#16
Randy Orton vs. Sheamus
Hell in a Cell ’10
Randy Orton won the WWE Championship from Sheamus in September 2010, as part of a Six-Pack Challenge that included Wade Barrett, John Cena, Chris Jericho, and Edge. Sheamus invoked his rematch clause, leading to this Hell in a Cell match. I remember being very interested in this one at the time, because Sheamus had come out of nowhere and launched himself into the main event scene, and had already beaten John Cena. Orton didn’t actually beat Sheamus to win the title, so it would be interesting to see who would walk away with the title in a one-on-one contest, where the likelihood of external shenanigans was low.
While it’s still in the bottom half of all the matches of its kind, this isn’t a half bad Hell in a Cell match. Sheamus and Orton are nothing, if not sound, consistent workers, and that’s the kind of match they would inevitably produce. I know they’ve had better over the last four years, but at a full 21 minutes, I was impressed by how well the Celtic Warrior handled himself inside the structure for the first time.
Like a few others on this list – mostly from the Hell in a Cell PPV era – if this match suffered from one thing, it was not actually needing the Cell. I bought into their rivalry, but there wasn’t enough truly bad blood, or enough compelling back-story to merit this championship match happening inside the biggest match WWE has to offer. Remove the Hell in a Cell and expectations are much lower, inevitably leading to a slightly better, perhaps more memorable program. But it’s a full-blown PPV, so you have to have the titular gimmick involved…
