5 ways to address Asuka's injury and NXT Women's Championship
On August 21, 2017, WWE announced that Asuka had suffered an injury at NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn III in her match with Ember Moon.
At this time, the information is quite basic: she broke her collarbone; she isn't cleared to compete, and no official timetable is set for her return but an estimation is roughly 6-8 weeks from now.
All we know for sure is that injuries are never a welcome problem, and WWE is going to have to figure out the best course of action for how to address the situation going forward.
Will a new champion be crowned? Will Asuka somehow still keep the title despite taking time off?
The way I see it, there are five possible ways WWE could go about handling Asuka's injury and all five of them have their merits.
#1 Play the waiting game
The simplest, easiest thing to do is absolutely nothing, but that depends on having the right amount of luck to be able to even entertain that option.
If Asuka is only going to miss 6-8 weeks as expected, that puts her on the shelf for a while, but not so long that she can get in the way of their plans.
It's doubtful WWE was going to have her wrestle much over the course of the next few episodes of NXT now that she's become such a featured commodity, as those wrestlers are typically kept aside for special event appearances.
Thankfully, WWE just hit the reset button and will start a new set of tapings soon, so there are a few days to plot out a course that gives her enough time to rest without drawing too much attention to it.
In the meantime, the focus can be put on building up her challenger, as whoever faces Asuka next needs to have as much momentum going in their direction to make them seem worthy of fighting the undefeated Empress of Tomorrow.
With a few weeks left to spare before NXT TakeOver: Houston, Asuka can heal up and be ready to go at that event as if nothing was giving her a problem, to begin with.