Wade Barrett doesn’t blame John Cena for beating The Nexus at Summerslam 2010.
At the biggest event of the summer that year, the main event saw a huge 14-man elimination tag team match. Wade Barrett led The Nexus against Team Cena, which included legends like Edge, Chris Jericho and Bret Hart.
Despite impressing early on, The Nexus fumbled a 3-1 lead as John Cena won the match for his team. While this has been considered a poor booking move by Vince McMahon, Wade Barrett doesn’t blame Cena for going through with it.
Wade Barrett spoke with AceOdds about the match at Summerslam. He admitted that he does not think the match should have ended in the way it did.
However, he blamed WWE management for the booking. Barrett doesn’t know how much input Cena had on the result, and instead argued that the WWE didn’t want to build any new stars.
“Yeah, I’d say for me personally, I’ve gone on record before saying that the Nexus Summer Slam match in 2010 should not have ended the way it did. And I don’t think you will find a single person of note in the wrestling industry who will agree with how that match ended, which is where John Cena beat the Nexus at our first real test. “
“How much of that was down to John Cena, I don’t know. I think the problem we had at the time in WWE was that management had a philosophy that we’re going to make one, two, maybe three stars and everybody else on the roster is essentially cannon fodder for these top names.”
Wade Barrett Thinks The Nexus Were “Backing Dancers”
Wade Barrett continued. He noted that The Nexus weren’t main event stars,and were just the “backing dancers” for the big stars.
He added that he doesn’t blame John Cena for winning that match. Barrett noted that, if he were in Cena’s shoes, he’d had happily taken the victory and all the spoils that came with it.
“So, it might have been a Randy or an Undertaker or a John Cena, for example. The rest of us were an irrelevance. We were just there as backing dancers for the top names. So that was just a management thing. I’m thankful that today that is not the case. It’s not like we just have these hand-picked two or three guys that are important. “
“Now it feels like everyone up and down the card is treated as a star, is treated as important. They’re given good writing, and opportunities to do storytelling, and therefore we don’t have these kind of dead segments in Raw and SmackDown of things that really don’t matter. I think that is where people were tuning out. So, I can’t really blame John Cena for what he was doing. If I was in his position and management came to me and said, “Hey, you’re going to beat everybody on the roster, every single night for the next 10 years”, I’d probably say, yeah, that’s great.”
