One WWE Match You MUST Watch From Every Year 1984-2024
17. 2007 - John Cena Vs Umaga, Royal Rumble
John Cena makes more than one appearance on this list, but over the decades there are plenty of ardent WWE fans that would suggest he should be nowhere near it.
'The Champ' - and he was in that spot for so many creatively barren years - remains an extremely difficult wrestler to retrospectively analyse. He was absolutely the child-friendly star WWE needed even if not the ageing hardcore supporters wanted. His execution was often sloppy or soft to the point of being more unsafe than if he laid it in, but various experiments as a sub-PWG versions of himself reframed some of his bigger matches as being good cases of simply working the crowds in front of him. Itself a hard job when they were divided into halves every time he walked the ailse.
It's perhaps all those contradicts that make his Royal Rumble 2007 war with Umaga so engaging. 'The Samoan Bulldozer' was such a threat to Cena's title in the moment that he effectively had to be all of the above to get the job done, cycling through each version of himself to seal the deal. The happy-go-lucky act had earned him a roll-up win on the otherwise-undefeated monster weeks prior, but it wasn't washing under Last Man Standing rules. This resulted in Cena at his most physical, artistic and violent, approximately a year before a divisive PG ruling clamped that side of his character for good.
By taking it seriously, Cena himself was taken seriously. It set him up for perhaps the best in-ring year he ever had, but also created a brand new problem - when there wasn't much more of this to go around, fans were left staring at his dayglo shirts and wondering what might have been.