10 Biggest Promises WWE Broke In 2020
1. 'The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever'
Beyond desperate to arrest an alarming ratings slide - those Performance Center shows hit record lows - WWE over a tumultuous spring period experimented with straight-up clickbait as a marketing tactic.
Incredibly, ahead of Backlash, WWE promoted Edge Vs. Randy Orton as 'The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever'. This was massively, laughably optimistic even before you consider that the WrestleMania 36 Last Man Standing match was 40 f*cking minutes of dull, histrionic walking and brawling in which Edge was so affected by his own violence that he cried. "Why. Why..." he seemed to convey.
"Why didn't I just ask to work AJ Styles or something, this is f*cking well boring."
The pathetic melodrama and echoes of wrestling tragedies (!) did little to legitimise WWE's bizarre hype-job. This was never going to be The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever because it was worked in front of no fans, it's all subjective anyway, and Kenny Omega or Bret Hart wasn't in it.
It was actually great.
Paced impeccably to build towards the pure counter-driven wrestling rush of the last five minutes, The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever took all of the pithy, ironic praise normally directed towards Randy Orton and contrived to make it earnest. It was a quintessentially WWE match that proved there's life in an unfashionable style yet. But it wasn't the Greatest Wrestling Match Ever.
It wasn't even the best WWE match that week.