Jimmy Redman

He's done something similar since then as well, in big matches where his opponent is the clear hometown hero. He just puts his head down, holds the belt up and goes to work. Not heelish, but defiant. Sidebar, Kelly Kelly did the same thing when she faced Beth Phoenix in Buffalo in 2011. One of the many reasons why I love that match.

Indeed, although I do love a good, "YOU CANT WRES-TLE!" *proceeds to have workrate classic* as well.

Fuck, I knew I'd forget something. Cena tossing his t-shirt around for half an hour is just the greatest.

Well neither do I necessarily, but he asked for the highest quality Cena matches. He liked the Brock match so maybe the rematch or the Umaga match will appeal to him in the same way. I hope he starts with the first list I posted anyway.

JVK's point is basically my point. He watched a match that a lot of other people like and can explain in detail what was great about it. But he didn't care for it, and can explain in detail what wasn't great about it. So he didn't rate it that highly. The rating is a reflection of how he felt about the match. See, from my point of view, if Lawler-Snowman is just as good to me (in it's own way...) as other ****1/2 matches I've watched, why wouldn't I give it ****1/2? How long is a ****1/2 match supposed to be exactly? It's all the qualifications and shit that people place on different matches, styles, workers, etc. that I don't go in for. If a 3 minute Divas match is one of the greatest things I've ever seen in my life, I will rate it ****1/2. Why the fuck wouldn't I? Because a three minute match can't be ****1/2? Says who? Same goes for a 4-minute Lawler quasi-shoot, or a 6 minute comedy match, or a "match as angle", or a Goldberg squash, or a "this was a fun popcorn sprint", or any other kind of delination of match that makes people hesitant for some reason to throw snowflakes on it. Like I remember recently in a thread, possibly the Tenta vs Someone thread, where someone argued that Tenta's *** match was better than Someone's **** match, some shit like that. And like...huh? If that's the case, why is Tenta's match only *** then? Because he's a big fat guy doing big fat spots in short matches, and that shit isn't as snowflake worthy as someone stringing moves together in a long workrate match? THAT is the shit I dislike about star ratings. Again, it's the idea that they are some kind of scientific marker, and thus matches with moves, length, psychology, selling whatever other things a great match is "supposed" to have are more worthy of snowflakes than a match with comedy, fat guys, women, no-selling, botches, brevity, etc. Even if it's a better match. Saying "I liked Lawler-Snowman better than a match five times its length, but I can't rate it higher because it's a sloppy four-minute match" is ridiculous in the extreme to me. Literally the only thing I could possibly care about when rating a match is how good it was. On another note, I actually agree with the point that star ratings are eminently useful for ranking and organisation. I use other people's as a gauge for what I should check out. If I see you or Meltzer or Parv or whoever else give something a high rating, I feel safe checking it out, even though I don't necessarily agree with you or Meltzer or Parv when it comes to ratings.

The goal is to entertain a lot of people, not just you. If a match doesn't do much for me personally for *whatever* reason (I didn't sleep well the night before, I don't like one of the participants very much, there was some little inconsequential thing I couldn't get past because of my own hang-ups, etc), but I can see why people liked it AND that those reasons are more related to substance than style, then I'm probably going to rate it very highly. If I had enjoyed it, I would rank it higher, yes, but I don't want to trash a match too much for catching me on a bad day. Sometimes I do fall into that, but again, I *try* not to do that. Why not? I mean I understand being self-aware enough to recognise personal style biases or bad days or a whatever else, as well as acknowledging when a match works for the crowd in front of them or does it's job, but even accepting all of that, for want of a better question, how does that change the fact that you didn't like it? I think the difference between us is that if we both watched a match that got over with the live crowd and was worked soundly, ticked all of the hypothetical boxes you listed above, but we didn't really enjoy it, I would say (if I used ratings) something like: "This match may have got over with the crowd and was worked perfectly soundly, but I didn't enjoy it at all because of X, Y and Z, so I give it **." Whereas you would say something like: "This match got over with the crowd and was worked perfectly soundly, so I give it ****, even though I didn't enjoy it much at all because of X, Y and Z." I'm using broadstrokes of course, but you get my point. Basically my thing is, if you're the one rating the match, why is anyone else's opinion worth more than your own? Why is it more important to you to gauge what the crowd thought of it or what other people thought of it, and use that as a marker before what you yourself thought of it? How do you even gauge what other people thought of it? How is that any more objective, when really you're only substituting other people's opinions for your own? I mean when you make a value judgment about what is "substance over style", or what is "well worked" even if you were bored, you're putting your own personal subjectivity onto it anyway, just in a different way and couching it in different terms. I don't see a star rating as some kind of mathematical rating that holds any more objectivity than using words to say "This was great". So when people use them as anything other than a marker for how much they liked or disliked the match, that's where you lose me, because I have no earthly idea what you're trying to base it on.

The one I liked more. Sorry I didn't see your post at first. What is "flawed"? If the match is great then whatever they did clearly worked for me, how is that flawed? If a match is sound, physically or psychologically or however else, but it bores the pants off me, how far did being sound really get it? Is the goal of a match to tick boxes, or to entertain me and be a great match?

To be honest, I can see where you're coming from but for me there is absolutely no difference between the match I liked more and the better match. By what other criteria am I judging a match on other than my personal enjoyment? Like, seriously. Unless you get into actually objective criteria like how much a match drew money or whatever, the only possible way I can see rating a match high for a reason other than how much you liked it is how much other people liked it, or how much you're 'supposed' to like it. To me that is insane, and again why I take issue with star ratings posing as objective ratings. Like, I am asking a real question here. By what other criteria could you be judging the match other than personal enjoyment?

One thing I want to say, especially in terms of this GWE project, and just with the general level of debate that we engage with here...I'm not sure how to phrase this exactly, but as verbose as I can be about matches or wrestlers sometimes (I think I've written over 2,000 words on Cena/Owens II in the last 24 hours...), there are other times when it's like...I like something, but I have no way to articulate why. I remember promising ages ago to talk about Shawn Michaels for GWE. In my defense I then went on a long hiatus from wrestling altogether, but even now that I'm posting again, I think about doing it and I just...have no idea what to say. I think Shawn is fantastic, I think he's been in boatloads of the best matches I've seen, and I think he's done millions of things to make those matches great. I could take a particular match of his and point out what I think he did well or what worked, but I have absolutely no idea how to extrapolate it into "These are the things Shawn does well in general that make him great." I just know he was. And of course this is a discussion board and so the point is kind of to explain why things are good or bad, but sometimes, I just can't. I don't think that means Shawn wasn't great, and I don't think that means that he's less great than someone whom I can immediately dissect their greatness (Cena for example). It's a flaw in me, not them, if that makes sense. So I guess my point in all that is that when I think of Shawn as a case, I think of all the great matches he was in, see how big that list is, and there's my evidence. That's just the easiest way for me to quantify his worth, well at least easier than trying to dissect his tools and etc. That may be Great Match Theory ™, but I don't think it's reductive or shows a lack of analysis on my part.

One thing I will never understand about star ratings is when people try to pretend that they have some basis in objectivity. I think using math makes things sound more scientific and thus people think they're judging things more objectively than if they just use their words...I don't know, but when I see people say things like "This match was **** but I liked it less than this match I only rated ***1/4..." I'm just like...what? Why didn't you rate the second match higher if it was better? By what kind of fucked up, bullshit, asshole criteria are you ranking matches with if it results in you ranking matches you liked less higher than matches you liked more?? That makes zero sense to me and never will.

Well come on Johnny, it's not a ridiculous comment. Since he became a main eventer and stopped rapping his character has remained virtually the same, and that was in like 2006.

That's an interesting thought. It would probably be an interesting area of research, to look at big stars and how their style of working and presentation changed as they got older and couldn't be booked as dominant champions anymore. Hogan turned heel and used the help of others. He took the shortcut way. You could even tie that into the old "Hogan was really a dick" grand theory. He turned heel when he couldn't get it done anymore. Whereas Cena is the ultimate, uber-babyface. Now that he's slipping he just works harder to try and keep up. Turning heel for him would be "Giving Up". Undertaker dealt with it by concentrating all of his focus on the one match a year that counted: The Streak, and his whole world became about it.

Well I mean if you put a gun to my head I prefer 2007 Cena as well. But I enjoy current Cena too and I really like that there is, in fact, a coherent thread running through all of his in-ring changes and seemingly random adding of wacky indy movez. I suppose the answer to why he would go there ties into what I was saying in my blog post: mortality. Cena is just getting older. He didn't need to evolve in 2007 because he was at his peak then, he had no reason to. Now he's almost 40 and facing guys who are a lot younger than him, younger, hungrier, with a different style of offense. He has to evolve in order to stay on top, in order to keep his spot. He's struggling harder than John Cena should struggle just to retain the US Title. He has just reached that point where things don't come as easily anymore. He's a little bit more human now, so he has to work a little bit harder. That's why this isn't Kurt Angle kicking out of everything, that's why those two examples aren't equal. Cena's matches now contain more and more kickouts because Cena is slowly losing his Superman powers with age and coming back to the field. Angle's matches have kickouts because Angle likes to kick out of stuff in every match. If I could find a logical narrative reason for Angle and Jeff Hardy hitting 17 finishers in a single match, I'd probably enjoy that too. But alas.

I tried to restrict myself to ten because I know JVK is only going to want to watch so many matches, but yeah, you could easily make a whole other list that looks legit, they're all good suggestions. vs Umaga, NYR 2007 vs Chris Jericho, Survivor Series 2008 vs Randy Orton, Bragging Rights 2009 (Ironman) vs Rey Mysterio, Raw July 2011 vs The Rock, Wrestlemania 28 vs CM Punk, Raw Feb 2013 vs Cesaro, Raw Feb 2014 vs Bray Wyatt, Payback 2014 (LMS) vs Brock Lesnar, Summerslam 2014 vs Kevin Owens, Elimination Chamber 2015

NL's point is a good one, and one I am probably going to repeat with many, many more words below. People lost their shit because it was move spamming. When it involves a main event star like Cena who has long been derided as having a limited moveset do you seriously not see why this get pops? Kurt Angle doing a 450 splash knee drop got a pop too but it doesn't make it a good idea. As for losing his shit because of a nearfall, I don't recall Taker losing his shit when the chokeslam gets kicked out of. I don't recall Edge losing his shit when the Edgeomatic gets kicked out of. I don't recall CM Punk losing his shit when the elbow drop gets kicked out of. I don't recall Daniel Bryan losing his shit when the headbutt gets kicked out. And all those moves have been presented as devastating transitional moves and occasional finishes (that they have busted out many times through their careers with as much effectiveness as anything else besides their finishers). Cena losing his shit over a move he has never once established as a move to be feared is just idiocy. But then again if I want to make up a narrative that could make sense, I suppose Cena is just the clueless putz who doesn't understand pro wrestling and coasts on his supreme strength and never die attitude to win. Because he is not clearly getting what makes a move effective. At this point I kind of have no idea what you're trying to argue. Cena shouldn't have used the Code Red? He shouldn't have sold the Code Red as a nearfall? Again, he should what, not try to get over a nearfall as important? Not use any new moves? Not expect to win with anything other than a finishing move? Honestly you seem to be way overreacting to a random move getting a nearfall at the death of a match. It's a pretty common thing to happen in like general wrestling history so I really just don't understand why you're so fixated on it. It's not like it didn't work for the match, it popped the crowd because it was cool and different and they reacted to the nearfall so clearly they bought it as something. It's not like it didn't fit the story of the match for reasons already gone into. It may have been sloppy but I mean fuck, it's John Cena, that's part of his charm at this point. I honestly don't see what your problem is, other than "People didn't like Kurt Angle doing a 450 Splash that one time", which I have absolutely no idea what that has to do with anything. I'm not sure if the people who aren't completely au fait with current WWE are aware of how long Cena has actually been doing movez. It's been touched on, but I want to fully explore it because I can see how it doesn't completely make sense without having the full picture. In the last few years Cena has basically been re-inventing himself as an indy-style worker, adding wacky movez to his arsenal (springboard Stunner, tornado DDT, the half-Nelson neckbreaker) and going heavy on the high-end offense in big matches. Not only that, even more crucially to the current discussion is that Cena's go-to gameplan when he's being tested in the ring is to bust out wacky new moves to try and win. You can actually trace it all the way back to the Punk series. In their 2011 matches they both knew each others games so well and had counters for everything, that whenever they wrestled again (NoC 2012, Raw 2013) both guys resorted to busting out entirely new moves, because they were the only thing that would surprise the other guy. Cena against Punk busted out a baseball slide, the crossface, a Batista Bomb...he even hit a tope on Punk once! And look at how those matches ended. The finish in 2012 was Cena hitting an Avalanche German off the ropes and they did the double pin, and as someone already said above, 2013 ended when Cena confused Punk with the Cenacanrana to set up the final FU. Both new moves that he busted out to great effect (besides the part where he accidentally pinned himself I guess). But he learned from Punk that when all else fails, the element of surprise works. And other guys along the road have challenged Cena in the same way. Bryan did at Summerslam, those guys threw many bombs at each other and couldn't finish, and Cena tried new things and new counters (powerbomb, blocking the Frankensteiner by dropping into the Ganso Bomb, a puro-style forearm cutoff of a tope), and so did Bryan and in the end HE hit an entirely new move to get the win - the Knee That Beat John Cena. Surprise works. So when we come to now and the Owens matches, and in these matches Owens proves himself as a guy who won't go down to what usually works for Cena, so Cena, naturally, starts busting out some new moves to try to put him away. Because that's what he does when confronted with this problem. And that went twofold for the second match because Cena lost to this guy the first time and was searching for a way to beat him, to the point where they came right out and said "Cena is going to be trying new things in this match". Like it or don't like it, whatever, but it was a perfectly logical thing to do and consistent with Cena's in-ring evolution of the past half-decade. Cena adapts. NL said it in his mislaid post, this is what WWE in-ring style is slowly turning into. With the influx of name indy alumni in prominent positions (Rollins, Ambrose, Owens, Cesaro, Harper, Zayn, Bryan...) big matches have tended towards bigger bombs, more high-end offense, more 00s indy trends like topes and flying dropkicks and striking battles and movez with a Z. This is what matches look like now. And Cena, as basically the old guard now doing battle with a younger, more indyriffic generation, is trying to adapt to this style to try to keep up. Note that he didn't face the problem of The Rock with movez, because Rock wasn't a movez problem. With Rock it was more about two WWE stars colliding and the key was signature moves, move stealing and getting the psychological edge over the other. When he faced Cesaro that time, he came up against a guy who could out-Strength him, so Cena busted out new movez and strength spots to show that he had more power. With Bray Wyatt, the problem was a psycho trying to fuck with Cena's mind and turn him into a bad guy, so the focus there was on the big moral battle between Good and Evil, which was faced with overwrought Acting and big smoke and mirrors effects like the cage finish. Rusev was a monster heel, and in the great tradition of Cena facing monster heels, he overcame this problem by using his Strength and Never Giving Up. Cena adapts to whatever the tone is of his current match. He faces a morality issue with morality, a patriotism issue with patriotism, and he faces a movez issue with movez.

King can still turn it on for big matches when he wants to.

Asking Cena not to act like he thought a non-finishing move could win him a match is pretty much asking guys to not sell any nearfalls that don't involve finishers. We all know that only finishers win matches, so why pretend? Why even bother using a non-finisher at all? They never win the match! Just stand there and hit only finishers until someone wins! ...Jesus. The fact that the crowd was losing their shit for all of those nearfalls off random moves says to me that they weren't a waste of time. Anyway, I form more of my own narratives on my blog because my review of the match is now up. I was just going to launch into this big thing about movez to go along with it, but it's almost 2am and it will have to wait for another day.

I don't think Cena winning in the end with another FU really negates the story of him having to bust out new moves against this guy. He had already kicked out of the FU so he was trying new things, seeing if they worked, and in the end he found an opening to hit a stunner-FU combo and it did the job.

Yeah I'm curious to know how it's us forming our own narrative when we're the ones actually following the story that WWE are telling, through the results, Cena's promos and the announcers, and ohtani is the one who is characterising Owens as a "repackaged indy guy" and not what he is actually portrayed as on TV. Cena busting out new moves makes perfect narrative sense because "Cena is busting out new moves to try to beat a guy he lost to two weeks ago" was exactly the story they were going for. If you weren't aware of that or aren't interested in that or don't think they executed that well then fair enough, but it's pretty off-base to suggest that people are making it up, when they were literally telling us that that's what was happening.

I didn't catch much of Raw, but I saw Owens' promo and I loved how he tried to claim that Cena offering his hand as a show of respect was a dick move. Also, R-Truth.

What's that got to do with anything though? You're saying those things as if it's "only" an indy guy (how is where he came from even relevant to his WWE career or how strongly he can be portrayed?) and "only" developmental, when the entire point is that Owens has been booked as a threat, he's been a dominant champion in NXT and has now come in at Cena's level, beating him clean on PPV in their first match. Cena had to bust out something new to beat him because he LOST to him the first time.

I include the Lashley match because, well firstly I think it is a legitimately great match. But more to the point, it may be Cena's greatest in-ring achievement. Lashley is terrible. Well I dunno what he's up to now but during his WWE career, he was terrible. Mystifyingly so, because he had so many physical tools, but had absolutely no idea how to put them together. In his two year run, at a very workrate-y time (2005-07 Smackdown) he produced almost nothing of value. Finlay lead him by the hand on TV a few times, and the Billionaires match was a fun clusterfuck, but that was it. I mean when El-P gets to December in WWECW and sees what fucking Lashley was doing he will long for the good ol' days of Big Show's reign. Lashley was awful. And then Cena had to get a PPV Main Event out of him. In some ways this is more of an achievement than the Khali match, because at least with a monster heel you can bounce off him and create a spectacle. Here Cena took a guy who had never had even a "really good" match before, and with no gimmicks or bells and whistles, and got a legitimately great face vs face title match out of him. Lashley brought it in this match, don't get me wrong, but it's so far above what he was ever capable of with anyone else in his career as to be mind boggling. Back in the day I used to see a lot of "Cena needs to be carried" around the internet, and I would shake my head every time because like fuck, in the space of like two months he got great matches out of the Great Khali and Bobby fucking Lashley.

Not exactly no. My goal with that list for OJ was to list as many different examples as I could to give an overview of Cena the worker, "different" in terms of opponents, styles, situations and quality. So it's not all the best stuff, just what was most representative of the categories I was trying to fill. Leaving out Punk at MITB and Brock at ER because you covered those in the other thread, here's a list of ten of his best matches off the top of my head, just going chronologically: vs JBL - Judgment Day 2005 (I Quit) vs Edge - Unforgiven 2006 (TLC) vs Umaga - Royal Rumble 2007 (Last Man Standing) vs Shawn Michaels - Raw 25th April 2007 vs Bobby Lashley - Great American Bash 2007 vs Randy Orton - Summerslam 2007 vs Big Show - Smackdown 27th Feb 2009 vs Batista - Wrestlemania 26 vs CM Punk - Night of Champions 2012 vs Daniel Bryan - Summerslam 2013 There's a lot of 2007 in there in an "if you don't like Cena in 2007, you probably don't need to keep watching" kind of way.

I don't think Cena will finish that high because he's such a polarising figure. He'll be in some people's Top 10s, and then some people won't have him listed at all. I don't have much experience with these ballots, but I don't see a guy making the top 10 overall if he's not on every ballot (or at least all but one).

I'm not really a star ratings kind of girl, but I'd call both Shawn vs Taker Mania matches *****, to offer up a dissenting opinion.