10 Wrestling Gimmick Matches That Only Happened Once

Without any effort at all, you can probably reel off about 15 to 20 gimmick matches that have, over the years, become veritable staples of professional wrestling.

Whether WWE's planned 50-man Royal Rumble - which is scheduled to take place (probably untelevised) next month in Saudi Arabia - joins this ever-growing list remains to be seen. There are few clues at present as to whether the company plans on making it a permanent part of its calendar.

Given just how many match-types have fallen by the wayside, however, we probably shouldn't get our hopes up. Wrestling's creative geniuses can always - and you suspect, will always - be relied upon to come up with harebrained ideas which sound great on paper, but whose flaws are immediately made clear the second they are put into practice.

Inexplicably, the Punjabi Prison Match is not among them. In fact, WWE saw fit to dust the cobwebs off The Great Khali's playhouse as recently as last year when Jinder Mahal and Randy Orton met at Battleground for the world title. Proof, if it were needed, that someone backstage is trolling us.

Bray Wyatt's House of Horrors - not to be confused with the "compound" on which his army of brothers tangled with The New Day a couple of years ago - has only hosted one WWE match to date, and the strong likelihood is that it will not do so again.

Mostly, this is because the format just isn't palatable for fans in the arena, who at Payback last year only got a viewing experience you would ordinarily associate with a premium-rate WWE live event when The Eater of Worlds and opponent Randy Orton rocked up in the ring for the final two or three minutes.

Up until that point, they watched the action unfold on a screen like the rest of us. And we're using the word "action" liberally here: much of what we were seeing less resembled a wrestling match than it did a sequence from a low-budget horror movie overly reliant on jump scares.

By definition, a trick of this kind - trying to pull in extra subscribers by promising a wacky match familiar to nobody outside of Vince McMahon's circle of trust - can only work once. They may pull out something similar in the future, but it almost certainly won't go by the same name.