100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 53 - Jinder Mahal vs. Randy Orton
WWE Championship - Punjabi Prison Match - Battleground 2017
In the lead up to this project I reviewed Big Show vs The Undertaker from Great American Bash 2006 as a little taster of the torment I was about to subject myself to over the next year or so. While an awful match in itself, it didn’t make the cut for this list because I gave them a pass. A) it was the first match of a convoluted stipulation; B) it was thrown together at last minute due to the infamous elevated liver enzymes; C) it was at the very least morbidly interesting.
The key difference that I see when placing this match rather than the Great American Bash is that we have since seen a decent Punjabi Prison match. No Mercy 2007 between Batista and Great Khali proved that by some miracle you can have a watchable match in these horrible conditions. Jinder and Orton had a blueprint with which to work if they wanted to.
This is also a pay-per-view main event so expectations should rightfully be higher. Old school mindset or not, by placing this as the main event you are telling your fans: this is the showcase match, and the one we think you should be spending your money to see. Truth be told, there were a few Jinder Mahal matches I considered for this process. The closest of which was the mind-numbingly boring Shinsuke Nakamura match from Summerslam, which killed a lot of the early momentum of Nakamura’s WWE run all in favour of wrestling’s worst champion. I settled on this one because it’s got equal parts stupidity, boring wrestling, and a dumb stipulation. A glaring reminder that Jinder Mahal - WWE Champion - is not some fever dream or nightmare that you imagined. It happened, and nothing any of us will ever say or do in our lives can ever change this. In centuries to come, Jinder Mahal will sit alongside Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, John Cena, Roman Reigns, Brock Lesnar, Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Triple H, AJ Styles, Eddie Guerrero as an answer on the Sporcle quizzes of our great grandchildren. Pray that mankind’s desire to destroy this world comes to fruition so the universe can forget this ever happened.
The Punjabi Prison has always been among my least favourite in wrestling, and deserves to be ridiculed like a classic TNA stipulation like King of the Mountain or the Reverse Battle Royal. If you’re going to have a match with such convoluted rules, you have to make it an entertaining concept or at the very least put wrestlers capable of coming up with imaginative spots. King of the Mountain’s stipulation usually sucked, but at least TNA had the sense to put guys like AJ Styles, Christian, and Samoa Joe in it to drag the match kicking and screaming to something entertaining. I should also add that the match is a total eye sore. When the camera does the wide shot it’s difficult to see anything through the Steel Reinforced Bamboo™. I suppose in most matches this would be a negative, but that may not be the case here.
Unfortunately, the Batista and Great Khali match also exposed how pointless the whole “four doors” rule truly is. Because it is just as efficient to climb up the inner structure and then jump across to the outer structure. There is no strategic reason to rush to escape the door. If your opponent gets out, who cares? Just go out another door or climb up. Adding doors also has the unintended consequence that cage matches have: wrestlers turn stupid to try and manufacture drama. From the first minute of this match, Jinder calls for the first door and immediately reverts to “I will slowly crawl towards the door despite not taking a single meaningful move in this match, I hope that my opponent will not stop me”. Because of the adherence to the illogical four doors rule, it elongates the match where the first fifteen minutes of this match are built around these slow attempts at escape. The crowd heat is nonexistent, not just because you have an excruciatingly boring match, but because there’s no drama to the inner door rules. The match can’t end until it’s resolved, and everyone can see through how stupid it is. For a match where the first part of the match centres around timing, these two are completely off with their own - particularly when it comes to cutting off their opponent’s escape attempt. One such example sees Orton call for the door and he waits and waits because he wants to hit the RKO - but in that same time he could have easily escaped the inner door several times over. During the last door, Jinder has a chance to get through, but he has to wait an uncomfortable length of time for Orton to cut him off. The Singh brothers, of course, interfere - hiding from under the ring and pull Mahal out of this last door, leaving Orton all alone in the ring. How will he ever be able to get out now?
Of course, Randy proves how stupid the whole door concept is by climbing out of the inner structure 30 seconds later and stepping onto the outer structure. Now we’re into the second part of this match - escaping the second structure, so surely we’re near the end of this match?
No.
For some reason, that I can only assume is that WWE hates us all, this match goes on for another fifteen minutes on the outside of the ring. Twelve minutes slow-crawling towards doors in the first part of the match, then a further fifteen minutes of Orton versus Jinder Mahal and the Singh brothers. Because who doesn’t want to watch a 3 on 1 handicap match between Randy Orton and three jobbers, one of which somehow ended up as WWE Champion. The Philly crowd are remarkably polite to the match all things considered, only briefly responding with Delete, Boring and CM Punk chants before settling back to silence. If I didn’t know better, I’d think giving these two 27 minutes was some kind of sick revenge from Vince McMahon for this crowd sabotaging King of the Ring 1995. I have this image of McMahon watching Jinder Mahal putting his FCW standard moveset to full use for 27 minutes, smirking and whispering to himself “this is for Mabel”.
So now we’re in the second part of the match, and the poor Singh brothers are out here trying to bump like madmen during this long handicap section. While this is happening we get more bad timing as Jinder has to awkwardly climb at a snail’s pace while Orton takes his time with the brothers - probably relishing the fact he gets to work with actually competent wrestlers for the first time in this match. The fifteen minutes on the outside somehow conspire to be almost as boring as the action inside. The Orton beatdown of all three men is so typically unmotivated Randy Orton - tame and unenergetic. It’s far longer than it has any reason to be, and he’s not got interesting enough offence - especially on the outside of the ring where people don’t take as many bumps.
I am sure there’s worse wrestlers ever, but I don’t think a more boring wrestler than Jinder Mahal ever existed - certainly not one pushed to the gaudy heights of wrestling’s biggest prize. I’ve had my issues with Orton as a wrestler, particularly when he’s unmotivated as he is here. He can be a mundane wrestler himself when his heart isn’t in it, particularly when he’s up against someone he doesn’t fancy. But compared to Jinder Mahal, Orton might as well be Ricky Steamboat, and I give Orton the benefit of the doubt because when he’s good, he’s damn good. Jinder is the worst WWE champion ever, and this reign is comfortably the worst in the long history of the championship. There’s no redeeming factors to him outside of the fact that he probably did fantastic business for WWE in India. But if you base your own enjoyment of wrestling based on who makes money for the company, then that is, in my opinion, a lame perspective. It is possible to acknowledge why a company does something without accepting a substandard product as a consequence.
The highlight of this match is Samir Singh’s bump from the outer structure through the announce table. Samir is the unlucky fellow to take the token huge bump in a Mahal title defence. You’d think this would be a redeeming factor of this mess, and you’d be partially right because it’s a cool spot and I don’t want to take anything away from either Singh brother’s ability to bump around for these matches. But when I watch this, I don’t feel joy as much as I think it’s far more pathetic that there is such a mediocre wrestler in this match that these two have to practically kill themselves to try and make his match watchable.
Just to make matters worse, the finish is incredibly stupid, even by the standards set by this match. It’s not bad enough that we sat through a 27 minute main event of the worst WWE champion that’s ever existed, but we get the return of almost certainly the worst wrestler to ever hold a World Title in WWE. Great Khali makes his return after several years away to help Jinder retain the title. Interference that would ultimately lead to … absolutely nothing in the long run. Interference that may have been explained on an episode of SmackDown, but I wouldn’t know as I’d long since checked out of the brand by this point. It just exists to give Jinder a way of winning. Even more hilarious is that Orton climbed over the cage, and then had to nonsensically flop the opposite direction back over the cage.
In the end, Jinder retains, laughing at Orton as he climbs over. Laughing at me because somehow I have now subjected myself to this match three times in my life. Which is three times more than should be legally allowed.
Up Next - One of the greatest wrestlers of all time, in front of one of WWE’s best ever crowds. How on earth did this get here?
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