Saraya Admits She Was Blown Up During In-Ring Return At Full Gear

Saraya has commented on how she was feeling following her AEW debut match at Full Gear when she says she was “blowing the f**k up.”

The final AEW pay-per-view of 2022 was called Full Gear with one of the big matches being Saraya’s in-ring AEW debut against Dr. Britt Baker DMD. It was highly anticipated because the last time Saraya had a wrestling match was in December 2017 when she was known as Paige in WWE. A major neck surgery followed and then she was medically disqualified from competing in WWE until her contract ran out in early 2022.

After debuting in AEW in September 2022, it was unknown if Saraya was going to be able to wrestle again. She has told the story about how she was cleared to wrestle on Halloween, which led to AEW officially announcing the Saraya-Baker match at Full Gear.

Saraya had an impressive showing against Baker at Full Gear as she picked up the win. There was a point in the match where Saraya was selling the neck injury just to tease the audience a bit, but she was physically fine.

Recently, Saraya spoke to WHOO’s House Podcast about how blown up she was during the match, which is another way of saying she was tired during the match due to the ring rust involved.

“My head was down the whole time I got back. This producer is like, ‘Why was your head down the whole time?’ And I was like, ‘I was blowing the f*** up. I could not breathe. I was like, ‘I cannot breathe. I can’t remember anything. What is happening? Why am I here?”

“Afterwards, I was like, ‘okay, thank God I got through that.’ But I was winded.”

In Saraya’s second AEW match that took place on the January 11th edition of Dynamite, she lost her first match in the company as she teamed with Toni Storm against AEW Women’s Champion Jamie Hayter and Britt Baker. The match ended after Hikaru Shida tossed a kendo stick in the ring, which Baker used on Storm (without the referee seeing it) and Hayter hit Storm with a lariat for the pinfall win.