5 Worst Wrestling Matches Of 2013

DISCLAIMER: These are the opinions of the writer and do not reflect those of Sportskeeda

There’s this old saying: the more things change, the more they stay the same. That was true for pro wrestling in 2013, and especially for WWE.

On one hand, there were quite a few critical changes that occurred in 2013 that helped keep WWE in its top position in the wrestling industry. Daniel Bryan became WWE Champion for the first time, Bray Wyatt debuted on the main roster (back when that was a big deal), CM Punk was having awesome matches, and the Shield were destroying everyone.

Conversely, a lot stayed the same, resulting in some truly annoying trends and creative directions. The Big Show turned heel and face more times than could be counted, Randy Orton failed to live up to the hype as WWE Champion, the women had more 30-second matches that meant less than nothing, and worst of all, the creative focus became all about evil authority figures.

All of these bad things manifested in some really dreadful matches. Here, we’ll look at the absolute worst of the worst…

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#5 Brodus Clay vs R-Truth – TLC 2013

This match was not announced before the show, so WWE wanted fans to think of it as a surprise gift. Unfortunately, that would’ve worked if this match were actually good. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in this match in terms of action.

Brodus hit his big moves as always and Truth sold for him as best he could. The only real story here was that Brodus wanted to throw Truth into the steps but Tensai didn’t want him to do so. Brodus got defiant, so Tensai and the Funkadactyls left Brodus in the ring by himself. This allowed Truth to pick up the victory, which didn’t mean much because, again, this match was unannounced and didn’t have any story behind it.

Worse, Brodus became yet another victim of the dreaded ‘wrestler loses via distraction’ booking. He had the match won, yet nonsense that could’ve been saved for a different time caused Brodus to ‘lose his focus’.

Stuff like this is why people think wrestling is stupid and shouldn’t ever be respected; the people involved book stuff like this to make the wrestlers look like morons.

#4 Mark Henry vs. Ryback – Battleground 2013

This match wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad either. It was just…there. It was a forgettable big man match with little novelty outside of a crossbody block from Henry to Ryback. What made this so bad was that it was an open challenge match that went around four minutes with little story.

This is something that should’ve been left for an episode of RAW, yet was instead placed on a Big Four PPV without much rhyme or reason. It goes to show just how far Ryback had fallen in the span of one year. In 2012, Ryback was almost completely undefeated and was working his way to the top of the company.

By the end of 2013, he had lost his undefeated streak, turned heel, had failed to capture the WWE Championship after doing so, and ended up losing to Mark Henry. By this point, it became clear that Ryback would never reach the high echelons of the company ever again, and the rest of his matches didn’t really inspire that much either.

#3 Bray Wyatt vs. Kane – Ring of Fire Match - SummerSlam 2013

First off, no, this is not the same thing as an inferno match. The point here is not to set your opponent on fire (which is as hardcore as it gets), but instead a standard match with the ring surrounded by fire (it wasn’t as cool in practice as it reads on paper).

Think of this as a cage match, with two wrestlers stuck in a ring together, incapable of escaping and the wrestlers outside could not interfere either. Only instead of steel, you have fire, and there are also tools that can put the fire out as well, which did play a role in this match.

So once you take the element of fire out of the concept, this is a singles match between Bray Wyatt and Kane and…to be honest…it wasn’t good. The actual in-ring action between these two super-heavyweights was slow and plodding, so they had to rely on weapons and outside interference to keep the fans intrigued. It wasn’t an awful match, but it was dreadfully underwhelming for what was Bray Wyatt’s biggest match on the main WWE roster.

#2 Randy Orton vs. Big Show – Survivor series

These two had one of the most boring main event matches of all time

The fall of 2013 was incredibly bizarre. For some strange reason, WWE thought Big Show, and not super-popular Daniel Bryan, should be main-eventing in WWE title matches. Unfortunately, the booking during their segments was disappointing, and Big Show had a lot of segments that involved him crying.

They tried to make him into a sympathetic giant, but no one bought it, especially since Big Show changes allegiance ten times each year. This bizarre booking led to a WWE championship match for Big Show at Survivor Series, which was one of the worst WWE PPV main events of the year.

Big Show and Orton wrestled a match that was so boring the crowd started chanting ‘boring’ early into the match. The in-ring action wasn’t anything special, and Orton, in particular, worked his regular match without anything exceptional being done to make this into a more important contest.

Then, to exacerbate the poor quality, the Authority interfered (complete with entrance music), which led to Big Show being distracted long enough for Orton to hit an RKO. At that moment, Show turned into the ‘big dumb giant’ again and lost due to the ridiculous concept of outside interference.

Well, WWE must’ve acknowledged their own asinine booking because in the weeks that followed, they basically retconned this entire rivalry. They treated it as though it never happened and expected their fans to follow suit. Unfortunately, fans don’t have selective memories; they remember the bad as much as the good, and this match and story were both very, very bad.

#1 Women’s Survivor Series Elimination Tag Team Match

This match marked the nadir of the Divas Division during the early 2010s. This was a match with fourteen women split into two teams of seven. The match went just over eleven minutes in length, yet it featured twelve eliminations in that timeframe. That averages out to about one elimination every fifty seconds.

This shows how little WWE cared about the women…sorry, back then they were known as Divas…as performers. Few of them were credible wrestlers, and most of them came from backgrounds that helped them learn how to be wrestlers.

Because of these different factors, this match came off as the perfect ‘bathroom break’ match. Nothing special happened in it. Eliminations came and went without any concept of ‘heat’ or in-ring storytelling, which left viewers asking themselves, ‘that’s it?’ As a perfect example, Aksana, one of the less-skilled women in the match, entered, hit moves and ate a pin all in the span of thirty seconds.

You can’t pack so much nonsense into a short period of time and expect people to care about it. Without background stories, fans won’t care. And without anyone to really cheer for, fans will just ignore matches like this one and sit quietly. It really can’t get any worse than that.