This was for Cena’s WWE Title.
Most unfortunately, John Cena has a fucked up left elbow and he’s gutting through this before taking time off. In some way it telegraphs the proceedings, but the existence of both Money in the Bank contracts allows enough wiggle room in the moment for it to not be completely obvious. Another piece of that is the voice in the back of your head. The one that exists to temper your most fantastical expectations. The one that tells you to calm down, because the best wrestler in the world is NOT going to beat a classical WWE Ace, especially cleanly, no matter how good the build is. Hogan never really put over Savage or Flair or Hart. Austin or Rock never cleanly put over Benoit or Guerrero.
No matter how clearly and purposefully the build and the last four months seemed to point in one direction…you know, fucking chill out. This is how people get their hearts broken.
Or is it?
I badly wish the match lived up to the build up or to the occasion.
I have for years.
I’ve felt disconnected with this match for close to eight years as, despite loving both of these men individually and loving the thing that they built together, I don’t love this match. I’ve always wanted to, but on a third watch, it still just didn’t do it for me beyond a sort of base level you’d expect from the literal greatest professional wrestler of all time and a fellow top thirty to forty guy too. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to the sort of 2015 and beyond PWG JAWN stuff that I don’t entirely love.
It’s much more forgivable here on account of the one arm.
And yet, it’s the sort of pure back and forth movefest sort of spotfest that feels beneath each man, and like the sort of thing they showed themselves better than twelve months before with a vicious and delightful television match. All in all, it feels like it suffers from Cena’s injury, but only ever on a micro level. Bryan has been better than a match like this for something like eleven or twelve years now. John Cena has gotten more than this from infinitely worse wrestlers than Bryan too. It’s not a mindless match, but it’s a dumber and far less considered match than these two showed themselves capable of twelve and a half months prior. And yet, within those confines, it somehow isn’t quite dumb enough? It feels stuck between two worlds. A pure bombfest that just sort of exists, not dumb enough to be the most bombastic version of what Cena’s future versions of this would become and not smart enough to stand above their previous work together. I don’t really see what anyone loves about this one, I think so so much of the praise here is just elation about the result. I absolutely get it, but in a world where Bryan has since gone on to win more World Titles and even a WrestleMania main event, I don’t think we need to prop this up as a singular match anymore.
I’ve never totally been able to square away the quality of this match on a bell to bell level with all of the things it got right in the build up and then on a larger scale. Because parts of this land perfectly. The most obvious and overt thing is the follow up to the “PARODY OF A WRESTLER” interview by Cena instigating a slap fight to prove himself once and for all, as the end of this two year journey that began at Money in the Bank 2011. You also have all of these wonderful little touches that I loved, and that I wish came together in more of a coherent package. The ways in which Cena is constantly one-upped and topped. The ways Bryan is stuffed and shut down, only to find new avenues and to find new pieces of offense, Most importantly, the way Cena avoids ever giving up the big finisher kickout, but still comes out of this feeling wholly and completely defeated.
In the end, Bryan simply outdoes Cena.
There is no major counter. There is no significant moment to it. On some level, I wish there was. To their credit though, they think less of the match and more of the future. Less about the dramatic quality of the match in the moment and more about what the most impactful way to do the thing is. For as much as CM Punk gained in the last two years from being ready and prepared and having big counters ready to go, I’m not sure that Bryan doesn’t wind up gaining even more through casually just being presented as better than John Cena in this match. He avoids the big impact finish. Their submissions seem to counter each other out. And most importantly, he has a second option while Cena is at a loss, and the running knee aka Busaiku Knee Strike not only gives Bryan the impactful win, but gains him the largest prize of his career.
No bullshit to it. Not even a minor distraction. Cna’s arm is hurt, but because of the way the match it worked, it never quite seems to matter. Bryan goes after it once, and it doesn’t exactly set up the finish. Cena rarely ever seems to be bothered by it in the match. When he loses, the arm never feels responsible, it feels like a loss that he was always going to take, and again, it’s majorly to their credit that they did this instead of a more obvious thing that would have muddied the waters. It’s the cleanest loss of Cena’s career, for another twelve months, and comes at the perfect time to make the absolute most of it.
For the next seven or eight months at least, the torch is passed.
I certainly do not believe the WWE intended for this match to operate as such. Perhaps they felt Cena’s bum elbow would be enough to provide him an out. It’s a credit to Cena for rarely selling it and to Bryan for rarely working it, resulting in this obvious injury never once feeling like a reason Cena lost. And yet, it’s one of the only times in the entire history of the company where this happened.
Like when he became the first man to beat The Shield, or like when he finally overcame Sheamus or Randy Orton, intent doesn’t really matter all that much. For the first time ever, John Cena drops an entirely clean victory to someone who wasn’t already established by the time he became The Man.
The result is that now, even more than with Punk’s slightly more questionable win twenty five months previously, Bryan now comes off as the guy. If not that, then as Batista did when he cleanly beat Cena at SummerSlam five year prior in the last 100% clean loss, at least as a complete equal.
It doesn’t matter what comes after this.
It doesn’t matter that Triple H reveals his duplicity by attacking Bryan and allowing handpicked protégé Randy Orton to cash in his Money in the Bank to steal the title. It doesn’t matter when the next night on Raw, Triple H goes on for a third of an hour and discusses how the WWE doesn’t want certain sorts of wrestlers to be their champions, or that The Shield reveals an alliance with Triple H and the McMahons, implying a long scale conspiracy to rob CM Punk against The Rock all along. None of it matters, because of what happened in this match. Whatever happens following Bryan’s knee is once again overpowered by Cena the next night on Raw literally handing the microphone off to Bryan and declaring him, in front of the people, God, and the audience in perpetuity, as the rightful champion. Yet again, what the WWE is too cowardly to do, John Cena seems to go out of his way to get done on his own.
It isn’t quite in the same ballpark as the other most obtrusive match in the WWE in the first part of the decade, but the result is largely the same. John Cena sneaks one in with the help of an all-time independent wrestling darling, and this time with the bullshit entirely confined to after the bell, passes the torch in near totality, only ever picking it back up following horrific injury.
The match isn’t half as good as everything surrounding it, but if it was, it would be the greatest match of all time.
HANDWERK 