100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 20 - Bray Wyatt vs. John Cena
Steel Cage Match - Extreme Rules 2014
Kick starting the top 20 with a match that I have always felt never got the hate it quite deserved.
WWE Steel Cage matches are, on the whole, renowned for how mediocre they are. Sure, you’ll get the odd gem like Edge vs. Matt Hardy, or Becky Lynch vs. Trish Stratus, but the company has historically struggled to convert the stipulation into anything worthwhile. Never was this more apparent than during the PG era where wrestlers were even more hamstrung than ever before. How could this stipulation - so often used in wrestling history for its brutal conclusion to rivalries - flourish in the tame environment of WWE? It’s difficult to pinpoint a specific reason why the WWE cage fails, however I’d say it’s mostly due to cognitive dissonance. We are often told how barbaric the cage is, but we never see it as the matches are mostly just the same as normal. We are told how they’re to resolve a personal feud - however the wrestlers often emphasise the “escape the cage” stipulation rather than getting your hands on your opponent.
Whatever reason or trope you can think of for the shortcomings of WWE cage, this match will have it in spades. The cage failing to stop interference? Check. Constant premature escape attempts? Check. Slow climbing? Check. A sheer lack of hatred and intensity? Check.
At Wrestlemania these two had a fine match. I had my issues with it, but overall it was perfectly acceptable. The story is that at Wrestlemania, Cena managed to resist temptation to hit Bray with a steel chair. Despite this, Bray’s popularity continued to grow, with live crowds in particular making Monday Night Raw a weekly singalong with Bray Wyatt. The story of using Bray’s rising popularity as this hypnotic cult leader, and mixing this in with Cena’s natural divisiveness is pretty interesting, and had potential. Like most of Bray’s career, however, this sounds better on paper than it does in practice.
Cena talks up how he has to win to stop Wyatt’s message, a point that the commentary team would reiterate throughout. Therefore you’d expect, naturally, that Cena would be eager to get his hands on Wyatt within the confines of the cage, and use this as an opportunity to beat him decisively.
On the contrary, the two decide to design this in a bizarre manner that doesn’t fit the stipulation, nor the story going into it. The match follows a repetitive structure based around constant escape attempts. In short, Wyatt dominates the match, and as soon as Cena gets any offence in he tries to escape. And he would have escaped multiple times had it not been for Luke Harper and Erick Rowan on the outside.
John Cena makes 10 attempts to escape the cage in this match. This is legitimately the only time he is “stopped” by Bray Wyatt. Every other is stopped by Harper or Rowan.
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with a cage match built around escape attempts, but there’s only been one prominent example of a quality WWE cage match in this manner. Comparing this to Owen Hart vs Bret Hart is perhaps unfair, but it is the closest to this in terms of sheer volume of escape attempts. The key difference between this and Owen versus Bret is that Owen and Bret wrestled theirs at a much quicker pace, which made for exciting and dramatic escape attempts. The stipulation meant they could only win via escape, unlike this entry. Bray and Cena wrestle the antithesis of Bret and Owen. Bret and Owen didn’t sell like death so that the other could make a slow climb or walk towards the door. They kept the pace logical, and all the escape attempts were well timed and exciting. It doesn’t rely on someone constantly playing dead in the middle of the ring. I think it’s important to recognise when this kind of match works well to understand why this is such a dire affair.
To give an idea of what this offers, John Cena hits his first offensive move after about 90 seconds when he hits a fisherman suplex. He immediately makes his first escape attempt after this. Harper and Rowan stand outside the cage to stop Cena from getting out, allowing enough time for Bray to recover and stop the escape. They repeated this spot again a couple minutes later, this time with Cena getting a second visual win after just his second offensive move of the match. It’s at this point that I should say they repeat this concept constantly again and again for the duration of these long 21 minutes. 21 minutes and they had exactly one story beat for the entire thing. The match structure is horrible, repetitive, boring and nonsensical. I have no idea what story they’re trying to tell, especially with regards to what motivations Cena is supposed to be portraying because he’s constantly trying to flee the match.
Cena and Wyatt wrestle like they’re plodding through mud - there isn’t urgency or pacing. The timing of pretty much every escape attempt is woeful to the point where guys go from being dead on the mat to back to life in a second. Cena’s selling in particular is wildly inconsistent. With Wyatt dominating the majority of the contest, this is one of those annoying Cena matches where he’s selling heavily after just a single move before springing to life when needed.
This is supposed to make Wyatt look strong - after all he beats the hell out of Cena, and wins the match. But it’s difficult to take that seriously when Cena has so many visual wins. There’s one spot where Wyatt misses a simple senton, to which Cena immediately springs up and climbs the cage to give him yet another visual win until he’s cut off by Rowan. All the while Wyatt has to lie in the ring and wait for an uncomfortably long time as he waits for the Cena and Rowan spot to wrap up. None of these escape attempts feel earned because each one is being attempted after the most mundane of moves. All it does is make Bray look pathetic for lying about for so long.
After the SEVENTH attempt by John Cena to get out the cage, and the seventh time he successfully gets to the top only to be stopped by Harper or Rowan - I’m left wondering why he doesn’t even try just winning the match via pinfall or submission. This would make more sense (or any at all) if the match were just an escape the cage match, but it’s not - it’s pin or submission too. This all makes Cena look like the dumbest motherfucker in the world. Not only that, but he just looks like a coward trying to get away from Bray Wyatt.
After another failed escape attempt by Cena, Luke Harper gets pulled into the cage, which allows Cena the opportunity to beat up two men in the cage and score a visual victory over both.
Perhaps the most egregious escape attempt is a couple minutes later when Cena gets fully over the top of the cage, and about a third down the other side. Rowan stands at the bottom of the cage with a chair, so Cena just decides to climb back into the cage. Where, I remind you, Harper and Bray Wyatt are. John Cena, dumbest man on earth, decides he’d rather climb back into the cage and fight two men Harper and Bray, rather than fall a relatively small distance, win the match, and face Rowan by himself.
To further prove that Cena could have won this pretty easily in the ring, he hits an Avalanche Attitude Adjustment on Wyatt. That would have been enough for the win, as he goes for his first meaningful pin attempt at this point. However Cena, being the absolute stupidest wrestler I think we’ve seen to this point, had already brought Luke Harper into the cage which allows him to break it up.
Cena finally manages to beat the hell out of all three members of the Wyatt family by himself. If you didn’t see this coming you obviously aren’t familiar with WWE 2005-2014. All the Wyatts are selling like death while Cena slowly, slowly crawls to the door. This lame attempt at drama just continues to make everyone involved look awful.
Suddenly, the lights go out, the Wyatt derp chimes, and when the lights return a creepy possessed demon child singing “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands” is standing at the cage door. The child has a voice filter stolen right out of a straight-to-DVD horror movie, to make it extra spooky. Cena is so unbelievably shocked at this development that he decides not to simply, walk out the cage. Instead, this dumb motherfucker stands there with his gormless face until Bray Wyatt hits him with Sister Abigail and walks out the door.
As a long time believer that anything supernatural in wrestling is dumb and should be mocked relentlessly, this is a finish that is so mind numbingly stupid that it takes what is already a horrendous WWE style cage match and props it comfortably into one of my least favourite matches of all time. This whole match is a chore to watch, makes everyone look bad, takes all the worst aspects of an already annoying stipulation, and then tacks on an all time ridiculous finish. This is a classic case of WWE wanting to give someone a win over a big star, but not wanting to commit anything to them that would make the win mean anything.
The child would later be revealed to be Little Johnny, son of former WWE manager Jamison. This brings me the only slight joy in this entire match because it creates perhaps the most bizarre connection between two matches on this list (Bushwhackers vs. Beverly Brothers - Royal Rumble 1992). The child was supposed to be the embodiment of the fact that Wyatt was now influencing the children, and turning the children against Cena. This would all culminate with Cena not changing his character at all, Bray Wyatt making no significant strides in his WWE career, and John Cena ultimately winning the feud. The child was never seen again.
Up Next - Perhaps this whole event was just WWE’s way of saying mid 90s AJPW was better than early 00s Ring of Honor?
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