10 Wrestling Matches Everybody Wanted (But Nobody Watched)

The gulf between the "casual" and "hardcore" fan is a constant source of friction amongst the online wrestling fandom, but then again what isn't?

This one is a particularly controversial subject that is fiercely debated whenever...

...AEW tops the cable charts for the night, beating literally everything else - "There's a big difference between being cancelled and being number one," in the words of Jerry Seinfeld - with a number that would thrill Warner executives.

But, because there aren't six million people watching, AEW is considered a failure. The reality is that the TV landscape has shifted considerably. The viewership decline is not exclusive to wrestling. The 1998 Seinfeld series finale drew 76.3 million viewers, where in 2019, a very close equivalent in terms of popularity - the Big Bang Theory - drew 18 million. It was considered an enormous success.

Because it isn't 1998 anymore.

Does this gulf even exist? Is AEW, if anything, smart for its hardcore fan service approach given the fractured, swamped pop culture landscape?

People from certain parts of the world are prone to taking this sort of thing literally, so just to clarify: it's not that nobody watched the following matches.

It's that their lack of something - a good number, acclaim, buzz - indicates that there might be a tiny something to the "casual fan" argument after all...

Everybody wanted The Rock to return in some capacity after 2004. He was the Rock.

It wasn't so much the match quality that fans missed, not that Rock wasn't great and probably underrated in that regard. He was simply so charismatic, to a level very rarely seen in the history of the business, that his body of work is often overlooked. But it was just part of one of wrestling's greatest ever package. The return of the Rock would bring with it incredibly entertaining promos in his own voice (albeit penned by Brian Gewirtz), a raucous, spellbound atmosphere, and a level of buzz and intrigue not felt in years and years.

When he did return to WWE, in 2011, he worked a can-they-co-exist gimmick alongside the Rock and worked the f*cking Miz.

Dolph Ziggler could have done that, almost every wrestler in the last decade has done something like it, and he'd have come far cheaper.

The match was dire. Watching John Cena sell and sell poorly for ages before Rock did little more than he would do in a physical TV angle was hardly electrifying, and nor, evidently, was the prospect of it: Survivor Series '11 drew 281,000 buys, was the weakest-performing Big 4 PPV of the year, and wasn't drastically higher than the prior year's show (244,000), which was headlined by Randy Orton Vs. Wade Barrett.