kid & Garza Jr. vs. Naomichi Marufuji & Taiji Ishimori vs. Drago & El Hijo del Fantasma vs. The LAX

2 of 3 Falls for the X Division Title
Low Ki vs. Sonjay Dutt

Full Metal Mayhem Tag Team Match
Eddie Edwards and Alisha Edwards vs. Davey Richards and Angelina Love

Strap Match
James Storm vs. Ethan Carter III

Jeremy Borash & Joseph Park vs. Josh Mathews & Scott Steiner

DeAngelo Williams & Impact Grand Champion Moose vs. Chris Adonis & Eli Drake

Spoiler: Winner of the Independence Day Battle Royal

It was announced this past week that an Independence Day Battle Royal will take place on Tuesday’s episode of SmackDown Live next week. The winner of that bout will move on to face Kevin Owens for the WWE United States Championship at the July 23rd WWE Battleground event.

According to PWInsider, AJ Styles is expected to leave the battle royal victorious. Styles is currently scheduled to face Owens for the Title at Battleground. As of this writing, Styles is the only participant in the match, however more names will likely be revealed in the next couple of days heading into the match.

Bobby Roode Wants John Cena at WrestleMania

While speaking to Card Subject to Change, Bobby Roode revealed that he would like to face John Cena at WrestleMania. Roode made the following remarks when asked ho he would love to face in the ring, dead or alive:

“One of the main reasons that I got into the business was I’m a huge fan of Curt Hennig, Mr. Perfect. I have like 12 hours of Curt Hennig footage that I watch all the time. So if there’s probably one guy that I would have loved to have just met it would have been Curt Hennig. And if you’re talking about potential matches that I would love to have, that’d probably be John Cena at Wrestlemania.”

You can listen to the podcast here.

Two Possible Matches for WWE Battleground

Dave Meltzer discussed the upcoming WWE Backlash event on today’s installment of Wrestling Observer Radio. As of this writing there are only two matches confirmed for the show. Those matches are Jinder Mahal defending his WWE World Title against Randy Orton in a Punjabi Prison match and The Usos defending their tag team championships against The New Day.

Meltzer revealed that two other matches that will take place on the card. Those matches are:

Sami Zayn vs. Mike Kanellis
Nakamura vs. Baron Corbin

WWE Battleground takes place on July 23rd from the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. As always, we will be providing live play-by-play coverage of the event.

Former Impact Talent Debuts at NXT Tapings

Former Impact talent Gunner made his debut at the NXT Live Event in St. Petersburg, FL tonight. Here are photos of his new look:

Gunner left Impact Wrestling back in 2015 and he was considering retiring from the business. Plans changed and rumors of him signing with the company date back to a couple months ago.

Bischoff on Wrestling Recap – Russo’s Restraining Order, RAW & Smackdown on WWE Network, Should Joe Defeat Lesnar? More!

Bischoff is joined on today’s show by his co-host Nick Hausman.

Bischoff comments on the news that Vince Russo filed a restraining order against Jim Cornette recently. He simply calls this action by Russo ‘bizarre’, and he’s getting sick and tired of talking about Russo. At first it was fun to poke fun at Russo because he’s so easy to get fired up, but at this point it’s just silly.

Hausman mentions that initially fans thought all these verbal jabs between Russo, Cornette, Bischoff and Prichard were a work, which would ultimately result in some live debate tour featuring all men. It’s obvious now that was never the case. Bischoff mentions that we was offered a pretty good pay day recently to do an in-ring segment with Russo for an indie promotion in P.E.I.,Canada. Even though the money was good, he turned it down because Russo is just too weird to be around.

Bischoff thought the Samoa Joe/Brock Lesnar segment from RAW this past week created some mystique, and that’s something that has been sorely missing from WWE’s product lately. Joe is a great character, and luckily WWE has made a commitment to Joe’s character because now Joe comes off as a believable threat to Lesnar. Bischoff thinks Joe will give Lesnar some of the best matches he has had in recent memory.

WWE Changes Plans for SummerSlam Main Event

As previously reported, SummerSlam was expected to be headlined by Braun Strowman vs. Brock Lesnar for the WWE Universal Title this year. Those plans have changed and WWE has decided to go a different direction, according to the Wrestling Observer.

Dave Meltzer reported on Wrestling Observer Radio that Lesnar vs. Strowman is not the plan anymore. Meltzer mentioned that Lesnar will defend his WWE Universal Championship against Roman Reigns or Samoa Joe at SummerSlam instead of Strowman.

If WWE decides to book Reigns against Lesnar at SummerSlam, it’s expected that Roman will carry the championship all the way until WrestleMania 34, where he would then defend it against the “free agent” John Cena. This could be one of the reasons as to why Cena is now working both RAW and SmackDown Live shows.

Alberto Del Rio & Paige Reportedly Still Broken Up

It was reported over the weekend that Alberto Del Rio dumped Paige over after the two had another argument. After these reports surfaced online, Paige took to her Twitter account to debunk those reports.

Del Rio also sent out a message but deleted it on Twitter. It read:

OK MARKS LEAVE US ALONE
INTERNET SHIT IS INTERNET SHIT WE ARE PERFECT AS ALWAYS

Dave Meltzer discussed this topic on today’s installment of Wrestling Observer Radio. Meltzer mentioned that he has spoke to people close to the situation and he can confirm that as of yesterday that the two are not together.

Possible Return Feud for John Cena Revealed

As many of you are aware, John Cena will be making his return to WWE programming on the July 4th episode of SmackDown Live. WWE has been hyping his return for around a month now, however it’s unknown exactly who he will be feuding with upon his return.

Dave Meltzer speculated on today’s installment of Wrestling Observer Radio that once Cena returns to television, he will enter into a feud with the returning Rusev. Meltzer attributes this speculation to the company not having anyone available for either individual to work with. This feud would eventually leave to a blowoff match at either WWE Battleground or SummerSlam. Meltzer didn’t specify which event.

X-Pac 1, 2, 360 Recap – The Ball’s Appearance on RAW, Joe vs. Lesnar, X-Pac Almost Stars on GLOW? More!

X-Pac opens today’s show speaking about Cody Rhodes’ recent ROH World Title victory. He says that he’s very proud of Rhodes, who took a huge risk and left the safe surroundings of WWE in order to bet on himself. It’s safe to say that Rhodes’ bet is paying off right now. X-Pac says that he heard a lot of friends criticize Rhodes’ decision, some even calling him a mark for doing this, but X-Pac was happy to see Rhodes follow his heart.

X-Pac mentions that he was lucky enough to be backstage at RAW this week in Los Angeles, where a lot of interesting things were happening. He was able to sit and talk with guest star Josh Duhamel for a while, and he was able to experience the backstage reaction during the MizTV segment featuring LaVar Ball and his two sons.

He says that WWE should have known that this was going to be a disaster and they very well might have, but they obviously didn’t care. He says that LaVar Ball went off script nearly right from the start and was jumping all over everyone else’s lines. In spite of all that, and even after the youngest son used derogatory language, McMahon was still urging cameramen to follow them to the backstage area and through Gorilla, because he didn’t want the cameras to miss anything good.