Wrestlemania #19: What Should The Match Order Have Been?

Anonymous says:

I like the order of the matches at Wrestlemania 19 pretty much as they are. A decent spotfest for the Cruiserweight Title opened the show. That’s how you should open a show. Then, the least interesting match went on second. That’s also the right way to do things. The Womens Title went on third and it was basically the 2nd least interesting match on the card, so that’s the right call. The Tag Title match was decent, but everything higher on the card was better. Jericho and Michaels was a great match, but although it had the 2nd best workrate on the show it just wasn’t as big as the matches that followed. Triple H and Booker T followed that match. That was the right decision, as it was the least interesting of the 4 main events, but still a pretty good match. Triple H is extremely underrated in this period by most reviewers. Hulk Hogan VS Vince McMahon was much better than it had any right to be and was a fitting match at its spot on the card. Rock VS Austin was simply a bigger match than everything else to that point. Lesnar VS Angle was the culmination of the best build for a Wrestlemania main event that I can remember. Lesnar was screwed out of his title by Heyman at Survivor Series and got no rematch, thanks to Heyman. Angle won the title at Armageddon with help from Lesnar and then screwed the fans by joining Heyman. Lesnar had to beat Big Show just to get into the Royal Rumble, which was his only chance at getting a title shot (despite basically still being undefeated) because Heyman’s faction seemed to have firm control of the title. Heyman’s faction just kept expanding as the A-Train joined and later Team Angle were brought up and immediately dominated the tag team division. Lesnar pretty much went through the entire Heyman faction (and they even brought out Eric Angle as a decoy) and took Heyman out in a steel cage match. Then, at Wrestlemania, it was just Angle and Lesnar in a 1-on-1 match without any outside interference or any manager. The one thing that went wrong was when Lesnar missed a move (the shooting star press) that he probably would have hit 9 times out of 10 because Angle was out of position. Sadly, Angle and Lesnar never quite equaled their Wrestlemania match, despite facing each other a number of times, including at SummerSlam, in an Ironman match on Smackdown and for the IWGP Championship in Japan.

In sharp contrast to the near-perfect booking of Wrestlemania 19 is the horrendous match order of Wrestlemania 20. That show was excruciatingly awful between after Evolution VS Rock N Sock until Eddie VS Angle. That awful stretch of the show lasted for around 2 hours. I consider Wrestlemania 20 to be the worst Wrestlemania of the modern era pre-PG (X-7 – 24). 5 hours is simply too long for a wrestling show to begin with and it doesn’t help when the middle portion of the show is filled with truly awful wrestling such as Lesnar VS Goldberg. 20 could have been a good show even with the 5 hour length if they had cut some of the crap. If they had done Lesnar VS Benoit and HHH VS HBK in that 5-star classic from Bad Blood that went nearly an hour instead of the actual main events they did, it would have been one of the greatest shows ever. Eddie VS Angle did not need a title (and I didn’t really buy Eddie as a main eventer anyway until he turned heel around a year later). They could have done Goldberg VS Austin and cut the divas matches and tag matches. If they wanted Booker T and RVD on the card, they could have turned Booker heel and done a match between them.

If I’m booking Wrestlemania 28, the order of the matches is as follows:

12-man Tag
Rhodes VS Big Show
Divas Match
Orton VS Kane
Hall of Fame crap
Bryan VS Sheamus
Punk VS Jericho
HHH VS Taker
Rock VS Cena

The one thing I’d be worried about is that I think the crowd could be burned out by HHH VS Taker. I would pace the show so that the Hall of Fame crap is over about 90 minutes into the show at the most, leaving 2 and a half hours for the good matches. Each of them should get to go at least 20 minutes. Punk VS Jericho should go extremely long to put over that they really are the Best in the World (even though they are actually just the Best in the WWE). HHH VS Taker needs to be a true HIAC match, meaning a bloodbath (I’d like to see a bladejob on HHH VS HBK HIAC levels). If the bulk of the show consists of 4 consecutive ****+ matches, this will be talked about as one of the best shows of all time. The only way you can put Sheamus VS Bryan after HHH VS Taker and before Rock VS Cena is if it is a quick squash for Sheamus and that would be a horrible decision.