10 Main Eventers Who SUCKED At Great Moves (But Did Them Anyway)
Don't try *this* at home.
The World Cup group game between England and Panama was the first from the tournament to draw faux-unknowing references to the mysterious world of WWE ("or whatever it's called", negged BBC host Gary Lineker before pundit Rio Ferdinand piled on by mentioning the Royal Rumble) thanks to the suplexes and roughhousing in the box that resembled a Tazmaniac working an early ECW show rather than a Panamanian on the global sporting stage.
It was all out of necessity. Whilst ordinarily the mother of invention, it was here an act of desperation - one side had skill and technique so far beyond the other that only guile and grisly physicality could be used to counter. But then, football is a sport. These are divisions that exist not to create drama from reality but to force competitiveness by the obvious metric of results-based success. Professional wrestling has no such shackle.
There's of course still a single-minded quest to lead the industry, but there are countless differing ways to be considered top dog. Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada continue to have futuristic and evocative IWGP Heavyweight Championship clashes that make Dave Meltzer's head explode, but many - and not totally without justification - refuse to pay them heed until they do the same in WWE over a strap with substantially different prestige.
Some wrestlers just fly, some just talk and some do nothing great but everything well enough. Why they'd chose to needlessly expose themselves in something predetermined thus remains quite the mystery...
10. The Rock - Sharpshooter
Introduced by 'The Great One' during a period where he got everything over, The Rock's Sharpshooter was for much of the audience a first glimpse of the move and perhaps why he escaped significant criticism for its woeful execution.
When Bret Hart departed for WCW in late-1997, he took his famous finisher with him, matching it up against Sting's Scorpion Deathlock in a war many had fantasised over for years. That particular 'many' was not the crowd eating up every catchphrase and comedy counter delivered by The Rock three years later. WWE had exploded into the mainstream in the meantime, galvanising a brand new audience in the process.
When Rocky required a greater ground game against submission virtuoso Chris Benoit ahead of their Fully Loaded title scrap, his loose leglock and even looser Crippler Crossface variant were more than acceptable substitutes for something that might have actually hurt.
The move getting over places it in opposition to several others on this list - but really neither is acceptable. Rock's lousy technique was propped up by crowd approval, but only as far as the first unconvincing sell.