This was an elimination match.
It actually rules.
There’s no reason it should.
I don’t just mean it in the usual way, which is to say that the Nexus (post-Bryan of course) was made up of mid-level talents at best, although they were. I mean that it is 2010 and the Team WWE side is not great either. Jericho is about a year past the point where I would call him more than average, and the same goes for Edge, as their bad series earlier in the year showed. R-Truth is out of his element in a match this high profile, and Bret Hart is a retired old man who has not wrestled in a decade because of a gigantic stroke. John Morrison, despite having his talents, should not be the third best guy in a fourteen man match put on by the biggest company in the world, but he is, and that’s what the match has to deal with.
Despite all of that, this rocks.
Above all, the match is a victory for strict planning.
To whatever extent this match achieves, it does so because of the regimented approach to it. These are not great talents, but almost nobody is ever in the ring for long enough for that to become SUPER obvious, save Wade and Gabriel in the last five minutes or so. People either do a few things they’re good at (Ryback, Tarver), hit the highlights that they still can (Jericho, Edge, Bret), and get out. Some of the longer tenured Nexus guys get exposed by the end, or with a total dud like Otunga, you see it immediately, but the match continually moves along to the next thing before it can drag the match down too much.
Being an elimination match also helps out a lot, as they’re able to use the elimination to not only get rid of guys but create a larger sense of drama through things like Skip Sheffield’s monster elims at the start making his eventual defeat more impressive, or the way the WWE team clearly has it before egomaniacs Edge and Jericho cost their team when both are eliminated because of minor spats with other teammates about trivial bullshit.
When the match comes down solely to John Cena and Daniel Bryan against the three left of Wade, Gabriel, and Slater, the match really shines, both through the performance of Cena as the sympathetic face-in-peril selling his ass off and making the basic attacks of the FCW kids far more interesting and dramatic than they would be against anyone else on the roster and then also of Bryan as this ball of energy ass beating hot tag.
Everyone knows, I think, what happens at the end.
Daniel Bryan gets it to two on two before The Miz run out to cost him to continue their feud, and Cena is all alone. He suffers a DDT on the exposed concrete floor, only to no-sell it and eliminate both Justin Gabriel and Wade Barrett on his own, super triumphantly, to save the day. It’s been criticized ever since, called out as selfish and dumb and this all-time bad example of a no-sell, all of that.
The thing is that that isn’t actually what happens.
Go watch the last two or three minutes of this match again.
John Cena’s selling is good.
I’m not saying it’s perfect. I wish there was a little more put into it, maybe a count out tease before they want to actually pin him and drag him in, maybe some more taunting, maybe a pause by Barrett when it comes down to one on one and John is still nearly motionless. There are a bunch of little ways where it could have been better, but it is so so so so so so far away from being bad, and even farther away from being what it’s been criticized as ever since it happened.
Cena doesn’t move without being dragged up, shoved in, and pulled into position for a minute or two. When he beats Gabriel, it’s a last ditch roll away from the 450 Splash and diving slightly into a cover. When he beats Wade, all he does is take him down to the mat (without ever getting to his own feet) after Wade taunts him, going into the STF all while yelling out in a more intense way than usual in a clear show of pure adrenaline, before then immediately collapsing again as soon as the match is won.
I don’t often come on here and find myself defending often criticized selling performances, it is far more frequently the opposite, but Cena rules here, and I want to talk for a moment specifically to everyone who was mad at this at the time, has been mad at this since, and especially anyone who (and I wouldn’t think these people still existed if not for a recent Twitter interaction with one of them) is somehow still upset about John Cena at the end of this match.
You are all babies with absolutely zero sense of consistency, there have been a thousand worse selling performances on shows of this magnitude or around it in the years since, and you have been babies for this long because what you’re actually mad about is the finish, which you are also wrong about.
It was and still is the right call.
The Nexus was a great angle for a few months. Their weaknesses — all of them being fairly middling guys, representative of the failure of WWE developmental at the time — were hidden in rare squashes and mostly working angles. However, as everything after this showed, not one of them really had it. Wade and Ryback came close at times, but years off, and not on a level where you can make any rational argument that they should have won. Wade had his chances and hw was what he was. Ryback maybe got hurt by getting hot in the middle of Punk/Cena/Rock up top, but failed to show much for years after that. It’s fun to complain, but this has always struck me as something not worth complaining about. Nothing was lost by them not winning, they likely would have fallen apart even had they won, with a loss to this team of eventual also-rans only hurting the Ace and friends in the process. What we have instead of doomed-to-fail wishcasting is just a proper ending to what, up to this point, was a good and different sort of a feud.
That’s why I like the match a lot.
It’s where the angle should have ended.
Nexus was never the NWO. It was never the WWE’s Generation Next. It wasn’t even the Impact Players. You were in a desert watching the WWE in 2010 and you thought you saw water, but thirteen plus years later, I hope everyone has grown enough to admit what it was (and that I was always right about this).
Seven developmental ass developmental guy got as far as they could with the element of surprise and total cohesion and unity, taking advantage of a weaker roster, but when it came time to actually do it against the top stars and slowly robbed of their numbers advantaged, they were revealed as what they always were. Good and promising talents, but either not yet or not ever good enough and tough enough to achieve when everything was fair.
The match succeeds as much because of its craft as it does because of its honesty, and because if nothing else, it knows enough to center the match around two of the greatest of all time, and to trust in how great it will feel when John Cena dispatches with yet another would-be replacement and absolute fraud.
Unlike the Nexus, so much much stronger than the sum of its parts.
HANDWERK 