10 Biggest High Profile WWE Squash Matches Ever
To celebrate the return of the squash match, here are 10 high profile merkings.
The new era of World Wrestling Entertainment has seen the return of an old friend from the past; the squash match. This week we saw Nia Jax and Braun Strowman lay waste to 'local competitors', displaying their dominant talents whilst rag-dolling some anonymous foes.
A squash match is definitely as an extremely one-sided and short match, with the intention of getting new performers over at the expense of unknown or relatively unknown jobbers. Late 80s and early 90s wrestling TV consisted mostly of matches like these, as week after week we saw Earthquake or Adam Bomb make light work of a conveyor belt of pasty nobodies.
It isn't always nobodies that are on the receiving end of this humiliation however. It also doesn't only happen on shows watched by next to no-one. Throughout wrestling history there have been a number of squash matches to take place on pay-per-views and big events, often involving well-known and top level superstars.
Here are 10 such examples of high-profile matches that ended in one-sided annihilation. WrestleMania, SummerSlam and the Royal Rumble are all represented, along with an iconic massacre on an episode of SmackDown over a decade ago. These are all WWE matches too, so my personal favourite squash (Goldberg vs. Raven) will not be featured.
For the record, I've tried to avoid those overly familiar one-and-done sub-20 second matches, so no Sheamus/Daniel Bryan nonsense here. In honour of Dino Bravo and The Warlord, enjoy!
10. The Shield Vs. Kane & New Age Outlaws - WrestleMania XXX
I'll start with WrestleMania XXX, and a match that many groaned at when it was booked but went absolutely perfectly in the end. The Shield were just off a hot program with The Wyatt Family, and it seemed utterly preposterous that they would be facing off against Kane and the New Age Outlaws at the biggest show of the year.
Everything about the match was done properly however. The Shield interrupted Road Dogg's now-tired pre-match spiel, and once the bell rang the whole thing went less than two minutes before the Outlaws were getting powerbombed back into their backstage roles.
Even so, this was three influential wrestlers of the past (well, one influential wrestler and an influential tag team I guess) getting squashed on the biggest show of the year by three of the most influential wrestlers of the future.