5 Worst Wrestling Matches Of 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

2015 was one of the most difficult years in WWE history. Throughout that calendar year, it and its fans suffered from one major problem after another. Not only were many of the company’s biggest stars sidelined with major injuries, but fans were vociferous in their rejection of Vince McMahon’s newest pet project, Roman Reigns.

Despite having good matches on a relatively-consistent basis, fan hostility followed him everywhere like a dark cloud. Things got so bad, that fans even started booing fan favorites that said anything nice about him.

But was this hatred and anger justified? That depends on whom you ask. Reigns has many defenders that say he’s a great performer and character. Yet on the other side, the way said character was booked, modified and scripted caused some people to recoil in disgust. And since the average fan has no way of going up to WWE’s bookers to tell them how much they hate those ideas, they decided to turn on the wrestlers instead.

Of course, Reigns wasn’t the only wrestler whose match(es) in 2015 were plagued by difficult fan reactions…

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5. Goldust vs. Stardust – Fastlane 2015

When this match happened, Goldust had wanted to wrestle his brother for years. To see if the match could draw money, they booked this match prior to WrestleMania. Unfortunately, it was nowhere near the big match the bookers or the wrestlers were hoping for.

First, everyone loathed the Stardust gimmick because it was such a disservice to Cody’s skills. In fact, he even left WWE over it because he wanted to be himself and not some wacko talking about stars and galaxies. Secondly, the actual drama in this match didn’t translate well for the audience, who reacted to this match with apathy.

That is the worst kind of reaction to get in WWE, because it means that what’s happening in the ring is neither exciting nor bad enough to elicit a strong emotional response. Third, the match ending was rumored to have been botched, but later reports confirmed that this original ending was, in fact, the correct one.

Yet because it came so out of left field, the fans couldn’t really be expected to care about it.

4. Intercontinental Championship Elimination Chamber Match

This is the worst Elimination Chamber match of all time, because it exposed the ‘pre-planned’ nature of the match in a bad way. Midway through the match, Dolph Ziggler threw Wade Barrett into Mark Henry’s pod, which caused the Plexiglas door to fall off.

Mark Henry, who was not scheduled to leave his pod yet, left anyway (because he’d be a complete fool if he didn’t), and then utter nonsense ensued. The match turned into a car crash thereafter (and not in a good way), as wrestlers hit each other with improvised moves.

At one point Dolph tried to call moves on the fly by shouting loudly to the other wrestlers (Michael Cole tried to cover this by saying he tried to ‘direct traffic’) but it didn’t do much to salvage this nonsense.

Of course, the fans would’ve cared about this match if there was any sort of build-up for it. The IC title picture in 2015 was awful, partly because the title was treated like a complete joke thanks to R-Truth’s ‘funny’ antics and King Barrett being booked like a complete loser.

While the action was decent by regular WWE standards, it was bad by Elimination Chamber match standards, which is why it gets a spot on this list. Had WWE actually booked the IC title picture in a better way, this match wouldn’t be listed here today.

3. Ryback vs. Big Show – Elimination Chamber 2015

Why WWE kept putting these two together is a mystery

WWE has a strange obsession when it comes to booking two stars and not wanting either one to lose. If two wrestlers are in such a position, WWE’s go-to plan is a DQ finish, which allows for a ‘proper’ conclusion at a later date. That’s what happened in this match between Ryback (a superstar once earmarked for a major spot in the company), and Big Show (someone that had been floundering in WWE for years).

In this case, Ryback and Big Show started having a decent match, but that came to an end after the Miz – who was ringside – interfered to cause the disqualification. This didn’t make sense, as Miz would’ve been smarter to let these two big men try and destroy each other and then he could pick up the pieces afterwards and win the title.

But WWE doesn’t like to use common sense in many of their booking decisions, and so this otherwise harmless match was ruined by a nonsense finish that made the title they were fighting over seem like an afterthought.

2. The 2015 Royal Rumble Match

Reigns was so hated that the fans booed THE ROCK...who is easily one of the most beloved WWE superstars ever

This is easily one of the worst WWE matches of all time, and served as a damning indictment of WWE’s terrible creative ideas at the time. Vince McMahon was hell-bent on making Reigns into his next big star, and wanted to use the 2015 Rumble match as the main vehicle to achieve that goal.

Unfortunately, everything about this match fell apart, some of it before Reigns even entered the match. The match-makers simply had no idea how took book Daniel Bryan when he entered the match, and thought it would be safer to have Bryan gone before Reigns even entered.

Big mistake.

Once Bryan was gone, the crowd proceeded to – for lack of a better term – defecate, all over the match, booing the majority of performers and only cheering on rare occurrences. As if that wasn’t enough, the final moments of the match were downright atrocious.

Instead of creating the remote possibility of someone else winning by having a dramatic final four sequence, WWE booked Kane and the Big Show, then acting as two big goons for The Authority, to literally dump the other fan favorites out of the ring, leaving the fans to (presumably) cheer only Roman Reigns.

It was as clear a message as any: Vince wanted the fans to only accept the wrestler he wanted them to cheer, so they turned on Reigns as hard as possible.

Not even a surprise appearance by the Rock could’ve salvaged this vile mess of a match, which ranks head-and-shoulders above anything else as the worst WWE match of 2015.

But it isn’t the worst match of all of 2015, for there is one match that managed to out-do this hot mess in the bad match department…

1. Los Villanos vs. Los Psycho Circus – AAA

This was the first match in sixteen years to receive an official minus-five-star rating from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. It was voted the Worst Match of the Year by a landslide, and has a lower rating than almost any other match we’ve discussed to date.

If there were one word to describe this match, it would be ‘disjointed’. After the first thirty seconds, the match seemed to lose all sense of structure, and six wrestlers just attacked each other without rhyme or reason.

Los Psycho Circus actually did significantly better than Los Villanos in terms of both hitting moves and selling, as the latter team absolutely sucked at both of those things. Of course, that shouldn’t be a surprise since the team of Los Villanos had a combined age over 150.

Their offense consisted mostly of really soft strikes and bad take-downs, and every time one of their opponents hit a move, it looked like they were intentionally being soft as to not hurt any of the Villanos.

Any sense of logic quickly disappeared from the match as wrestlers hit moves without thinking. In one moment, one of the Psychos actually interrupted his own pin to taunt the crowd and hit another (weak) move, only to be cut off by someone else and then defeated by the opposing team.

It was a horrible, ugly mess of a match, but at least the crowd was loud for it.