Worst Match of the Year

What is the Worst Match of 2011?

  • Sting vs. Jeff Hardy - Victory Road

  • Michael Cole vs. Jerry Lawler - Wrestlemania

  • Hulk Hogan vs. Sting - BFG

  • Matt Hardy vs. RVD - Genesis

  • Matt Morgan vs. Crimson - Turning Point

  • Jerry Lawler/Jim Ross vs. Michael Cole/Jack Swagger - Extreme Rules

  • Michael Cole vs. Jim Ross - Raw - April 25


Results are only viewable after voting.
Cole/Lawler was nothing put a piss break from the beginning, it's not like it was a main event match for the company's top championship.

No it wasn't. It was meant to be payoff for a nearly year long angle of Michael Cole becoming increasingly insufferable. And then, not only does he not get his face pounded in in a matter of seconds, but he technically wins the match. WUSSUPWITDAT?
 
No it wasn't. It was meant to be payoff for a nearly year long angle of Michael Cole becoming increasingly insufferable. And then, not only does he not get his face pounded in in a matter of seconds, but he technically wins the match. WUSSUPWITDAT?

Was it really supposed to be the payoff? or was the payoff the Country Whipping match?.... no wait, that's right, it was the kiss my foot match.

Are you trying to tell me you had actual expectations for Cole/Lawler? I have trouble believing that.
 
Was it really supposed to be the payoff? or was the payoff the Country Whipping match?.... no wait, that's right, it was the kiss my foot match.

Are you trying to tell me you had actual expectations for Cole/Lawler? I have trouble believing that.

Yes. I expected it to be 2 minutes of Cole getting his ass handed to him by Lawler, and a Stunner to follow it all up. Think Bret Hart vs. Vince McMahon from the year before. What did I get instead? A fifteen minute match with Michael Cole controlling most of the action, and two more matches that nobody wanted to watch.

Once again, Sting vs. Hardy was a minute and a half that went by relatively quickly. This Lawler vs. Cole match was 15 minutes of torture and the opening of Pandora's box.
 
Yes. I expected it to be 2 minutes of Cole getting his ass handed to him by Lawler, and a Stunner to follow it all up. Think Bret Hart vs. Vince McMahon from the year before. What did I get instead? A fifteen minute match with Michael Cole controlling most of the action, and two more matches that nobody wanted to watch.

Once again, Sting vs. Hardy was a minute and a half that went by relatively quickly. This Lawler vs. Cole match was 15 minutes of torture and the opening of Pandora's box.

Cole vs. Lawler was shit but it didn't make me want to get a refund for the hard-earned money that I paid for the event. Sting vs. Jeff Hardy did that.

In a business where matches are supposed to make money and provide the audience with their money's worth, Sting vs. Hardy failed miserably.
 
Talk about Cole/Lawler and Hardy/Sting all day, but Miz/Cena had huge build-up, The Rock, was the biggest match of the biggest show of the year, major entrances and... 15 minutes of poor coordination, expectations dying and Dusty finish capping off what has supposed to be the biggest match of the year. To add insult to the injury, the next night lets us know it was all done to set up Rock Vs Cena with the countdown clock set at 362 (I believe )days.

Too much rode on that match and it just did not deliver at all in my book. Sting and Hardy's ordeal was indeed horrid business, but Victory Road wasn't set up as the biggest show TNA could dish out and Lawler vs Cole was ridiculous from the get-go regardless of how much people wanted Cole killed, why waste breath on an announcer? It may have looked the WM card look bad, but the main event is what really killed the show with Triple H and Undertaker pretty much being the shows only true saving grace.
 
Yes. I expected it to be 2 minutes of Cole getting his ass handed to him by Lawler, and a Stunner to follow it all up. Think Bret Hart vs. Vince McMahon from the year before. What did I get instead? A fifteen minute match with Michael Cole controlling most of the action, and two more matches that nobody wanted to watch.

Once again, Sting vs. Hardy was a minute and a half that went by relatively quickly. This Lawler vs. Cole match was 15 minutes of torture and the opening of Pandora's box.

Sting vs. Hardy was the main reason people bought that PPV; if you bought WM just to get a Lawler/Cole Payoff you've got other issues.

Sting/Hardy was a disgrace to pro wrestling, it was so bad you can barley even classify it as match; at least Cole wrestled in his match, Hardy couldn't even throw his shirt into the crowd.
 
I like the "well Sting vs. Hardy was only a minute so it wasn't that bad" argument. Really? You know the reason why the main event world title match that sold a pay per view was only one minute? Would it be because someone was too wasted out of his skull to perform at all? It's a silly argument. Sting vs. Hardy is truly one of the most embarrassing things to happen in all of professional wrestling. It's a huge black eye on The career of Jeff Hardy and TNA as a whole.
 
Come on, this is one of the clearest of all the choices. It has to be Sting/Hardy. You cannot even consider matches involving guys like Michael Cole, as he isn't a wrestler, so everyone expected this to be abysmal. Hogan, with his age and degree of physical degradation, same thing. But Sting versus Jeff Hardy was the main event of one of the biggest shows of the TNA year. Expectations were high, anticipation was even higher. Unfortunately, Hardy was even higher again, making a laughing stock out of the event and the entire organization. People knew Cole was on the card for the various shows he appeared on, and people could have chosen not to watch or if they did watch, they had to know what they were getting. But what excited fans of TNA were expecting, and what they paid for, versus what they got? Shameful, clearly the worst match of the year, in fact, of the last many years.
 
I'm not judging it by how it affected buys or business or any of that. I'm judging it by which match I found more torturous. If you spent the money to buy that TNA PPV, then I guess I could understand why you feel cheated by that minute long main event. However, I can all but guarantee that at least 15 of those 29 votes didn't drop a dime on Victory Road.

So unless you had money involved in Victory Road, I don't see how you can say you hated that match more than Lawler vs. Cole.
 
I don't understand how anyone could find Cole vs Lawler worse than Miz vs Cena. Which of those did you pay to see?
 
Why is Hardy RVD up there? That match wasn't that bad, Hardy was just hilariously fat. Not to mention he wore some anime coat-made-of-belts that was just HE'S FAT

Cole/Lawler had the issue of having a great feel good moment overturned to further Cole's uh, "gimmick," with a PPV that ended on a heel victory in the main event for the first time in... 11 years? Couldn't the GM have reversed the decision the next day on RAW so people had slightly more elation throughout the PPV? It's fucking Wrestlemania and Snooki trolled it up all over the MATT HARDY IS FAT

Write in vote for Anarquia vs Chris Sabin vs Sabin's ACL on the April 28 episode of iMPACT.
 
I'm really not surprised Sting/Hardy is leading this thing... They did ruin a main event of an already lackluster PPV. But when you compare it to ruining an entire WrestleMania and making you want to turn off every episode of Raw... Cole/Lawler from Mania 28 takes the cake for me.
 
I don't understand how anyone could find Cole vs Lawler worse than Miz vs Cena. Which of those did you pay to see?

Miz Cena wan't the best match. It probably was barely a good match. But it surely wasn't the worst match.

Cole and Lawlers was just awful and offered nothing. At least the Cena match involved the Rock. Besides that Miz suffered a concussion during the match, which probably changed the match some.
 
Its Sting vs. Hardy simply because of the outcome and how it really didn't help any wrestler or either TNA in the long run. Miz vs. Cena was lame and King vs. Lawler was terrible, but at least people who ordered WrestleMania 27 didn't demand refunds for those matches. (Although they probably should have). Sting vs. Hardy was the main event of a PPV with two of the biggest stars in the company for the World Heavyweight Championship. Cole and Lawler's match was a throwaway gag.
 
How anyone can say anything but Sting vs Hardy is beyond me. Yes, Lawler vs Cole was horrible, but we expected it to be bad and a great piss break opportunity going into it. Not only that, but I find it hard to believe that the ENTIRE show was ruined because of this match. Seriously? If you hated this match, as a lot of us did, at least we still got HHH vs Taker at the event to balance it out, making Mania just an average show, and not a complete pile of garbage. The same can not be said for Sting vs Hardy. This was a MAIN EVENT WORLD TITLE MATCH! This was THE match that people bought Victory Road for. You can't take away the expectations for this match, because half of every match IS the build-up and expectation that the fans put into it. Don't believe me, I present exhibit A of Rock vs Hogan at Mania 18. That match was made by the fact that the crowd so anticipated and expected greatness from seeing these two in the ring together that they whirled themselves up into a ravenous frenzy that shone through during the match. So yeah, expectations for a match ARE important, and what happened during Sting vs Hardy? It was a 90 second travesty. A black mark on TNA that will take YEARS for them to get over. Jeff Hardy should have never been allowed into the ring that night, and the fact that he was just showed people what a second-rate, horrible organization TNA really is. Lawler vs Cole was bad, but it didn't change the complete perception that we have of the WWE. For a lot of people, Sting vs Hardy did change how they view TNA as a company, and it will be a while before TNA will be able to gain any shred of the momentum that they had going for them during the middle part of this year.
 
Those of you trying to sell me on lofty expectations for a non-major TNA PPV are silly indeed. If it is all about expectations then more people should have listened to Coco or nominated the Royal Rumble. We don't measure best match relative to expectations, so why should that be done here? Is it really still that hard to criticize what happened that night rationally all this time later?
 
It's Worst Match Of The Year, not Biggest WTF. People talk about the expectations of Sting/Hardy but Cena/Miz had far more and the mediocrity last more than 90 seconds with all contestants sober
 
But, shattered, don't we normally pick out which matches are great matches using our expectations? If we didn't, Evan Bourne versus John Morrison from an episode of ECW would have been the 2009 match of the year. Instead, it was something we expected great things of. It might not be relative to expectations that a match becomes great in people's minds but the expectation of greatness certainly primes people to enjoy things more than they otherwise would. With that in mind, I still have Cena-Miz as the worst match of the year.

BTW, what was wrong with the Royal Rumble?
 
But, shattered, don't we normally pick out which matches are great matches using our expectations?

Exactly right. It's noteworthy that 4 of the 7 "worst match" entries involve TNA, and 3 of them (minus the Hogan contest) were expected to be competitive. The Sting-Jeff mess, which got my vote, was widely anticipated and wound up a non-match. It's only proper that match is winning this race.

As for the 3 WWE matches listed, none were expected to be serious, competitive fights. Any contest involving Michael Cole or Jim Ross should not be viewed as a serious encounter. If you want to eliminate joke matches from a wrestling card, then do it........but we shouldn't lump exhibitions like Cole-Ross in the same category as those of actual wrestlers.
 
There isn't anything noteworthy about it beyond how stupid people are. People hate Matt Hardy so they just picked something, Hogan-Sting being on there is a flat out joke and Morgan-Crimson was far from worst. IWC types dislike gimmicky non-wrestler matches so that is all they will admit to WWE doing wrong. Big difference between worst match and what "I don't like" but people aren't capable of figuring that out.

I agree that you should not judge a non-wrestlers match by the same standards but I do not think that is why people didn't enjoy Cole-Lawler. In those type of matches you have to judge the story and it has to deliver something when it is given so much prominent airtime. They have a responsibility to deliver something passable if they are going to be given all that time in build and on the show itself. If they can't, don't put all that time into building up peoples' expectations. For some inexplicable reason they decided to try and put on an actual match and completely botched the story.

Coco is correct to an extent that expectations do play into things, however, I think there are a few key differences here. First, the main reason expectations do matter is because they come from the build which impacts the match. There was not much of a build to Hardy-Sting. Second, people are claiming that a divergence from expectations is what matters. Why is it that we are saying that if I expect something to be good and it is then that makes it a best match candidate but if I expect something to be good and it isn't that makes it so much worse than something I expected to not be good? I do think it is fair to judge a match on both build and in-ring action but the fact is people are judging the Hardy-Sting match on neither. A squash match isn't the worst match of the year even if you expected something different. There was no in-ring action to judge in the first place which has been the common sense way to judge such matches for a long time up until this happened in TNA.

Royal Rumble gave me very little for how much it was built up. That Hornswoggle stuff was terrible although it was fitting because the match pretty much turned into a joke. I think it started decent and then went to hell and ended terribly. Aside from Morrison spot and Diesel pop I remember nothing of interest about it. Easily the most disappointing match I remember seeing in WWE this year although I can't remember watching many so take it FWIW. I wasn't expecting much from Cena-Miz but for a main event that thing really did fail to deliver. If expectations matter then Wrestlemania was easily the most disappointing show of the year. When Snooki outperforms most of the roster that really says something.
 
I'd pretend to be shocked that people are defending Hardy/Sting, but I've come to learn that there are some people who will defend TNA/IW from anything. Dixie Carter could be videotaped pitchforking orphaned babies into a furnace, and a few months later people would post stating that she was really performing a humanitarian act, because those babies had no one to care for them and probably would have either starved or became criminals anyways, and besides, the WWE did (whatever) that makes it OK.

No other match this year caused its parent company to offer out free product to everyone who watched it. There was a lot of disappointment to go around in wrestling in 2011, but Hardy/Sting is the only match that actually caused its company to give away product to anyone who actually saw it. Thankfully, TNA/IW's PPV numbers are shit, so they didn't lose too much on it.

I hadn't even bothered to come to this thread because I didn't think there was any possible room for debate or argument on this topic. If we want to talk about the worst worked match of the year, and try to pretend that this award is for the match of a certain length which disappointed people in the quality of its wrestling portion, then we could nominate every Divas match and 70% of the Knockouts matches from this year.
 
There isn't anything noteworthy about it beyond how stupid people are. People hate Matt Hardy so they just picked something, Hogan-Sting being on there is a flat out joke and Morgan-Crimson was far from worst. IWC types dislike gimmicky non-wrestler matches so that is all they will admit to WWE doing wrong. Big difference between worst match and what "I don't like" but people aren't capable of figuring that out.

I agree that you should not judge a non-wrestlers match by the same standards but I do not think that is why people didn't enjoy Cole-Lawler. In those type of matches you have to judge the story and it has to deliver something when it is given so much prominent airtime. They have a responsibility to deliver something passable if they are going to be given all that time in build and on the show itself. If they can't, don't put all that time into building up peoples' expectations. For some inexplicable reason they decided to try and put on an actual match and completely botched the story.

Coco is correct to an extent that expectations do play into things, however, I think there are a few key differences here. First, the main reason expectations do matter is because they come from the build which impacts the match. There was not much of a build to Hardy-Sting. Second, people are claiming that a divergence from expectations is what matters. Why is it that we are saying that if I expect something to be good and it is then that makes it a best match candidate but if I expect something to be good and it isn't that makes it so much worse than something I expected to not be good? I do think it is fair to judge a match on both build and in-ring action but the fact is people are judging the Hardy-Sting match on neither. A squash match isn't the worst match of the year even if you expected something different. There was no in-ring action to judge in the first place which has been the common sense way to judge such matches for a long time up until this happened in TNA.

Royal Rumble gave me very little for how much it was built up. That Hornswoggle stuff was terrible although it was fitting because the match pretty much turned into a joke. I think it started decent and then went to hell and ended terribly. Aside from Morrison spot and Diesel pop I remember nothing of interest about it. Easily the most disappointing match I remember seeing in WWE this year although I can't remember watching many so take it FWIW. I wasn't expecting much from Cena-Miz but for a main event that thing really did fail to deliver. If expectations matter then Wrestlemania was easily the most disappointing show of the year. When Snooki outperforms most of the roster that really says something.

King and Cole walked out there, and gave it their all, physically. Both were ready to compete, and did so.

I don't think it would be fair to punish someone for trying (yes, I realize this award means absolutely nothing). They tried. The guys in the Rumble tried. Every other guy on this list went out there and gave it his all.

Jeff Hardy did not. He wasn't able to compete because he was high off his ass. How is it fair to punish those who actually went out there, worked hard, and gave it their best? Punishing them, for that, is beyond stupid.

Hardy deserves this. I hope he continues to stay clean and all that jazz, but that performance was fucking pathetic.
 

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