10 Most Disappointing Wrestlers Of 2017
Consolation prizefighters.
Did anybody really expect much of Jinder Mahal in his maiden reign as WWE Heavyweight Champion?
It wasn't a disappointment because few anticipated there was a worker underneath those veins - and there wasn't. Mahal somehow contrived to make a match in which a man took a 20-foot table bump tedious. Beyond the constrictive Punjabi Prison stipulation, it was plain to see, past the bamboo, that Mahal was an average in-ring talent, unable to translate his menacing, improved body language into gripping, exciting, believable traditional wrestling matches.
Even at his best - as muscular luggage in an heroic, title-winning effort on the part of AJ Styles - Mahal botched just as the contest reached a dramatic crescendo. It's not his fault - he was hardly going to reject the push, and the money that came with it - but the man is such a career jobber that it's little wonder he could barely perform his finish.
The role was beyond him - which is why it should have remained beyond his reach. As such, he doesn't warrant a place here.
This is a list reserved for those we expected far more of...
10. Randy Orton
Around 18 months ago, we published an article entitled 10 Reasons Why Nobody Has Missed Randy Orton, which caught some flak - but realistically, if he'd extended his injury layoff with a long vacation, would it have drastically altered the WWE landscape? Would it have altered the landscape at all?
Orton's Royal Rumble win avoided backlash through cynically careful forethought; only by including Roman Reigns in the final two was the uninspiring repetition accepted. The platform to Orton's programme was at least unremarkable; the programme itself was remarkably bad. At its worst, it was laughable - and Orton's subsequent role of legitimising Jinder Mahal yielded the sum total of absolutely nothing. Their methodical, slow in-ring approaches meshed to create a tedious advert for the receding "WWE Style" in a series that was somehow a novelty and a bore.
His big year turned into a big nothing in short order, thanks to a weird series with Rusev in which the two men traded squash wins as a prelude to an entirely forgettable B-show blowoff.
More or a less a patron of Shane McMahon as the year drew to a close, this spare part portrayal is vintage Orton - though not the Orton WWE would still have you believe is a genuine legend.