Brock Lesnar wants nothing to do with these very long matches

It’s one thing to predict the winners and losers at Elimination Chamber 2023, but how about taking a guess at the match order for the event?

Elimination Chamber takes place tonight (Sat., Feb. 18) from the Bell Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with the main card starting at 8:00 pm ET, live on Peacock (in the U.S.) and WWE Network (everywhere else).

WWE has announced five different segments for the main card of this event. Here is my subjective view of how important each of these five segments rank, ordered from most important to least important.

Roman Reigns vs. Sami Zayn
Women’s Elimination Chamber
Men’s Elimination Chamber
Brock Lesnar vs. Bobby Lashley
Edge & Beth Phoenix vs. Rhea Ripley & Finn Balor

Main event

This main event match is obvious. It has to be Roman Reigns vs. Sami Zayn, which is perhaps the most anticipated WWE title match of the last decade.

Elimination Chamber matches

WWE should try to space out the two chamber matches as much as possible. Given that neither chamber match will be the main event, that means they should be placed in Segment 1 and Segment 4. The main question is, what order do they go in?

I think the men’s match is a better bet to deliver from a workrate standpoint, which makes it a good fit for the opener. Then again, maybe WWE will want to kick off the show with a pop for Natalya in Canada? They can always put Edge on early in the night for a similar purpose, so I’ll stick with the men for the opener.

That gives me the following card:

Segment 1: Men’s Elimination ChamberSegment 2: Segment 3: Segment 4: Women’s Elimination ChamberSegment 5: Roman Reigns vs. Sami Zayn

Everything else

The only thing left to do is make a choice between Brock Lesnar and Edge for Segments 2 and 3.

Four of the five matches at this event have a decent chance of running long, with Lesnar’s typical short match standing out from the pack in that regard. Therefore I’ll stick him right in the middle of the show in Segment 3, to avoid three consecutive lengthy matches on the card. See that, Brock’s penchant for minimizing input and maximizing output has some utility for the card as a whole.

Finalized card

So here is my final prediction for the match order at Elimination Chamber, along with guesses on the bell-to-bell match times:

Segment 1: Men’s Elimination Chamber (30 minutes)Segment 2: Edge & Beth Phoenix vs. Rhea Ripley & Finn Balor (17)Segment 3: Brock Lesnar vs. Bobby Lashley (7)Segment 4: Women’s Elimination Chamber (26)Segment 5: Roman Reigns vs. Sami Zayn (22)

That’s my prediction for the match order at Elimination Chamber. What’s yours?