10 WWE Matches of 2017 that didn't live up to the expectations

#3 John Cena vs Rusev, Flag Match (Battleground)

"Why couldn't it stop when one of them grabbed a flag?" Asked every sane person who saw this monstrosity.

Battleground is widely agreed to be the worst major WWE show of 2017, and the event was in trouble long before this match came on, but wow oh wow did it make the night so much worse.

How couldn't it? The evil foreigner vs. American hero story should have been left behind in the 80's, but it's WWE's own version of the Walking Dead - hordes of these zombie foreign heels have come and gone ever since. So the story around the match already sucked. To add injury to insult, the match itself was just as terrible.

To prolong our agony, we found out that simply grabbing the flag off the pole above the turnbuckle wasn't enough to win the match, but rather the first man to put his country's flag in its respective pedestal up the ramp would be the victor. I guess we can credit WWE for innovating the foreign heel story in that small way, maybe.

Then, John Cena took forever to come out, and to insult our intelligence further, the commentary team talked up how this was one of the highest-pressure matches of his career. Sure.

What followed seemed to be an eternity of unconvincing back-and-forth offence, including what might be one of the worst powerbomb reversals in history. It was like watching two men try to fight underwater. Neither Cena nor Rusev seemed to care at all about the match, almost like they both knew it was garbage and had agreed to phone it in. The "action" we saw was far beneath both of their talents. It would only get that much worse when they left the ring.

After grabbing the flags off their poles, both men stumbled up the ramp as if they were trapped in a tar pit, overselling all the way. Throughout, you had the feeling that the match should have ended numerous times, but the slow, plodding Chinese water torture continued.

John Cena eventually stopped Rusev's hand from putting the Bulgarian flag on its pedestal. He then put the Brute through two tables with an Attitude Adjustment and placed the American flag on its pedestal to finally end the ordeal 10 or so minutes after it should have concluded.

The flag match was a perfect storm of all of professional wrestling's vices expressed at their absolute worst - hokiness, phony-looking action, two performers that clearly didn't care, and a match that long overstayed its welcome, especially when the "action" left the ring (which is why I rate this as being worse than the very lambasted Punjabi Prison match). May we (finally) never see another such match again.