10 Most Disastrous Wrestling Heel Turns

There's a nasty rumour doing the rounds at the moment that WWE officials, in their infinite wisdom, are about to turn perennial fan favourite Bayley into a heel for the first time in her career.

Predictably, most of the internet has reacted to this news with confusion. Though her character has suffered as the result of poor booking over recent months, The Huggable One remains one of the company's most marketable figures on account of her enduring popularity among younger fans.

Even setting merchandise sales aside, it seems frankly impossible to imagine her batting for the side of evil. She's practically the female equivalent of Daniel Bryan: so damn likeable that, even if you heard about her throwing kittens into a swimming pool, you'd probably say they had it coming.

All of this is to imply that transitioning Bayley into a bad girl has the potential to go very wrong (at least if you classify fans not booing her as "very wrong"). And there's plenty of precedent here: wrestling history is awash with examples of heel turns that just never quite caught on...

Eric Bischoff's "special" nephew turned heel on an episode of Raw in November 2006, furiously attacking Jim Duggan with his own 2x4 after the duo lost a match to the Spirit Squad (yes, that - not getting routinely mocked by the entire roster - was the final straw).

Suffice it to say, this was the first time that Eugene - real name Nick Dinsmore - had worn the colours of evil since stepping up from the territories two years earlier. His character, up until the moment he snapped, had shown absolutely no predilection for wrong-doing.

To his credit, Dinsmore's performance on the night was actually pretty convincing. He looked like a fundamentally good man who was suddenly overcome by a violent outburst he didn't really understand, which is exactly what you suspect the architects of the angle had asked of him.

If anything, he played it too well. It was impossible for fans to hate the guy, even though they had just watched him unleash a vicious assault on a beloved (if occasionally irritating) Hall of Famer. Small wonder, then, that the character shift was abruptly dropped a couple of weeks later, with Eugene swiftly rejoining the forces of good.