Everyone knows I’ve been highly critical of Cena’s character. I thought the logical choice was the have Owens take the title but merchandise sales and the open challenges on RAW seem to have spoken volumes. WWE seem to do a great job of making numerous people look like credible contenders and then they all seem to fall at Cena’s feet and have to start again. It’s happened with Rusev, Wyatt and now Owens.
This wouldn’t have felt as painful a defeat if Owens didn’t have to tap out to Cena’s horrific looking submission. I hear some people argue that tapping out isn’t a big deal these days. In that case, I would then ask why Cena has never tapped out. I understand he is Mr. ‘Never Give Up’ now but that hasn’t always been the case. As the main babyface he’ll never tap out and that’s fine, but don’t make him humiliate every major contender he faces by making them tap out. Tapping out still matters and until babyfaces like John Cena do it, it always will. At least Owens tried to save face on the WWE.com exclusive by stating he did it to fight again another day.
One of the positives out of this match was the reactions and facial expressions Cena made when he was unable to put Owens away. At numerous times he looked to be frustrated and started to show an aggressive edge to his character. This was mentioned by the commentary team which made think whether they were plotting seeds for Cena to go a new direction moving forward. After all, the seeds for Undertaker’s return were planted when he was being mentioned in the weeks leading to Battleground, so could this be a similar situation? Cole stated that he hadn’t seen Cena look like this since facing The Rock at WrestleMania 28 where we all know that WWE were considering the Cena heel turn. Unfortunately this seems unlikely as Cena obviously picked up the victory but he also went back to his usual self on RAW during his confrontation with Rollins.
WWE also continued the trend of making the Money in the Bank briefcase holder the whipping boy until they decide to cash-in which doesn’t make much sense to me. Barrett kept hold of the crown (yay – lose – lose situation there) and the Wyatt family is now back together. Basically Wyatt has returned to what he was doing before he was paired with Cena. So it’s taken him a year to get back to where he was and back on track.
Overall I’m not getting overly excited for SummerSlam at this stage, Undertaker V Lesnar and Cena V Rollins are matches which creatively concern me. I’m sure they will be interesting contests but not sure that they are logical choices to make at this moment in time.
Maybe Undertaker is having this contest now as they already have big plans for him at next year’s WrestleMania and feel this might be the only opportunity they get to do the rematch? Maybe Undertaker wants to have a longer run going into a possible retirement into 2016; it’s all speculation at this point.
What are your thoughts on this past week’s events? Let me know on Twitter @BeansOnToastUK, email me [email protected] or comment below.
