9 WWE Matches That Fell Apart On Live TV
6. Cody Rhodes Vs John Cena (WrestleMania 41)
The WrestleMania main event. Unequivocally the biggest match in all of wrestling, and that's exactly how WWE want it. The biggest company puts on the biggest show featuring two performers who are comfier in the spot than most others...but one more could have done with turning up instead of his inexperienced rapper mate.
Not that The Rock replacing Travis Scott in a like-for-like switch would have repaired the damage already done to the WrestleMania vibes by Cody Rhodes' almost devastatingly bad WWE Championship defence against John Cena. The pair were given something of a poisoned chalice in the spot, thanks to an iconic Cena heel turn that had already started to veer off course in the weeks hence, and a go-home promo spat in Las Vegas that had somehow created a split crowd all over again.
The match itself didn't suffer from a visible or terrible botch, but simply felt like one never-ending one. Cena stomped and punched away, Rhodes at various points made comebacks to scattershot reactions, Cena slowed it down, Rhodes came again, and the whole thing wore on and on and on as the live crowd optimistically pined for a grand finale and those at home voted with their social posts.
An appearance by The Rock - the man Cena sold his soul to, remember - was going to be the difference between creative catastrophe and narrowly-averted disaster, so when Travis Scott filled the spot (albeit with one last play of the epic FE!N) and guided 'The Champ' to his "never-seen seventeen", the former was bleakly apparent.