8. John Cena vs. John Laurinaitis – Over The Limit 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFrriLuRtNs
Whoever thought it was a good idea to put the 50-year-old John Laurinaitis in a main event match against John Cena, please raise your hand. You’re not in trouble I just want to have a talk with you, and also my friends Be-Bop and Rocksteady will be part of this talk, and also there will be no cameras or witnesses. Over The Limit 2012 saw Cena face Johnny Ace in a No DQ match where if Laurinaitis lost he would be fired. Fun fact number 1, John Laurinaitus wasn’t even that good in his prime, and fun fact number 2 this went for 17 human minutes. 95% of that time was John Cena being “just fun to watch” bullying the calcium out of johnny’s skeleton. He poured water on his head and down his pants, he covered him in garbage, locked him in repeated STFs while taunting him on the mic. Look I’m not going to get riled up about scripted wrestling bullying, whatever Johnny was an arsehole, sure, what I will get riled up about is YOU WASTING MY F***ING TIME. I have a finite number of minutes on this planet, and watching Cena doing a punch and judy show with Big Johnny’s corpse is not how I want to spend them. Then everyone’s favourite Main event enhancer the big show comes out and costs Cena the match, thanks mate, another month of this then. And the final cruel punctuation mark to all this? The main event could have been CM Punk vs Daniel Bryan for the WWE Championship. Feels funny to look back on now. Ha ha. Ha ha.
7. Diesel vs. Mabel – SummerSlam 1995
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAqzoIh866A
The mid-90s were a difficult time for WWE, in much the same way that having an elephant slowly stepping on each of my individual testicles would be a difficult time for me. Hogan had gone and the national steroid scandal had forced them to bench all of their cough BIGGEST stars. Without his traditionally beefy boys, Vince scrambled for main eventers who were big in different ways. Diesel was tall, cool, put the belt on him and… erm… Mabel was 400 pounds? That’s the same thing, right? So in 1995, Mabel won King of the Ring, in a tournament that also included Shawn Michaels, The Undertaker and Razor Ramon, so I don’t f***ing know either, leading to the main event of Summerslam, the second biggest show of the year. Diesel vs Mabel. When Kevin Nash is the agile one in a match you have Got Problems. Big Daddy Cool’s title run was widely considered a bust, as he drew so little as champion that WWE had to cancel whole tours of house-shows in 95, but this is the nadir. Slow, clumsy, and with Diesel even getting injured during, because Mabel is one of the most infamously unsafe workers in WWE history. The match stank, and even though it only went 9 minutes, it feels like it’s still going on to this day.
6. Triple H vs Roman Reigns – WrestleMania 32
A bad WrestleMania main event really hurts. All that travel, all that pageantry, a whole week building to one crescendo, then RASPBERRY. The Miz vs John Cena was really bad, and probably was number 11 on this list, ending with a double count-out IN THE MAIN EVENT OF MANIA, and having to be restarted by Dwayne The Dwayne Dwayneson, but at least it was relatively short., Hogan vs Yokozuna was an insult to everyone from the locker room to the audience at home, but at least it was even shorter, and the crowd seemed to dig it. Triple H vs Roman Reigns on the other hand, went for half an hour. 30 minutes of a match no f***er in that building wanted to see. My knickers simply shall not untwist about it. When the match started fans began to cheer heel Triple H, just for something to keep themselves amused, but as the minutes and the minutes and the minutes crawled on, even that enthusiasm died away to perpetual grumbling. WWE muted the crowd, leaving this glacially-paced match to drift on in a bizarre heatless void. Genuinely the most interesting thing for like, 5 straight minutes was the fact that Triple H got a bit of confetti stuck to his forehead, I AM NOT KIDDING. Then Roman won, and we cheered, because we all got to go home, and that should not be the final feeling of wrestlemania weekend. Just a total tone-deaf turd from bell to bell, apart from the bit when Steph got speared though, that was nice. That was something.
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