5 Ups And 9 Downs From WWE Hell In A Cell 2019

5. Poor Planning, Poorer Execution

Randy Orton Mustafa Ali
WWE.com

Heading into Sunday, there were only four confirmed matches for the Hell in a Cell PPV: the two cell matches, the SmackDown Women’s Championship bout, and the tag match between Roman Reigns & Daniel Bryan versus the former Bludgeon Brothers.

That is just insanely terrible. How in the blue hell does a promotion with three weeks to build up the PPV manage to not announce half the card until hours before showtime? Would it have killed them to announce during a 30-second blip on SmackDown about Natalya and Lacey Evans? Or Chad Gable and King Corbin? Those two were existing feuds, so fans wouldn’t have needed a backstory.

And even then, we got a ninth match announced during the kickoff show, which on its own would be fine, but that means more than half the card was announced less than 24 hours before the show started. That’s unacceptable.

To make matters worse, the show was poorly executed, with the main match for the show – the WWE Universal Championship Hell in a Cell match – being a dismal embarrassment, and most of the late additions being TV or house show matches at best rather than something PPV-worthy.

It felt like WWE realized they had to put on a show on October 6 and just threw what they could out there to get by for the night.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.