10 Things WWE Regrets About Fastlane
9. A Misfire That Backfired
Daniel Bryan's performance in this match was outstanding. Just absolutely outstanding in its subtlety.
At WrestleMania XII, Bret Hart famously deemed his divisive Iron Man match the high point of his career when he discovered that he had timed it to his version of perfection. He successfully engineered its ambitious moving parts to the very second.
Perhaps Daniel Bryan felt something close to this as his Fastlane '15 match with Roman Reigns rumbled to its finishing sequence. His tweener work throughout was so calculated, so sly, that when he attempted to galvanise the crowd with chants of "Yes! Yes! Yes!", they more muted than usual. His rally felt more forced, too. By design; this was Bryan's attempt to portray himself as a desperate man performing a sudden and literal about-face, as he learned his technical prowess was, in the end, no match for Roman's impressive and dominant power game.
Ultimately, it didn't matter how excellently Bryan - and Reigns - performed across those 20 incendiary minutes. The WWE fandom had already predicted and braced themselves for the next 10 years of the main event picture.
A match that could only ever have invited visions of a more popular alternate reality, it felt almost cruel - and since Reigns symbolised that withdrawn hand, it left the audience all the more hungry for his blood.