Gimmick Some Lovin': The Elimination Chamber

My Rating

The blood, and the tetanus risk make a very early appearance thanks to spots like this.

When talking about his 1997 Hell in a Cell contest on his DVD set released shortly after this contest, Michaels talks about how freeing it is to originate a match type because the tropes and expectations have not yet been established.

That dynamic is on display here, as it's easy to see how some of the signature spots from this contest became Elimination Chamber mainstays. The clanging slams on the steel grating that makes the ringside area, pod-crashing power moves, and RVD's aerial assaults set an effective blueprint for this match type.

Further, the mix of styles and personalities lends itself well to some great match dynamics; Van Dam's schtick was still novel for WWE audiences (although he'd been doing it for six years, dating back to his ECW days), and Jericho exudes pure heel charisma throughout (the fact that the size of the chamber allows him some up close and personal insults to crowd members while still leaving him on a pedestal is not lost on Chris Irvine).

It wouldn't be as good a match without this spot, but could it have been a better match without the injury it caused?

I don't know, though, if it's because of his damaged throat or if it was the plan all along, but Triple H doesn't seem to get enough punishment in this contest. The first WarGames match saw Ric Flair get decimated by each member of the babyface team, and the contest was nonstop comeuppance for its heel entrants.

In middle school, I remember thinking how odd it looked when I would put a WCW championship on my Shawn Michaels Jakk's action figure; seeing it happen for real was one of those exceptionally weird 2002 wrestling moments.

Triple H loses, yes, but it's not in the fashion of someone who'd spent the summer and fall making outrageous accusations against his fan-favourite opponents while torturing them with barbaric schemes. His destruction of Michaels after the pair's August street fight begged for revenge, and Shawn's Spirit of '76 celebration among spiraling confetti could have been much grander with a greater release of aggression on his former best friend.

It's a brutal blueprint for future cell matches, to be sure, but it doesn't quite go far enough. 7.5/10

My love for this Lionsault, and the distance Y2J flies to hit it, cannot be understated.

Meltzer Says

Dave puts this one in WWE's top ten for 2002 with a 4.25-star rating; that puts this contest on par with HBK's return match from SummerSlam in terms of star rating, and just below the 2017 contest which saw Bray Wyatt take his first main roster singles title at 4.5 stars.