10 WWE Worst WrestleMania Gimmick Matches

If there’s any time to pull out the stops, it’s WrestleMania.

The 'Show Of Shows' is WWE’s chance to draw the eyes of the world to its product, and to attract an audience who might be devotees, lapsed fans, or casual viewers, it’s important to put on a smorgasbord of entertainment.

This means matches that go beyond simple one on one grappling. A great WrestleMania gimmick match can take the form way beyond the simple showdown, incorporating ladders and cells, or comedy and invention, to entice a broader crowd.

A bad WrestleMania gimmick match, though, can be disastrous. From the ill executed to the badly conceived, from those that could have been good but fell apart to the ideas that were dreadful from the off, making a mess of a complex stipulation bout can be far more damaging to the product than any ponderous singles fight.

Whether these matches are so bad they’re perversely enjoyable or just plain drivel, these are the times the bookers have attempted to add a little spice to the stew and ended up making something entirely inedible.

There’s an element of grading on a curve here - unlike a lot of the matches on this list, this street fight isn’t downright terrible. Ambrose is massively charismatic, and Lesnar carries an undeniable aura and sells well when called upon to do so.

With the talent involved, though, this should have been far better. It’s a street fight in name only, tame even by WWE’s PG era. Ambrose swings a kendo stick and a chair a few times and lets off a fire extinguisher; Brock demonstrates that he’s more powerful than any weapon.

All this leads to a match that should have been bonkers and brutal but winds up quite dull. Most frustratingly, this seems to be due to Lesnar’s unwillingness to take it up a notch. Ambrose has since discussed his attempt to pitch something exciting and crazy, but Lesnar wasn’t interested, even though all of Ambrose’s notions were for spots that would do dreadful damage to him and make the Beast look more brutal still.

No one was expecting Ambrose to actually utilise Terry Funk’s chainsaw to slice Brock in half, but this was flagrant false advertising: we were sold a rampage and wound up with a run of the mill match. We’re not angry, we’re just disappointed.