5 Ups & 8 Downs From John Cena's WWE Retirement Tour

5. Those Matches

Realistically, we could chart a “down” for nearly every match during John Cena’s heel run, but it’s probably easier to just lump them all together, hold everyone’s collective noses and give a big thumbs down.

After winning the Undisputed WWE Championship at WrestleMania 41 (more on that later), Cena went on to stink up the joint in a handful of slow, plodding, overbooked matches that exposed just how washed he really was.

Cena versus Randy Orton, Cena versus R-Truth, and Cena versus CM Punk were big matches should have felt like events, but his heel persona sapped the energy and mystique out of them. They were odd curiosities – a question of what a heel Cena facing a babyface Orton would look like – but they didn’t deliver on the night.

In some cases, you could chalk this up to a failed experiment, but we’re talking about three post-WrestleMania PLE main events that were dragged down, which impacted how those shows were received. No one is going back and watching those matches, and they won’t show up on a highlight reel. They’ll be forgotten or ignored, like the entire Pandemic Era.