9 Exact Moments WWE Booking Stopped Making Sense
4. CM Punk Killed Before John Cena Drops The Bomb
John Cena Vs CM Punk was one of the most hotly anticipated return matches from audiences that had remembered their iconic battles in the past as well as recent fans that were keen to see one of their newer heroes lock horns with the company's newly-minted heels.
It was littered with problems.
The first was the location. By holding it in Saudi Arabia, any build was going to be foreshadowed by CM Punk being made to eat crow for words he'd used about working in the country before that. The second was that the build almost tried to play with that, and curate a narrative that Punk was stubbornly acceptant of his lot to get a title shot, rather than being glad to visit a place he'd previously spoken out against.
The third and final bleak chapter was Cena's big role reversal of Punk's iconic "Pipe Bomb" promo from 2011. He recited half of it incorrectly, bought his latest brand of scarcely believable shlock to it, and all against a backdrop of 'the Straight Edge Superstar' selling a table bump for what felt like longer than he was out of wrestling. Punk's clapback rap promo the following Friday might have been dumb enough to work in a lighter programme, but at this point the entire thing was cast in shade.
It was the latest (and thankfully one of the very last) in a long line of experiments with the John Cena character that had become symbolic of a wider creative decline within the company. In fact, a tonal and total lack of consistency was just about the only thing consistent about Cena since the March switch...