2017 Awards: Worst Match of the Year

It’s the Rated RK-No Special.

This is one of the awards that often shows you how bad things can get. There’s a fine line between a match that isn’t very good and one of the worst of the year. That’s the case this time around as well, meaning I won’t be including matches that aren’t very good because I’m looking for something far worse than that. These are the worst of the worst for one reason or another.

Before we get into the regular nominees, I’m intentionally leaving out Goldberg vs. Kevin Owens from Fastlane. It was 20 seconds long and it’s kind of hard to make a match really be that bad in so short a time. The match was stupid booking instead of a bad match, which are two very different things.

We’ll start with the ladies as Alexa Bliss and Bayley which had one of the most career destroying fallouts that you’ll ever see. Bayley still hasn’t recovered from this and there’s a good chance that she never will. The whole story was about Bayley channeling her inner extreme and then she just got the heck beaten out of her in the actual match. Terrible idea and a really bad match, which is quite the horrible concept.

Next up is House of Horrors from Payback, which wasn’t even the worse Orton vs. Bray Wyatt match of the year. This was basically a segment in a house (which wasn’t horrory), an hour off, and then a brawl in the ring with interference giving Bray the win. Wyatt gets nothing out of winning because it’s non-title and then the Brand Split screwed everything up anyway. Easily a horrible match, but it would get worse for these two.

Let’s spread the venom a little more with the men’s Survivor Series match. I don’t remember the last time I saw a match and wondered what the heck they were thinking more than this. It was COMPLETELY overbooked, the big stars they brought in didn’t mean much, and it wound up being about HHH vs. Kurt Angle. Oh and that whole Braun Strowman attacks HHH thing? Still waiting on a followup. This was a straight up disaster and one of the biggest missed opportunities in a long time.

It’s time to get to Battleground and one of its two horrible matches of the night. First up is the flag match between John Cena and Rusev, which was as much pandering to the show’s name as I had seen on anything other than the Royal Rumble. This was long, it was never in doubt, and it was flat out terrible, along with having a rather heavy handed set up in the first place. Cena is better than this, but he seems to have forgotten how to do so.

And now, in a rarity, I present you with a tie for the worst match of the year. In no particular order, we have Randy Orton vs. Bray Wyatt at Wrestlemania XXXIII and Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal in the Punjabi Prison match at Battleground. Both of these are horrible for reasons that I can’t quite differentiate, meaning I can’t put one beneath the other.

We’ll start at Wrestlemania, which not only felt like a nothing title change but also featured Bray’s main event run (which was long overdue in the first place) having its legs cut out from under him (and he’s showing no signs of recovering), title reign for Orton that is as transitional as you can get, and A BUNCH OF FREAKING BUGS BEING DISPLAYED ON THE MAT FOR NO APPARENT REASON! I get the idea of Wyatt trying to get in Orton’s head, but it didn’t even work. Orton just shrugged it off, hit the RKO, and won the title. What was the point of this?

Speaking of that, what in the world was the point in having the Punjabi Prison match go that long? It felt like they could have chopped a good fifteen minutes (it was less than thirty altogether) from the thing and told the same story: Orton dominates, the Singh Brothers interfere, Mahal gets beaten up some more, the Brothers interfere, Great Khali makes a one off appearance and Mahal retains. It was long, it was terrible, and Mahal retained the title.

But was it as bad as Orton vs. Wyatt in Orlando? Well…

I don’t know, because I’m not thinking about these things again and you shouldn’t either. Go watch some old Divas matches which were at least so bad they were funny. These were so bad that they belong in a woodchipper somewhere. The bad stuff was REALLY bad this year and I can’t imagine things actually being worse this year.

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