10 Things I Hate About WWE Champion Dean Ambrose

It’s a little sad for the many, many fans of the Lunatic Fringe who thought that his WWE World Championship win at Money In The Bank was the latest indication that the WWE had (at long last) begun listening to the opinions of their vocal fanbase.

Instead, it seems as though he was only handed the top title in the company because he - and it - were being drafted to Smackdown Live to head up the B-brand. Oh, WWE talk a good game about raising Smackdown to RAW’s level in the eyes of the fans, rebuilding the show’s reputation after years of serving as a glorified recap segment for RAW.

But who was the champ’s opponent for his big SummerSlam title defence on behalf of this allegedly revitalised brand? Dolph Ziggler, a man who’d spent the last eighteen months or more losing lower midcard matches, growing his hair out and working on a fake tan so alarming that terminal skin cancer patients had started nominating him for Make-A-Wish.

More than that, Ziggler’s the man Ambrose had already beaten pretty definitively to earn a place in the Money In The Bank ladder match that got him the title in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Ziggler’s work, especially when he’s motivated: and he delivered some of the best promo and character work he’s done in years in the build-up to SummerSlam.

But in summer 2016, the Human Satsuma is low rent opposition. No one seriously believes in him anymore as a contender: he’s been beaten down by nothing booking in nowhere angles for too long.

Despite all of that, Ziggler versus Ambrose seemed like exactly the kind of match we should be seeing halfway up the card at SummerSlam. It says something about how Ambrose himself has been presented by the company - and about how he carries himself as champion - that the midcard still seems right about his level.

Now Ambrose’ next opponent is AJ Styles, a man often called the best wrestler alive today, who’s coming off a clean victory over John Cena that caused Big Match John to pull his tired and emotional face and tease Giving Up Never Giving Up. If there’s an opposite to Dolph Ziggler in summer 2016, Styles is it.

This is the WWE’s opportunity to make Ambrose as the WWE World Champion, and for Ambrose to capitalise on all that main event promise he showed in fits and starts earlier on this year but failed to deliver. Yet, for all that, it seems far more likely that, win or lose, Ambrose will look resolutely midcard once more, as he continues on his quest to make the biggest title in professional wrestling look like a belt buckle you’d buy at Hot Topic.