Bray Wyatt: What Went Wrong?

Wyatt's WrestleMania record had at that point been a catalogue of his most high profile failures, in a WWE run full of regular weekly ones. A John Cena WrestleMania XXX programme was a burial hiding in plain site. A loss to The Undertaker a year later was substantially less subtle. He was one of the countless wrestlers too injured to work at WrestleMania 32, but WWE still found the time for him to get bantered the f*ck back to the backwaters by The Rock.

But 2017 was going to be different. Not like the others. Bray's Elimination Chamber win came right as his storyline relationship with Randy Orton had taken two stone dead characters and rehabilitated both. 'The Apex Predator' had won the Royal Rumble one month earlier, bound himself by the bond with a Bray that had taken a Roman Reigns-shaped bullet to guide him to the win. There was genuine synergy between the two, and - more importantly - evidential emotional investment in the angle based on increases responses to the pair.

That Randy Orton literally burned it all to the ground.

Acting as rashly as WWE's creative team, Orton revelled in his revelation of a six-month ruse by setting fire to Bray's compound to - ahem - heat up their WrestleMania clash. 'The Viper' had been a snake alright, but his arson seemed to sap the supposed superpowers out of his former cult leader until Bray bit back with some awfully f*cking stupid prop-based threats just days away from their 'Grandest Stage' showdown.

Still, at least the silliness was out of their systems before the match itself...

CONT'D...