10 Worst Anticlimaxes In WWE History

10. Triple H vs. Randy Orton - Wrestlemania 25

Set up as a professional feud turned horribly personal, this one had a big fight build: top heel Randy Orton had taken his habit of randomly assaulting people for no reason a step too far, and attacked the McMahon family, including babyfaced Triple H’s wife Stephanie. Helmsley had returned the favour by attacking the Ortons at home, and the grudge match storyline was due to climax with two of the company’s best in-ring performers meeting on the biggest night of the year, in the third and final main event, with the WWE championship on the line. It should have been huge.

In the end, the match didn’t deliver the desired big fight reaction, playing out to disinterested fans. It was, after all, the third main event, and there had been six matches on the undercard. To make matters worse, the instant classic that was Undertaker vs. Shawn Michaels had taken place as the first main event, followed by an average triple threat for the world heavyweight championship. Traditional booking involves cooldown matches for a reason: arranging all three main events one after the other without a break was practically guaranteeing audience apathy.

More than that, the match had a stipulation that if Triple H lost by disqualification, he’d lose the title. The crowd knew that the storyline required the babyface to take the heel to the woodshed, but the stipulation was setting up a bloodless, PG era main event instead – and Triple H and Orton had essentially been feuding on and off ever since the Game kicked the Legend Killer out of Evolution five years earlier in 2004. The paying audience had been watching the pair of them main event pay-per-views against one another every year since then, often squabbling over one of the world titles, and often with a gimmick like Last Man Standing attached.

In the end, a referee bump allowed Triple H to use the sledgehammer to defeat his archenemy, but by then it was just too late for the crowd to get into it. A red hot angle was let down by short-sighted booking on the night…