The 8-Ball: Top 8 Reasons Why AJ-Paige Should Be Hell in a Cell

This week the Magic 8-Ball uses all of its list-of-eight powers to make one point. The proposition here is simple: AJ and Paige should at the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view in an actual Hell in a Cell. That’s right, women in the match that Mick Foley made famous by taking bumps that should have killed him, the match in which WWE legends have spilled an ocean of blood. It’s the structure in which the men of the WWE traditionally unleash their full fury.

Well, supposedly hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Hath not AJ and Paige scorned each other? The 8-Ball believes they have. The WWE has never pulled the trigger on women fighting inside its most diabolical structure. Here’s why it should:

Let’s face it, we wrestling fans have become complacent and the WWE bears some responsibility for making us that way. The situation is critical. We’re in a rut. We need to be properly and thoroughly confused. Plus, it would wake up fans when it comes to Divas matches. We’ve been conditioned not to care after years of cat fights and squash matches. If we know what to expect pretty much all the time, why are we watching? The answer is we’re barely watching the WWE’s female wrestlers. The braintrust in Stamford needs to start messing with our expectations. An AJ-Paige Hell in a Cell match would do that quicker and more forcefully than anything else WWE Creative could dream up

The AJ-Paige-Nikki Bella match at Night of Champions came off pretty well, but unfortunately it also displayed that the wooden acting and so what consequences of the Bella feud have taken over the Divas division. AJ and Paige should be burying the Bellas. In fact, they should storming into the ring to lay waste to the Bellas, just for setting everyone else in the locker room back three decades. Forget about the tedious Mean Girls level bitchfest. AJ and Paige in a Cell would rescue us from that.

Exactly where are AJ and Paige headed if not to Hell in a Cell? Skipping contests? A frenemy spank inferno? Because no one cares that Alicia Fox has been brought in to be the estrogen-laced version of Damien Mizdow. AJ and Paige have upped the stakes in their feud. They’ve each gotten cheap wins and hard-fought wins. Paige has turned, now she’s bringing in another diva to stack the odds in her favor. Time for AJ to get pissed off and tell Paige she’s sick of the nonsense. What she wants is to kick Paige’s pasty ass without Paige getting any excuses, so it’s time to take this inside Hell in a Cell.

You can hear crickets chirping almost every time Paige makes an entrance or cuts a promo. She’s dull. The hell turns helps, because a lot of people who ignored her when she was a face now can boo her for the crime of boring them to tears. The good thing about Paige is she can be fantastic in the ring. She can do actual chain wrestling. She can counter the counter to her counter. Inside a cell she would stand out as the sadistic one looking to inflict punishment in order to make a statement. Basically, the match would be so different and Paige’s ability to deliver in the match would be high enough that we might forget how dull she is.

I’ve said a few times that in AJ the WWE is sitting on the female equivalent of Hulk Hogan. She has an innate ability to get over with the audience. I’ve seen some argue AJ isn’t anything amazing in the ring. Sure, but neither was Hogan. Doesn’t matter. She connects during pretty much every moment of what she does. Moving her into the Divas title mix was a demotion when it happened. She had been a central player in the CM Punk-Daniel Bryan and Dolph Ziggler-John Cena feuds. AJ is slumming it with the Divas belt around her waist. And having her do the normal Divas schlock is a waste of talent. If you’ve got a star, then let her shine. It makes all the sense in the world for AJ to blaze new trails for the division, to kick it up a few notches.

I don’t know what they’re going to call it (though obviously I’ve got a name for it), but as of the debut of the WWE Network we entered a new era. How we consume the WWE’s product has changed. What we’re watching will change with it. The WWE proved during the past decade that it’s really good at taking its fans for granted. It stopped reacting to our reactions. When people piped up about their dissatisfaction with the product, the WWE turned a deaf ear. Per entry #8 above, it conditioned us to some very cautious booking and storytelling. Yet the company now needs to make its network must-watch material. When you pay that $9.99 a month do you feel like you got the best deal ever? You should. Allowing AJ and Paige to take their hostilities inside Hell in a Cell would be a step in the right direction. Watch it for the novelty. Watch it for the spectacle. Watch it for the morbid curiosity of seeing if they botch it. Whatever the reason, you’ve pretty much got to watch that one.

I’m starting to wonder if the WWE brass has developed collective amnesia about how to deliver a big event. They do fine at WrestleMania and SummerSlam, but many of their secondary pay-per-views have felt like Raw episodes. Payback was pure transitional fodder. The main events of Money in the Bank and Night of Champions went over like lead balloons. In all those cases, fan legitimately could have asked themselves if $9.99 is way too much to pay for a product this shoddy. Vince, you gots to do better. The goal for Hell in a Cell should be to build a card which blows us away, which makes everyone who sees it insist to everyone who didn’t that they missed the coolest thing ever. Hard to get there from where they are at the moment, but a Divas Hell in a Cell match which reshapes what we expect from the WWE’s female talents would be a big step in the right direction.

If you’ve watched what the women in NXT are doing or you’ve caught TNA’s recent revitalization of its Knockouts division, then it’s pretty clear the WWE Divas need to step up their game. It’s time to stop being the slap-and-tickle division. The women can be scantily clad and the stories can still trend toward hokey, but the wrestling has got to become more legit. In general, modern women don’t go for the notion that they’re the “lite” version of their male counterparts, even in sports. Maybe AJ and Paige can’t bench press a Volkswagen, but they should be able to go as hard in that ring as any man, or at least as hard as Miz. Time to make the case that the WWE has the most talented in-ring female performers in the business. AJ and Paige are right two women to push this envelope. Now is the time to do it. Show us that you think women can be more than superfluous sex kittens. Be a star, WWE.

I take requests.. The purpose of this column is to look forward. What could be? What should be? What is and what should never be? What would make more sense? 411 has plenty of columns that count down and rank things that happened in the past. This is not one of those columns. The Magic 8-Ball is here to gaze into the future. If there’s someone