10 Worst Finishes To WWE WrestleMania Matches

So you’ve got a match on WrestleMania.

This is it: the culmination of a dream. Years of hard work, heavy graft, all leading up to this point - your chance to strut your stuff on the biggest stage the industry has to offer. You work your match, all goes as planned, and now the final hurdle: the finish. Here’s where it can get tricky.

Despite the grandeur of WrestleMania and unimaginable man hours ploughed into staging the event, it’s not at all uncommon for Show Of Shows’ matches to end on a real bummer. We’ve seen great matches take a plunge in the final three seconds, fair fights turned foul by a scuffed ending, and shoddy fixtures made downright rotten by baffling conclusions.

There can be nothing more frustrating for a performer than a bad finish - more often than not it’s the enduring image viewers will go home with. Whether these are botches, stumbles, or just stupid pieces of booking, these endings left sour tastes. Think of these as cautionary tales: it’s only the most important part of the most important match of your career, lads. No big deal...

This one was a bad idea from the off, and everyone knew it. In 2011, swathes of fans had never been more down on Cena, and for all he’s a commendable professional, a WrestleMania headliner The Miz ain’t.

WWE bolstered this with a decent build and an excellent pre-match package highlighting the competitors’ disparate paths to the top, and from there, the bout was perfectly fine, a distinctly WWE contest by two excellent workers.

This would have been a disappointing but unexceptional main event, up until the finish. The pair were counted out to a hail of boos. Enter The Rock, who took it upon himself to restart the match, then swiftly nailed Cena with the Rock Bottom, allowing Miz to retain the title.

What this amounted to was an advert for next year’s WrestleMania, the main event of which was sealed the following night on Raw. Rock vs Cena was a huge match, and the lengthy build paid off in the amazing business the show did, but it’s a bit of a slap in the face for the paying fans in 2011, who’ve been subjected to a duff match and a commercial for what they could be watching in a year’s time.