For: A Lacklustre Rumble With Few Surprises
We heard rumours of Y2J, RVD and Christian. Hell we even hoped that maybe the Undertaker would make an appearance in the 30-man event. There is nothing more exciting than seeing what surprises the Rumble will throw up as the anticipation of every entrant makes you wait with anticipation. So which big returning star did this Rumble have? Kevin Nash. Hmmm... Admittedly, Sheamus did come back and added some much needed vigour to a match that was a little on the boring side. While the start was good with Alexander Rusev making an impressive debut as well as CM Punk and Seth Rolling acquitting themselves well, by the time of entrant number 14 or so, it was beginning to drag. Not because of any real bad spots (though Nash was not in ring shape by any stretch of the imagination and later Batista's outing here may worry some people who remember the Rock's issues last year). It's just that the Rumble this year felt incredibly...formulaic. Almost everything that was predicted to happen happened. CM Punk was screwed out of a win by the Authority, Roman Reigns got a big push, Batista won the match (from the same spot he won it from last time, for crying out loud), Sheamus returned, the Shield turned on each other, they had the resident comedy wrestler (in this case El Torito) and Kofi Kingston did another feat of acrobatics. That's all very well, but when it came to the unexpected, the audience felt a bit cheated. There was little in the way of surprise entries that were really cool, nor were they any amazing swerves that nobody could have guessed. If one was to sum up this Rumble in one word it would be 'safe' in that everything the WWE put on the table was tried and tested before it got there and so it lost all of its shock value- rendering this year's Rumble as one of the most dull in recent history.