‘Perfect storm of garbage’ – Top John Cena WWE match ravaged so badly by critics it was given minus stars

John Cena has wrestled everywhere from tiny community halls to WrestleMania stadiums, but only one match in his vast catalogue carries this kind of infamy.

Cena’s epic WWE career comes to an end on December 13th against either LA Knight or Gunther – his final opponent to be determined when those two meet on Friday.

WWE

The finale battle in an epic wrestling journey will be memorable – as are countless other outings over the last two decades. With the clear exception, that is, of at least one.

It did not take place in some forgotten mid card slot or on a throwaway TV show. It went on last, closing a WWE pay per view in front of a North Carolina crowd expecting the kind of all action Cena spectacle that defined his peak years.

What they got instead was something else entirely, something critics still drag more than a decade later.

Critics pan ‘garbage’ John Cena main event

Over the Limit 2012 should have been as easy as they come. The storyline ‘Board of Directors’ had stacked the stipulations to help John Laurinaitis, the WWE official whose own in-ring career had long since ended against Cena – the iron man headliner who rarely phoned it in.

Instead, the whole thing collapsed into a surreal, slapstick main event carried by a man who headlined WrestleManias aplenty and another who had spent most of the previous decade in talent relations.

When Big Show wandered in to punch Cena and gift Laurinaitis the win, it only confirmed what fans already felt: something had gone very wrong.

The critics were even less forgiving. WrestleCrap’s Art O’Donnell summarised it with brutal precision, writing: “Together, Johns Laurinaitis and Cena made history, becoming the first pair of former Observer Match of the Year winners to go one on one in the Worst Match of the Year, stinking up the joint in a perfect storm of garbage wrestling, bad storylines, and… a total disregard for the established characterization of the company’s top star.”

For a performer who had delivered classics with everyone from CM Punk to Edge, seeing Cena attached to a verdict like that remains jarring.

And O’Donnell was not alone. 411Mania’s review did not bother dressing it up, blasting: “Holy hell that was one of the worst main events in WWE history.”

The match had barely finished before the backlash began, and it has only intensified over time. Alex Podgorski’s long form breakdown was even harsher, opening with, “This match got plenty of backlash when it happened and it isn’t hard to see why…” before dismantling every awkward beat of a bout that “hardly qualified as a match per se; it was more of an extended angle.”

WWE

WWE

WWE

And that is the strangest part. Cena was not phoning anything in at this point in his career. He had just gone toe to toe with Brock Lesnar in a wild brawl a month earlier.

CM Punk and Daniel Bryan were stealing the show underneath him on the very same card. Even the Big Show turn, telegraphed as it was, should have given the match some spark. Instead, it all played out like a fever dream stitched together from discarded Attitude Era props.

Podgorski’s review cuts straight into that whiplash, describing how “Cena turned this into a prolonged humiliation ritual,” complete with comedy beats, water bottles, trash cans and the kind of PG slapstick more at home in a Saturday morning sketch than in a pay per view main event.

The match structure did not help. Laurinaitis, a former All Japan hand and six-time champion who had not wrestled in over a decade, spent most of the 17 minutes running, begging, flailing or selling bits that barely qualified as offence.

John Cena beaten in ‘worst ever’ WWE match

Cena, infinitely more capable, was left to alternate between clowning and carrying and neither choice rescued the pacing. “The action hardly qualified as a match per se; it was more of an extended angle,” Podgorski noted, one long stretch of crowd baiting that lost momentum the second the novelty wore off.

Even the finish, with Big Show looming over Laurinaitis before turning and dropping Cena, landed without the shock WWE clearly hoped for. By the time Laurinaitis crawled over the fallen Cena for the three count, the match had already cemented itself as the night’s worst, emphatically overshadowed entirely by Punk and Bryan’s wrestling clinic earlier in the evening.

WWE

But the real stings continued to come, year on year as retrospectives roll in.

“The only reason this match doesn’t get the full MINUS FIVE STARS is because there were at least some fans who got a momentary kick out of it,” Podgorski wrote.

More than a decade on, that is still how it lives. As Cena’s unrivalled career comes to a close, it remains a perfect storm of garbage that blew in once and never really left.