The cell is a big deal. The Cell gets its own entrance music. The Cell is such a big deal that it has only been seen in 26 matches. The Cell is such a big deal that I spent the entire article last week talking about it. And yet, the Cell may have been the least important thing on the PPV this past Sunday.
Now I don’t mind saying that Punk and Ryback was really the only match I was looking forward to at Hell in a Cell. Sure I love Team Friendship as much as the next guy, but they’re at their best when yelling at each other or hugging it out, and we knew that there would mostly just be fighting. Many of the matches were the results of insta-feuds that popped up simply to fill the card, and I hanve’t been excited about the World Championship in AGES! So really, all there was to look forward to was to see how Punk and Ryback was going to play out.
And now that we have, I have to say, I’m still not really sure what to think about this feud. We’ll get to the Ref bit in a minute, but first I want to take a look at the actual feud between these two guys, which is apparently going to continue till Survivor Series (we’ll get to that in a minute too)
This past Sunday, Ryback and Punk had a match, which was clearly used to make Ryback continue to look like a monster. Though it took longer than Ryback’s weekly match against Jimmy the Jobber that he’s been having for months now, It was clear that Ryback I supposed to look like he can destroy Punk, and most of the roster. This however has created a disastrous side effect, as it has effectively turned Punk into a chicken heel. Now I will begrudgingly accept that Punk is a heel again (though I will still cheer when his music hits) but there is no reason that Punk needs to be the kind of heel that runs from a fight, complains about unfair treatment, and generally does everything he can do to keep from actually wrestling. We already have too many of those heels, in fact just about ever top, or near top, heel seems to employ that type of character.
Think back to Punk’s heel turn, and how he complained about having to defend the title in a Triple Threat match. Sure he was complaining about his circumstances, but what he was saying seemed valid. And then denying Cena a shot at the title, this wasn’t just to be mean, Punk pointed out, accurately by the way, that Cena had tried and failed to win the title, and it was time to get in line. But now, with Ryback as his new feud opponent, Punk seems to spend all his time running away from a fight, hiding in a corner, and trying to avoid confrontation however possible. I don’t want to see Punk running up the ramp, clutching the title, because he’s scared that Ryback might hurt him. When Punk was a face, he declared himself to be a fighting champion and defended the title on a weekly basis there for a while. In the end I don’t really care if Punk is face or heel. I just want to see the self proclaimed “Best in the World” eager to back up his claim.
But now we have Survivor Series, where I can only fear that Punk will avoid fighting Ryback, or perhaps avoid almost all of the in ring action by sending in teammates instead of himself. Teammates by the way who all had matches at Hell in a Cell. Matches by the way, that were all against people on Team Foley. Hey wait a second! The Survivor Series Elimination Match, is quite literally, going to be the entirety of Hell in a Cell all jammed into one match. And while I could maybe put up with that fact, here is what truly concerns me. Four feuds are in this match, one tag team feud, two other title feuds, and one “Smackdown Guys” feud. Which most likely means that we will continue to get the same matches, the same promos, and the exact same commentary that we’ve had for the past month trying to build up to Hell in a Cell, all over again.
Related Thought: Not much was made of the Ref attacking Ryback on Raw. In fact other than Punk mentioning it and saying it was not his doing, there was no fallout. No having the ref explain himself, no having somebody fired over this incident. Nothing. Now I will happily give WWE an entire week to come up with something and wait until next week before demanding an explanation, but I have to say, until then (and most likely after then as well) I would have to, unsurprisingly, assume, that the Ref betrayal was a twist with no real thought put into anything past that point. And not to beat this already thoroughly dead horse, but this is what happens when you rely too much on Cena. Almost everything comes back to the fact, that because Cena wasn’t cleared to wrestle, we had a situation, where there was no storyline to fall back on. And when that happens, we get random twists for no reason.
