Seth Rollins has commented on when he knew that his WrestleMania match would be against a returning Cody Rhodes. 

In the weeks building to WrestleMania 38, Seth Rollins struggled to find himself a place on the card. Squandering a number of opportunities to get himself a match before threating to hijack Monday Night Raw if he wasn’t placed on the show.

In fact, it wasn’t until a few days before the event that the 36-year-old was told by Vince McMahon that he could be competing at WrestleMania, but it would be against a mystery opponent. An opponent that would turn out to be a returning Cody Rhodes in Dallas. 

Speaking during his appearance on the Out of Character podcast, Rollins spoke about the memorable moment and how he found out he’d be facing the American Nightmare. 

“I knew like, I would say, for sure, I would say less than a month out from Wrestlemania. I was really left out of WrestleMania. He ended up being a godsend. It was finalized like I want to say like three weeks before Wrestlemania. Even as we were starting to build the story towards that, it was not quite sure. There were conversations being had and all this stuff that I wasn’t really privy to.”

I was kind of trying to poke around and be like, ‘Hey, is this going to happen or do I need to start thinking of something else because I’m really not interested in getting left off WrestleMania, two nights, and I don’t want to be thrown into a match that means nothing. Both the titles were being held up in the one match. I’m like, ‘I gotta have something here.’ I had been doing so much good work. I was doing great work.”

“If I was sucking, then yeah, I get it, but I’m not. I’m 35 at that time in my prime. I’m like, ‘I don’t know what else you want from me.’ I was like, this is awful. I had some really strong conversations, I’ll put it that way, with Vince leading up to that, but once we got rolling and everything was set in stone, like I said, I think it was like three weeks, four weeks, somewhere in that time frame where I finally texted Cody.”

Rhodes would defeat Seth in their epic WrestleMania clash and would go on to compete in a trio of matches before Cody’s torn pectoral injury. Something WWE used to write him off television by way of an attack by Rollins following their Hell in a Cell bout.

Rollins was in action this past weekend when he defeated Matt Riddle at Clash at the Castle in Cardiff, and the pair are set to extend their programme with an expected rematch at next month’s Extreme Rules show.