As seen at Sunday’s WWE Fastlane event, Bill Goldberg defeated Kevin Owens in 21 seconds after Chris Jericho came out and distracted Owens before the match started. This match was discussed on today’s installment of Wrestling Observer Radio and Dave Meltzer believes there are a couple of factors in why WWE booked this main event the way they did.
The belief is that the match was booked short had to do with the company not wanting to risk injury to Goldberg, given his age and they don’t want him going into WrestleMania hurt. The other reason has to do with the company being afraid to put on a bad match. It’s well documented that Goldberg can’t really perform long matches. A majority of his matches in his prime were only 5 minutes or less.
Logically, the finish they did was the best finish they could possibly have storyline wise going into WrestleMania. It setup two title matches for the event — Goldberg vs. Lesnar for the Universal Title and Jericho vs. Owens for the United States Title.
There was also talk that the finish of this match and the RAW Women’s Championship could play a role with the on-going Mick Foley and Stephanie McMahon storyline, which could ultimately lead to Foley being fired.