10 Times John Cena Silenced His Critics

To understand how John Cena acquired a reputation as someone who couldn't wrestle, you have to go right back to the beginning.

Instead of arriving at the big time via a steady climb up the hard-knock indie ranks, one-time bodybuilder Cena pretty much went straight into WWE, where he was almost instantly pushed towards the top of the card as the company looked to replace departed Attitude Era stars.

It wasn't so much great matches but great promos that defined Cena's formative years on SmackDown, and even as he began to put in show-stealing performances after his ascent to the main event, those "you can't wrestle" chants somehow endured. Dissuaded more by his over-protected booking than anything, hard-nosed wrestling purists refused to recognise the man's ability between the ropes, despite the growing mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Having headlined WWE shows for more than a decade, it's not surprising that he can lay claim to a greater number of main event calibre matches than any of his contemporaries, but what's striking is his ability to defy expectation.

Cena is a man for all occasions, able to pull it out of the bag whether he's in the ring with a fresh-faced newcomer or a hardened industry legend...

If you were a wrestling fan in 2012 when Brock Lesnar made his long-awaited WWE return and delivered an F-5 to Cena on the post-WrestleMania Raw, chances are you wanted to see the Beast Incarnate savage his opponent in his first pay-per-view match for nearly a decade. That didn't happen (not for another two years, anyway), but it's probably the best Lesnar has put on outside of his original run.

This was less a technical wrestling clinic than it was an old-fashioned street fight, marrying together the authentic style of post-UFC Lesnar with the traditional absurdity that surrounds WWE and a no DQ stipulation. It worked to great effect, and although the consensus is that the wrong man won, neither of them came out of it any worse off.