#25
CM Punk vs. Ryback
Hell in a Cell ’12
Oh, Brad Maddox. You’re career didn’t exactly get off to a great start, did it?
Yes, this is the infamous Hell in a Cell match that took the organic popularity of Ryback, and tossed it out the window with a screwy referee angle. This is the sole reason the self-proclaimed “Big Guy” is – when healthy – stuck at the bottom of the card with Curtis Axel.
Now I’m not saying WWE should have put the world title on him here. But in retrospect, since Punk’s record title reign was eventually fed to The Rock, maybe it would have been a good investment to set up another major heavyweight in the main event scene?
We’re supposed to be talking about the match, so I guess I’ll let me bitterness over this terrible finish rest to address the bell-to-bell quality of this contest. If anything can be learned from Punk’s first Cell match, or the Undertaker’s forgettable WrestleMania match with Big Boss Man, it’s that you can’t build to a quality Hell in a Cell match in ten minutes.
Maybe it’s because they over-booked the rest of the card. Maybe it’s because Ryback just didn’t have a varied arsenal of moves to choose from, and they didn’t want to expose him as green. Whatever the case may be, this match just wasn’t that interesting, and we’ll never know if it had the potential to get better, because they ended a PPV main event after ten minutes, with a crooked referee spot.
By the way, this match just barely edges out Kane vs. The Undertaker, because while the screwjob finish was bad, at least it wasn’t a jar of light…
