4 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Backlash 2025 (Results & Review)

2. ‘THE Rivalry’

To hear WWE tell the story this past month, John Cena versus Randy Orton is a storied rivalry that has defined wrestling for the past 25 years.

And honestly, the company can be excused for leaning into the history between the two future Hall-of-Famers. They have 31 world title reigns between them and have battled each other 23 times in televised singles bouts through the years (and an additional 69 times in multi-man and tag matches).

But their rivalry simply hasn’t been that good. They don’t have a tremendous amount of chemistry together; they’re certainly not wrestling soulmates. Too many of their matches have been snoozers, and showing clips of previous bouts only reminded longtime fans just how bad some of these contests were.

However, they’ve only had one singles match in the past decade, so a significant portion of the current WWE fandom likely has only seen those highlights rather than the entire matches and boring promos that longtime fans experienced. The problem is that then WWE tossed out that match at Backlash, thus rendering all the hype moot.

Even if fans bought into the “storied rivalry” aspect of the match, many had to be groaning by the end of that debacle and wondering whether Cena/Orton was as good as WWE sold it.