10 Most Embarrassing Wrestling Botches Of 2021 (So Far)
Botches that tore down the veil of kayfabe: featuring Sasha Banks, Roman Reigns, pyro, and more...
Despite their portrayal as athletes who border on superhuman, the people behind our favourite wrestling superstars are mere mortals just like the rest of us.
Mere mortals who are also at the mercy of mistakes.
When the rest of us screw up at work, the humiliation is caged in our workplace. Wrestlers don’t have this luxury. At the bare minimum, they have a live crowd hypnotised by their every move, at worst the whole world is watching.
Wrestlers long ago learned that the best way to deal with a botch that goes viral is to accept it, laugh at it, and soon the clip will largely stop being shared. Yet some botches come with an embarrassment so searing that they take a little longer to stop burning.
Due to the pandemic, 2021’s most embarrassing botches were largely behind closed doors, though, the slowdown of society has given the online wrestling community increasing free time to watch more content and to share and vent about it online.
While highlighting botches can turn a little petty and overly critical, some mistakes are so embarrassing they force themselves out-front eclipsing all that went before and came after it...
10. Surprising Cameo From Mae Young's Son
Bobby Lashley vs. Drew McIntyre
WWE Championship
WWE Hell in a Cell 2021
The first point of embarrassment may fall on the petty side of botch discourse, but in an entertainment form that requires suspension of disbelief even the smallest error that takes you out of the fantasy is jarring. The prime example of this is the controversy caused by a visible Starbucks cup in an episode of Game of Thrones.
The match was the card’s main event, the Hell in a Cell match stipulation and the bout billed as Drew McIntyre’s final shot at Lashley’s WWE Championship added serious tension to the clash. The botch that sapped away attention was neither competitor’s fault.
After McIntyre was sent crashing through a table to the outside, the hand of a member of production was clearly visible on camera, pushing half of the broken table. This was assumingly for aesthetics to make the wreckage from the table spot look as devastating as possible, but it just took fans out of the moment.
The blunder was called out by fans on social media, though a large portion of the fanbase moved their ire onto the match’s roll-up finish.