Saraya discusses changing her in-ring style now that she is returning to the squared circle.
Saraya, formerly Paige in WWE was recently cleared to wrestle again after nearly five years of forced retirement due to injury. Now, she is building towards her first match back, a showdown with Britt Baker at AEW Full Gear 2022. After five years away, she knows she has to change her wrestling style in order to stay safe in the ring and be able to live out her dream as long as possible now that she has this second chance.
Speaking with Renee Paquette on The Sessions, Saraya explained how she will be changing her style and noted that attacks from behind would have to be extremely controlled and called ahead of time.
"I wasn’t too crazy before when I wrestled, I would do a lot of mat work and that kind of stuff. I did love taking a bump. That was my favorite thing, to take a bump," she said. "I’m not going to be bumping like crazy. There is going to be bumps, I can’t just go into a match with zero bumps. I’m fully aware of stuff I can’t do when it comes to anything from behind. That’s more of a PTSD thing too. ‘Please don’t do anything from behind.’ That’s something I absolutely would not tolerate. That would piss me off. Until I’m fully comfortable with something, don’t do anything from behind when I’m not aware of it. if it’s something you’re going to call, a forearm across the back and stuff, I’m talking about like a kick or something you could easily lose control over. That’s something I have to be cautious of. For the most part, the bumping, I’m doing some training and the bumping is different. I have to adjust how I did it because I was a person who would just fling my body back and it would be mostly neck. I have to learn how to flatback bump properly without creaming or killing myself."
She concluded, "This match is a big moment. People haven’t seen me wrestle in five years and they’ve only seen me wrestle in a WWE capacity."
For now, she will only be wrestling once a month but Saraya gets the opportunity to do more character work and compete in gimmick matches as her comeback gets underway. Learn more about that here.
Fans can check out the full card for AEW Full Gear 2022 at this link. Fightful will have full coverage of the event as it happens on Saturday, November 26, 2022.
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