An interview with Neville recently appeared in the British Newspaper The Sun. Don't get too excited, he didn't reveal the reasons for his shocking heel turn last night at Roadblock; the interview was conducted before the turn. But Neville did hint at a change in character for 2017.
Neville first spoke about how he got injured ahead of Wrestlemania and his long road to recovery. You can watch a clip from the match in which he was injured, against Chris Jericho back on March 14, here:
"It was a rough night in my career to say the least. I hurt my ankle on a very basic, fundamental move; a baseball slide that I have done thousands of times. My toe got caught on the canvas, pulled me back and broke my ankle in two places. When it happened I was not aware of what had gone on, I knew I had tweaked my ankle but I didn't know about the severity. I tried to continue but I soon realized that I couldn't even hold any weight on it."
"It was obviously really bad timing because Wrestlemania was around the corner and I had hopes of having big plans that then couldn't come to fruition," he said.
Neville returned from the injury this past summer, but he appeared to be in a holding pattern, mostly wrestling on Superstars against the likes of Curtis Axel and Jinder Mahal. "Right now I am bouncing back from that injury but it has been a slower process than I would have liked," he said. The Cruiserweight Division debuted and Neville was nowhere to be found among its ranks. Many fans were confused.
We haven't seen Neville on Raw since October 17, when he lost to Bo Dallas.
Maybe that loss changed him.
It's possible he let something slip in the Sun interview. "I feel in 2017 I want and deserve more," he said, a little heelish entitlement creeping into his confident demeanor. "I want to achieve more and I just need to get that momentum back and I am confident I will get the opportunities I want and I will then be able to take them."
Neville deserves more, he says. He's going to take opportunities.
Sounds like the kind of guy who might do this:
or this:
or this:
Neville didn't have much to say for himself after the beatdown of Rich Swann and TJ Perkins.
He did say, "You should not be surprised."
Guess that means we should have read between the lines of his interview with The Sun, which you can read in its entirety, here.
