10 Dumbest WWE Match Finishes This Decade

Don't turn around.

By Michael Sidgwick /

Some of the more risible finishes in modern WWE history are understandable - to a point.

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There is no stopping the television juggernaut, which is WWE's primary revenue stream. Storylines must be bent and contrived to its whim. With more airtime to fill than ever before, the odd screwy finish is to be expected. Feuds have to be prolonged within the current paradigm, and sometimes the only way of orchestrating that is by having a heel try and cheat his way out of a match. This is an accepted and established part of wrestling. These days are over, now that the automatic rematch rule is no more. It's fine, though, because here's Rowan.

What isn't acceptable are those infuriating occasions on which big matches draw to a close without a satisfactory conclusion. The juggernaut keeps rolling because we as fans keep greasing the wheels. We should be entitled to sufficient closure sometimes - otherwise, why are we investing so much time into the product?

Most galling of all is WWE's insistence on protecting stars in defeat, often to the equal detriment of the victor. Building two stars to appear in a feature WWE match, and putting them back to where they started, is just dumb, and this has been an incredibly pervasive trend this decade.

10. Dean Ambrose Loses Via Exploding Monitor (TLC 2014)

After a brutal Tables, Ladders and Chairs match, during which the two men tore strips off one another in a violent war, Ambrose attempted to maim the Eater Of Worlds with a monitor. Only, he misjudged the length of the cable attached to it, and it blew up in his face, gifting his foe the win.

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This did the sum total of absolute zero for either man. Ambrose was left looking more like an idiot than a lunatic, and Wyatt more fortuitous than 'destroyer'. No one man bested the other , nor had any real case to advance further up the card.

These match outcomes have debilitating effects on future programmes, too. Wyatt was scheduled to face the Undertaker at WrestleMania - who in their right mind believed he had a chance of overcoming such steep odds, when he couldn't even beat Ambrose decisively? It's not as if Ambrose was pencilled in for a similarly important singles match (he was an extra in the Intercontinental title ladder multi-man). There were probably no plans for him whatsoever at that point, so why did he need to be protected?

Even more so than the finish itself, that there was a screwy finish at all left an awful taste. This feud was instigated by Wyatt after his interference left Ambrose and Rollins right back where they started at the close of Hell In A Cell - all three men were in roughly the same position by the end of the year, and yet, months had been spent pointlessly moving them around the chess board.

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