100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 55 - Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins
Intercontinental Championship - TLC 2018
I hasten to refer the reader back to my original post explaining how I weigh these matches. Expectation is a key factor in my placement. Is this match technically worse than Nia Jax vs Charlotte? Well, yes I would argue it is, but it’s also burdened by the fact that nobody expects Nia vs Charlotte to be anything good. Rollins and Ambrose had a fantastic series of matches in 2014 and you’d be forgiven for thinking they could repeat that here. For god’s sake they had an amazing lumberjack match of all things.
On the very Raw where Roman Reigns announced his leukaemia diagnosis to the world and the Shield hugging at the top of the ramp, the show ended with Rollins and Ambrose winning the tag team titles. Only for Ambrose to immediately turn on Rollins in one of the most shocking and controversial turns ever. It was a source of much contention online in the following days, with people thinking it was cheap and exploitative. I was in the other camp - I loved it - at least in the moment before any follow up. It felt painful, because it was. The sort of emotion that is very rare to get in wrestling, and I thought this was the springboard to one of the most personal feuds in WWE in some time. A man so stricken by grief that he has no idea how to react.
The problems soon emerged. Instead of just making this a bitter rivalry between a man who turned on his friend when he was most vulnerable, it somehow turned into “Dean Ambrose is a germaphobe and getting a vaccination up his backside on TV”. Ambrose failed to justify his reasons for turning on Rollins, and instead would cut countless “you people” promos like every other generic heel. Mixed in were some bad comedy, gas masks, and annoying sirens over his theme.
There’s giant red flags even before the match as Ambrose says that Rollins will slip up and lose his cool, leading to him losing his title. The commentators also make reference to this. I say this is a red flag, because this is an idea that sounds good on paper, but in execution has almost always been horrendous - the most notable example being Triple H vs Randy Orton from Wrestlemania 25. The reason this sucks is because it relies on a hate-filled feud in order to justify this sort of psychology, but this means that you end up having a match that is in a completely different tone to the feud you’ve been having.
Make no mistake, this match does not turn up on this list solely because I’m disappointed as I’ve seen them have better matches. No, this match is on this list because it’s fucking terrible.
This match, which has - in theory - an incredibly personal build up and basis for the feud, starts with a basic lockup. And then a bland series of standard moves you’d expect from just about any match you’d see on TV. I am fairly certain that the first half of this match exists. But it is so inconsequential, mundane, and lifeless that I cannot be fully certain outside of the fact that time has somehow jumped forward ten minutes while I’ve been watching this nothingness. Not a thing about the first half of the match matters. It doesn’t help that everything looks like shit. Rollins can’t throw a punch, and Ambrose isn’t much better. Ambrose’s idea of controlling the match is to slap on a boring hold. It’s as if they were given the length of the match and realised that they had no idea how to fill up 23 minutes so they decided to have a house show match at 50% speed. The crowd responds to this disappointing feud and vanilla match in the only way that is appropriate. With awkward, deafening silence. It is painfully dead in this arena - not quite at the level of Rockabilly vs Jesse Jammes, which is the measure that all heatless matches must be compared - but it is also not that far off.
The only memorable part of the first half of the match is the commentary, and predictably that is not a good thing. The team is Michael Cole, Corey Graves, and Renee Young. The match is overwhelmed with bickering between Graves and Young, with Corey continually grilling Renee over the actions of her husband. It is every bit as irritating as it sounds. As good of a backstage announcer as Renee is, and she is wonderful in that role, unfortunately commentary wasn’t for her. Having Graves tear into her through this whole match exacerbated this and made for an awkward experience even more frustrating as a viewer.
If the first half of the match is uninteresting, the second half of this match is an abomination. It felt like every big Rollins match around this time still featured the dreaded “injured knee” story to it. That story was only executed properly once, and that was his excellent match with Roman Reigns at Money in the Bank 2016. Every subsequent match, it felt like it exposed the worst habits of a wrestler that I actively do not enjoy watching most of the time. The main problem with him is he has absolutely zero concept of how to sell a body part. He has always felt like an AI generated wrestler to me - an idea of what a great wrestler should be, and his matches are an idea of what a good match is. He does cool moves, he has limb work, he can do high spots, he even does the Shawn Michaels foot stomp to set up his finisher because that’s exactly what an AI would assume makes a good wrestler. But because it isn’t quite right - the execution feels as fake as it is. He always feels like he’s pretending to be his idea of what a great workrate wrestler is, rather than just being a great workrate wrestler. This isn’t helped by the match’s placement on the card, following an excellent match between Daniel Bryan and AJ Styles who are experts at such a style.
The knee stuff drags this already boring as shit match into the abyss. Rollins goes immediately from no injury at all to selling the leg like death after one move. But only in between moves. If you thought that an injured knee would stop Seth Rollins from doing any sort of move, then you have never watched Seth Freaking Rollins. There’s too many examples to name, but one spot sees him - seconds after selling like his leg is about to be amputated - running about hitting his suicide dive, running back into the ring, then hitting another shittier suicide dive. Then he remembers he’s supposed to sell the knee. Atrocious.
He pulls out the “sunset flip into the powerbomb” spot, which he always does in any match featuring knee work, only for his knee to buckle. The commentators are quick to remind us that’s how he injured his knee in the first place, and I am shocked to see that his knee prevented him from actually doing a move.
That is until not seconds later he just grabs Ambrose like nothing has happened and runs across the ring with a powerbomb. Don’t worry though because he sells the knee after doing the move. Genuinely mind-bogglingly bad selling.
If you think this match is only bad because of Rollins, you would be wrong. His opponent is no better. Ambrose gives probably the most unmotivated and laziest performance of his career (which is interesting considering this is not the highest Ambrose match we have on here). This is a man that has clearly checked out completely. This is his first big opportunity as a singles heel wrestler in WWE, and there’s just none of that energy or personality you’d expect out of him. We’d been waiting for so long to see a main event heel Dean Ambrose in WWE and it’s bitterly disappointing, both from WWE and from himself. Look at how bad his offence is. Even the stuff that should be impactful like his Nigel McGuiness top rope lariat looks like absolute shit. It’s no surprise that this angle was the straw that broke the camel’s back for him, and ultimately led to him leaving the company in a few months.
Nothing they’re doing is resonating with the crowd. The crowd is dead at the start, and eventually that boredom leads to impatience. They start into “Becky” and “This is boring” chants as the fight wears on. It’s not like this is the first time a crowd has turned on an overly long Rollins match in 2018 and tried to entertain themselves instead.
The most embarrassing moment of the match is when they try the old hockey punches - one of the most reliable ways of getting a pop from the modern WWE audience. Only to be met with even more silence.
The damning part of this match is its sandwiched between matches that display how much of a failure this match is. I’ve touched on AJ versus Bryan. But then it’s followed by the main event which was a brutal, hate-filled brawl between three women that the fans loved. Two genuine match of the year candidates that put these two to shame. Hell, Nia Jax, who we ragged on in the previous review, put on a match with Ronda Rousey on this show that put these two to shame.
The only semi-decent part was Ambrose trying to do the Shield fist bump to put Rollins off. However that immediately leads to “modern WWE conflicted drama acting” and now I hate it again. This is apparently the moment that leads to Rollins snapping, complete with “dramatic talking”, and leading into Ambrose hitting the Dirty Deeds for the win. Thankfully the dramatic acting isn’t as egregious or obnoxiously elongated as it will be in future entries, but I think it’s the first example on this list where we’ve seen this annoying trope that will become all too familiar in future entries.
Up Next - “Went down, down, down - And the flames went higher - And it burns, burns, burns ….”
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