100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 48 - Roman Reigns vs. Samoa Joe
Backlash 2018
What a difference a few years makes.
Right now, you won’t find many people that have a bad word to say about Samoa Joe. He’s had a career renaissance in recent years, producing the best work he’s done since at least the early days of TNA. It’s easy to forget in 2023 that there was once a time when Samoa Joe was seen as washed up. Outside of fleeting glimpses of old Joe, we were nearing nearly a decade of a disappointing, noticeably slower and unmotivated Samoa Joe - a shadow of the man that was justifiably considered one of the greatest wrestlers on Earth.
Roman Reigns, meanwhile, has become one of the most quantifiable draws in wrestling since Cena’s heyday and has ushered in what many are calling a mini-boom period. His heel title reign may have run stale to some, but there’s no denying that he’s perfected his role and thriving more than ever before. Back in 2018 he was in the middle of a miserable failure of a babyface run. WWE tried exactly what they did with Cena by having an overwhelmingly dominant wrestler who was also somehow presented as an underdog which the fans understandably detested. By this point we’re now in year four of the Roman experiment, with the latest chapter being WWE once again opting not to crown him as champion at Wrestlemania against Brock Lesnar.
Despite this, Roman claims himself as the uncrowned Universal Champion - ignoring the fact he came up short twice in recent months against Lesnar. That’ll surely endear him to the fans. Samoa Joe rightly says that Roman is a loser, and a crybaby which led to where we are here.
Before the match they brawl around ringside and it’s actually really awesome. One of the surprising highlights of this series so far. It gives the impression that this is how this match is going to be going forward - a brutal, energetic, hectic brawl. Joe is throwing Roman left and right, through the announce table, and it’s terrific albeit brief.
Eventually, Roman struggles to his feet, and agrees for the match to start. From the moment the bell rings, all that momentum and urgency disappears. The energy of both men vanishes, and what follows is 18 minutes of some of the laziest, most tedious and monotonous wrestling you’ll ever see. I was going to do a running joke where I was going to do a gif of every resthold in this match, but after the 4th one I realised that substack probably wouldn’t let me upload all of them in one review, and truthfully I couldn’t be bothered to do what would have amounted to 8 separate gifs.
The cognitive dissonance here is what frustrates me the most. The feud is built around the idea that Samoa Joe is a dangerous monster who is out to cause pain and destroy Roman Reigns. The commentators hype that Joe is vicious and going to inflict unimaginable pain on Roman. And despite this, what we see in front of us is a slow, boring, lazy match between two wrestlers that either aren’t interested or don’t have the energy to produce something entertaining. The first half of this match is almost entirely restholds. Imagine the disappointment of going from the admittedly very cool pre-match brawl to a barrage of restholds while the crowd becomes increasingly restless. All the while the poor commentators have to try and pretend that this is the most vicious assault on Roman’s career.
Nothing explains how off this whole story is than when Roman is locked in a keylock early on. Joe taunts him, saying “this is the pain I was talking about”. Not the brutal assault at ringside that may have tricked the viewer into thinking they were going to watch a wild brawl. No, the pain is the keylock - the move you’ve seen in just about every mediocre match you’ve ever watched. Moments later he upgrades that pain to a chinlock. And they sit in that hold for, I kid you not, three or four minutes while the crowd is getting more and more agitated. Bearing in mind that we are a little over a month removed from a Wrestlemania main event that was rejected by the fans. Instead of trying to make the fans invested in their match, they decide to start this in the worst possible way. It always bemuses me that wrestlers can hear the fans shitting on their match for being boring, and their solution is just to slap on another hold. Especially when you feature two guys that should know better. The commentators constantly talk about how dangerous Joe is - how much he wants to maim his opponent, but all we have is some restholds to show for it.
The crowd goes from boredom to hostility in a hurry. It starts with the standard “CM Punk” chants, but then the fans get a bit more creative later on as the chants escalate to other protest chants like “This is Boring”, “Rusev Day”, and “Delete”. Whenever there’s a match hijacked by the fans, there tends to be one memorable chant that stands out from the rest. In this case, it’s the infamous “beat the traffic” chant, which feels like the spiritual successor to “change the channel” from the Big Show vs Batista ECW on Sci-Fi match.
Unfortunately for both these men, many people do indeed try and beat the traffic. Videos went viral in the aftermath of this match where fan footage would show fans leaving the arena in droves before the match ends.
Even outside of the restholds, the offence from both men looks lethargic. For two guys known for having cool and impactful looking moves, there’s none of that here. The match is a whole bunch of nothing outside of the crowd’s protests. Joe dominates the match for almost the entirety - even having the match won with the Coquina Clutch until Roman luckily rolls over into the ropes. Moments later, Roman hits the Spear out of nowhere for another undeserved win. This truly was a throwback to a Hulk Hogan era main event, but in an era where it doesn’t work. The average wrestler is far too good to justify a match like this, especially in the main event spot over the extraordinary talent WWE holds.
One thing that makes this hard to fairly review is due to Roman’s health issues that would emerge later in the year. 2018 was not a good year for Roman as far as in-ring work goes, and you do wonder how much his underlying health issues caused the poor performances. Without confirmation, it’s impossible to say for sure, but it would be negligent of me not to mention it as a possibility. With that said, it doesn’t change the fact that this match happened and was awful to watch. If Roman was not capable of wrestling a match of this length, then the match shouldn’t have been run, and certainly not in the main event. The fact this was the main event of a PPV which also featured a WWE Championship match between AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura makes this even more egregious. While that wasn’t anything too special, it furthered the frustrations fans had with Roman being pushed into the main event spot at the expense of the rest of the roster. If we didn’t know better from the Cena push, you’d think that this was all an intentional sabotage to turn the fans against Roman. In the end, there’s no deep conspiracy here. It’s just WWE had no idea how to book a top babyface for like 15 years.
Up Next - Midgets and the Bushwhackers. Again.
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