photo courtesy: wwe.com
After last week's Raw when Laurinaitis fired the Big Show after humiliating him by having him beg on his knees for his job, most, including myself, felt that this was a set up for Big Show to appear at the PPV and interfere with the match—while turning heel because of the stipulation that anyone interfering in the match would be instantly fired.
The match then took an interesting turn. Instead of it being a serious boss/employee match like what happened numerous times with Austin/McMahon, Bischoff/Flair, and even the match between Bret Hart and Vince, the match became a comedy act.
After building up the fact that Laurinaitis was a pretty good wrestler back in the day with video clips online, Laurinaitis looked like an utter goof for the majority of the match. Cena would taunt him by dousing him with water and pouring it down the front of his track pants and dumping trash on him. This started to kill the mood in the crowd.
The match came to a total halt as he grabbed the mic and said he was going to put Laurinaitis in the STF and would let it go after a 10-count as long as Johnny didn't tap out, something he did a couple times.
Then as Johnny was able to get away from Cena after banging his arm on the announce table, he made a break for the exit. He was then brought back to the ring by the Big Show, not surprisingly.
When it seemed that Cena was going to do his Attitude Adjustment, Show hit him with the WMD punch, stunning the crowd and causing them to boo. Then in the minute it took Laurinaitis to cover Cena, the arena became deathly quiet—horrible for any match.
The match itself was “eh” at best. The commentary was actually funny listening to Jerry Lawler almost gasping for air because he was laughing too hard to commentate, with Michael Cole saying that it was already over and Laurinaitis should just get pinned.
Cena did an impersonation of Michael Cole while he made Laurinaitis act like Booker T. But other than that, the match didn't seem like a main event level match outside of the people involved.
People complained about the Wrestlemania match between Bret Hart and Vince McMahon a couple years back. The ending where the Hart family stayed loyal to Bret and beat up Vince for the entirety of the match was an obvious ending, but the main difference between these two ending matches was that fans got what they wanted from the Bret/Vince match, after nearly thirteen years and the history between both men.
People wanted to see Bret get his revenge on Vince for the Montreal Screwjob and they got that with the match at Wrestlemania. The fans didn't get that with the Cena/Laurinaitis match.
For the past couple of months the fans have been wanting to see Laurinaitis get bruised and battered—it didn't matter if he still beat Cena, fans just wanted to see him beat up and we didn't get that.
Now it's a guessing game as to how this whole thing will play out, although the WWE was able to save the angle after Johnny's mistake where he said that he had rehired Show on Saturday night (not Sunday) which would have meant Show would have been fired.
Instead it was quickly corrected to mean that the two had a verbal agreement prior to the PPV rather than an actual contract. But now we're stuck with Cena vs. Big Show at the next PPV while Laurinaitis gets away with being a tool—similar to the Jerry Lawler/Michael Cole angle from a year ago.
source: bleacherreport.com
