After being linked to Ronda Rousey in WWE basically since “The Baddest Woman on the Planet” made her debut in the promotion in 2014, Shayna Baszler was finally afforded a chance to work with her former UFC buddy in the ring full-time in 2023, when the duo linked up to become a tag team.

Winning the Women's Fatal Four-Way Showcase match at WrestleMania 39, the team captured gold for the first time as a unit in May, when Liv Morgan and Raquel Rodriguez vacated their belts due to an injury to the former that opened the titles up to a four-team fight in yet another Fatal Four-Way; a match they won the night after Night of Champions.

Discussing what it was like to get back into the ring with Rousey and becoming a full-time team on Busted Open Radio, Baszler acknowledged that the pressure is on for the current tag team champs heading into their unification match with Isla Dawn and Alba Fyre of the Unholy Union, before declaring that they're up for the challenge.

“The pressure is on me and Ronda. If you were to take a poll, no one thinks anyone can beat me and Ronda. We have everything to prove, they have nothing to lose,” Rousey said via Fightful. “On top of that, the meaning of those titles, if people don’t remember, I had [the WWE Women’s Title] before, and we were wrecking shop across all three brands during the COVID era, even though nobody remembers that. For whatever reason, they’re like, ‘Oh man, Bayley was the workhorse. She worked on all three…’ we did it too. All three brands. Went to NXT, beat the snot out of them so bad they were like, ‘we want tag titles too,’ and made their own. The titles live and die with me,” Baszler said. “They are only there because we decided to make NXT viable with a tag team and division, and now full circle, me and Ronda set out from day one, talking about this journey, we want to defend these every week, all the time. Let’s get some tag teams going and get a real division. We want to do this every week, and we want more than four weeks of work. That’s why Ronda said in that promo, we were going to wreck shop too much so we had to look towards NXT. There is no taking away that they are a great tag team, obviously. They work well together, they are the champions, but me and Ronda have been a team since 2013.”

Unfortunately for Rousey and Baszler, it would be hard for them to defend their titles week-in and week-out, as WWE has about a half dozen “real” women's tag teams spread out over RAW, SmackDown, and NXT, and they would run out of foes right around SummerSlam. Still, the desire to be fighting champions is a noble one and could help to get fans behind them once more.

Shayna Baszler wants to become more natural in her promos.

Elsewhere in her appearance on Busted Open Radio, Shayna Baszler turned her attention to her promo work and discussed a desire to become more natural on the microphone moving forward.

“It's just a matter of not trying so hard,” Baszler said via Fightful. “The misunderstanding comes from, and this is no disrespect to any co-workers or whatever; everybody is different. People get so used to a promo sounding like a promo. When you get someone like Ronda or me that comes in, and we just talk, we're not doing a promo. It's not like [aggressive loud voice] ‘we're the champions now. We're going to do this, and we're going to wreck shop in the WWE.' We're saying, [normal tone] ‘We're the champions now. We'd like anyone to step up because we're going to wreck shop no matter who gets in the ring.' We're saying it like we're just talking. I think it's unfamiliar. People think promos have to be a certain way, and they forget that this is also a way and it's a lot more natural. It's helped Ronda too, being in a tag team with me, someone who is her friend, to be more relaxed in promos and come off a little more natural.”

While Baszler and Rousey aren't the worst speakers in WWE, as some performers have managers for a reason, the duo do have a tendency to be a bit wooden in their delivery, shooting off lines as if they were written in advance; which, to be fair, they were, but it shouldn't sound like they were. If the duo can become more comfortable on camera, delivering their lines with a natural authority, it will go a long way in defining their ceiling as a team.