Tonight at WWE Extreme Rules, John Cena fought Brock Lesnar in the main event in front of a very rabid (and awesome) Chicago crowd.
The match started in a way I hadn’t seen in years. Brock Lesnar charged John Cena, busted him open immediately with an elbow, and landed stiff shot after stiff shot on both Cena and every referee who got in Lesnar’s way.
For the bulk of this match brawl, Brock successfully brought his hard-nose MMA style of fighting to John Cena’s face, his arm, his legs, and almost every part of Cena’s body. Lesnar chained Cena up, hung him over the ring post, and just killed him.
For a long while, this match was like a Ryback squash, with Lesnar picking apart Cena limb from limb and just destroying him handily.
And as this was happening, the crowd really didn’t know how to react, and then, well, Cena did something I haven’t seen in a long, long time: he gained sympathy during a match.
That’s right, with every ref Brock took out and every piece of John Cena that Lesnar bruised up, Cena became a true underdog that the crowd could rally around.
Unlike Rock-Cena, where the underlying intention was to have an entertaining, moneymaking WrestleMania match, it was clear here that while Brock Lesnar wanted to win at Extreme Rules, he also wanted to pummel John Cena into the ground and out of the WWE. The Rock didn’t really have that kind of malice for Cena, and that extra ingredient really made this whole thing click for me tonight more than Rock-Cena did at WrestleMania.
After what seemed like an eternity of Lesnar kicking Cena’s ass, Brock finally made a mistake that turned the tide. He went for a second suicide dive on Cena, thinking John had no fight left in him. Cena, however, found his chain — the same chain that shackled his legs earlier in the match — and he was finally able to even the score by busting Brock’s head open with a sick shot to Lesnar’s unsuspecting head.
The end then came with Cena feeding off the crowd’s energy — a crowd that actually turned in his favor as the night progressed — and the end result was an emphatic Attitude Adjustment FU to Brock Lesnar on the steel steps in the middle of the ring, followed by a three-count from recovered referee Charles Robinson.
John Cena won over the crowd and defeated Brock Lesnar tonight. Brock, to his credit, beat the hell out of John Cena.
Cena said after the match that he may be going away for awhile, and I honestly hope that happens. I would love to see Cena off WWE TV for the next three to six months, for real. Let Lesnar stew over his loss that slipped from his grip, and take it out on EVERYONE in his path. That’s how I would handle things, and I hope that’s what happens next.
Either way, what a night.
That’s all from me — CB.
