100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 25 - Dolph Ziggler vs. King Barrett vs. Mark Henry vs. R-Truth vs. Ryback vs. Sheamus
Intercontinental Championship - Elimination Chamber 2015
55.
Please keep this number in mind for a later point in the review.
Following Wrestlemania, Daniel Bryan’s injuries that derailed his WWE Championship run the year prior re-emerged. Bryan was forced to vacate the Intercontinental Championship that he won at Wrestlemania 31, leading to this match to crown a new champion.
This show was never meant to be televised, and based on this match it probably would have been better if that remained the case. The show comes from Corpus Christi, Texas, a crowd infamously known for being unresponsive and who were historically ass tonight. However, WWE decided on a whim to make use of the WWE Network and put on what was, for all intents and purposes, a televised house show.
In an effort to generate interest, the house show was converted into the Elimination Chamber event. Up until this night, I used to think the Elimination Chamber was the most idiot-proof stipulation of all time. The historical average quality of the match was remarkable. The 2006 ECW December to Dismember was widely considered the worst Elimination Chamber match ever up until this night, but even that wasn’t bad in the traditional sense. It was just one of the worst booked matches you can imagine - but the actual wrestling wasn’t bad. To this point, there had never been an outright bad Elimination Chamber in my opinion.
The commentators note that Mark Henry is a late substitute for Rusev, who fractured his foot prior to the pay-per-view. Rusev was in the midst of the quite atrocious Rusev/Lana/Ziggler love triangle storyline - but hey at least it had the segment where Rusev threw a fish at Lana. This is more than I can say for Ziggler’s preceding storyline with Sheamus featuring the “Kiss Me Arse” match. 2015 WWE was creatively bankrupt. As if to support my argument, here comes King Barrett, complete with the shitty Poundland crown and sceptre. For anyone wondering, this is now the third time we’ve seen the accursed King of the Ring gimmick on this list after King Mabel and King Corbin.
The only other comment I have before getting into the match is that somehow this is R-Truth’s fourth Elimination Chamber. How on earth does R-Truth wind up in four of these?
The match opens with King Barrett and Dolph Ziggler, who proceed to have the most 2015 Raw midcard match you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s at this point the viewer will realise this crowd is shockingly quiet. Not that they have much to be excited for.
Everyone reading will know what’s to come, and of course we will go into great detail about where this match truly becomes infamous. But I want to touch on one often forgotten aspect. This match sucked even before the botch. R-Truth comes out and we immediately see why this looks like a bunch of amateurs out there. Ziggler - despite the fact that he hasn’t taken any big bumps and had what amounted to a pretty basic match with Wade Barrett - is selling like death on the outside while Truth and Barrett go through a couple of minutes of spots. This match is absolutely littered with guys just lying around doing fuck all. And I could almost forgive them doing that after the match goes tits up if I didn’t just see them doing that exact same thing for several minutes beforehand.
Of course, this all converges to the point where Barrett throws Ziggler into Mark Henry’s pod. The famously reliable Elimination Chamber glass, that has never once been prone to breaking, breaks. All of a sudden Mark Henry is out and the crowd, for the very first time, are excited. What an interesting spot to be in - we’ve never seen a guy forced into the match early. The anticipation is building. This match just got a whole lot more interesting.
Meanwhile, the match comes to a screeching halt. There seems to be this uncomfortable moment where everyone realises what’s happened. Mark Henry, who isn’t meant to enter this match until the very end according to interviews with Ziggler, is now free. He looks to the referee for advice, who doesn’t know what to do. The commentators have no idea what to say. These people are, quite literally, not trained for this.
Henry, probably against his better judgement, decides to step into the match.
At the start of this piece, I asked the dear reader to keep the number 55 in mind. This is the collective years of in ring experience of the 4 men in the match when Mark Henry enters. What follows is one of the most bizarre experiences I’ve ever had watching a WWE match. We’ve seen some bad matches so far, we’ve seen some hideous things go wrong. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a collection of wrestlers just outright collapse under the weight of one unfortunate moment, at least not in WWE.
It’s clear right from the minute Henry comes out that nobody knows what to do and everyone is panicked. To compound things, it happens less than a minute before Ryback is due to come in, and they don’t delay his entry. There is no culprit worse than Mark Henry. He’s not in for very long, but his impact is so detrimental that he brings the rest of the match to a screeching halt. There is a point where he is plainly on the screen just watching Ziggler and Barrett wrestling, standing out like a sore thumb in the process.
To make matters worse, as he watches this unfold, he sees Barrett hit Ziggler with the Wasteland. Henry, in his infinite wisdom, decides to break up the pin. In an Elimination Chamber match. The commentators even make note of how much of an idiot he is. At this point I hasten to add that Mark Henry is a fucking 20 year veteran at this point. Despite this, he has absolutely zero clue how to improvise anything.
I think back to other matches where something went catastrophically wrong. My mind goes to New Year’s Revolution 2007, featuring Triple H’s second quad tear. Shawn Michaels, realising the match is now at a knife edge, decides to improvise the last ten minutes of the match doing absolutely everything in his power to put on a show for the fans. And it fucking ruled because he took an unfortunate situation and improvised the fuck out of it. That is what a good pro-wrestler does - they can fix stuff that goes wrong no matter how bad it may seem.
Bad wrestlers crumble when they botch. They lose their composure, or do something silly like try and repeat the spot.
The worst thing is, this isn’t a hard thing to improvise. You’re Mark fucking Henry. Your whole gimmick is built on destroying folk. You have three other men in the ring. Literally, all you need to do is come out and kick some ass for a bit, then maybe take someone’s finisher to go down for a bit, then carry on as normal.
After Barrett is eliminated, Ziggler decides this is a fantastic time to have a very public intervention. The four men in the match (Ziggler, Ryback, Henry and Truth, plus a referee) are all standing in the ring like the world’s worst Mexican standoff. Ziggler for the next minute decides to audibly call out the next spots in the match. And he’s not even being subtle about it. He’s chatting to the referee, pointing to each man and instructing them what to do. The amount of second hand embarrassment I’m experiencing for each man cannot be understated. What little excitement the crowd had for the match is long gone. The commentators, probably in awe of the ineptitude in front of them, struggle to justify what is going on. Jerry Lawler speculates that they’re trying to form alliances. Yes Jerry, Ziggler visibly chatting to Mike Chioda is to build alliances. Ziggler gets a bit of feint praise online for trying to keep this match together - a stance I disagree with. This is awful, unsubtle, and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to call it one of the more exposing spots in WWE history.
After a minute of actively plotting the next spots, what do these geniuses think is the great spot they’ll do to get this match back on track?
They split up and throw some punches in the corner. That’s it.
I want to say this is a damning indictment about the training of wrestlers within the WWE system. The product is so micromanaged that it’s no wonder that the talent have no clue what to do when something goes off script. What must Daniel Bryan be thinking watching this from ringside. A man who damn near lost his fucking eye during a match and still delivered one of the best matches of the year in the process. What must he think watching these 55-year-veteran amateurs collapse at the slightest bit of adversity.
Eventually, Sheamus’ buzzer goes off. But his chamber door isn’t opening for some reason. Now in truth, this is actually a unique heel spot where he uses the cross of his necklace to jam the door shut, preventing him from entering the match. The problem comes in that this is missed by both production (meaning the live crowd doesn’t get it), and even more unforgivably - utterly missed by the commentary. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to talk about how atrocious the commentary is in general. This is the biggest example, because they completely fail to tell the audience that Sheamus’ pod not opening is a cunning plot. In any other match this is just bad commentary. In a match that has already been derailed by a botch involving the pods, this is unfathomably stupid. It’s no surprise that viewers often mistakenly call this another botch in the match.
The commentary is fucking horrible. I’ve mentioned that the crowd is silent throughout, but the commentary team are just as bad. It’s more like video game commentary - they call the move, and if you’re lucky they might say “oh that’s going to hurt”, but they make no effort to tell the audience what’s going on, what stories are happening. Why is nobody mentioning how dangerous the chamber is? Why is nobody bringing up the history between Sheamus and Ziggler? Why is nobody talking at all? Yes, the match is fucked, and it’s a mess - but it’s your job to cover for that. Again, this is just more proof that the overly micromanaged scripted nature of WWE television means that improvisation is a lost art to all the performers here, commentary included.
In amongst this is even more waiting and lying about. There’s a long delayed vertical suplex spot by Ryback to Ziggler, which I am convinced is just there to stall for time. This is somehow worse than your standard multi man match, which as we all know are prone to guys taking turns having a nap on the outside. At least in a traditional multi man match, the guy on the outside is out of sight out of the ring. Because they’re in the Elimination Chamber, everyone lying down is always on camera all the time. Just try and spot how many times there’s guys just having a nap. If there’s one praise I can give to the moment when Ziggler is calling the spots in the match, it’s the only time in the match that you can see more than two people standing up at the same time.
Speaking of the guys stopping to call out spots, this actually happens a second time, which I completely forgot about until it just happened. I almost want to bump this up the list for that reason alone.
You may be wondering why I haven’t touched on any spots outside of Ziggler going through the pod. Well, that’s because there aren’t any. This match has a shockingly low number of bumps involving the Chamber. It’s the softest Chamber match in history by miles, and that includes the new gym mat style Chamber matches. The majority of the offence in this match is Ziggler trying about ten million roll ups because he can’t think of anything else to do. There’s barely any bumps to the outside, with the only notable one being when Sheamus hits White Noise onto Ryback. Ryback must have also been surprised by this as he almost forgets to kick out of the subsequent cover.
Eventually, Ryback picks up the win and his first, and only, championship in WWE. Bryan hands Ryback the championship, and says that nobody deserves this more than Ryback. Bless him for trying. Quite frankly, an embarrassment all around.
Up Next - Once again, someone attempts to murder the Undertaker. Unintentionally, this time.
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