5 Worst wrestling matches of 2008

DISCLAIMER: These are the views of the writer and do not reflect those of Sportskeeda

One of the most challenging things about putting on a good wrestling show is managing fan expectations. Different fans want different things, so trying to make everyone happy is hard. Even with a specific core or target audience, there’s always a chance someone won’t like what you’re showcasing.

To deal with this issue, one can take different approaches. If you were a smart booker, you’d try to make your wrestling show as diverse as possible, in the sense that you showcase different styles to give as many different people as possible.

If you’re an arrogant booker, you showcase only what you know and what has become expected from your die-hard fanbase, never straying out of your comfort zone.

And if you’re a spiteful booker, you put on matches and storylines that either disappoint your own fans or are done just so that you can get a kick out of other people's anger.

The five matches on this list are a combination of options two and three (but mostly three) as the creative figureheads in these cases thought making people mad was a great way to make money.

Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

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#5 Honky Tonk Man vs. Santino Marella

Marella's 'Honk-A-Meter' was the ONLY part of this feud that was actually funny

This match might’ve only lasted just over one minute, but WWE still put considerable time into the pre-and-post-match segments. While Santino was playing a sort of comedy heel at this time, he fell victim to WWE’s style of ‘awkward’ humor.

It was too cheesy to be slapstick, not risqué enough to have mature humor, and filled with so much awkward nonsense that fans sat on their hands in response. Santino and Honky had a dance-off, which WWE seems to have a strange fascination with before the expected cheapshot occurs.

Of course, Beth Phoenix got Santino intentionally disqualified, because apparently, Santino couldn't beat a real old-timer like Honky by himself. It continued post-match, leaving fans scratching their heads over what they had just witnessed.

Although a lot of people that watched the match did at lease praise Honky for being in relatively good shape, that doesn’t really help much when your entire match lasts just over a minute and features very little actual wrestling.

#4 AJ Styles vs. Frank Trigg - 3 Rounds of MMA

AJ Styles is arguably the best wrestler alive today. The key word in that first sentence is ‘wrestler’. He, like almost all pro wrestlers, does not belong in an MMA fight against someone that isn’t trained in wrestling.

Antonio Inoki found this out the hard way in 1999 and almost killed NJPW so badly that he was forced out of his own company. Yet TNA didn’t get the memo and made Styles take on Frank Trigg in an MMA contest. The ‘match’ was inundated with boos and chants of ‘we want wrestling’. It only got progressively worse as Styles resorted to cheating to win the following round.

By the time this whole thing was over, Trigg had left the company without leading to any big profit for the company and Styles had been wasted on someone that had little to no knowledge of, or interest in, wrestling.

#3 WWE Survivor Series 2008 Team Phoenix (RAW) vs Team McCool (SmackDown)

Things were rough for the women in 2008. Despite their roster slowly improving thanks to workers like Beth Phoenix and Natalya, the focus was still on the wrestling itself.

As a result, all of the most important women were thrown together in a traditional survivor series elimination match. The problem here was that, while the effort was clearly there, the story was not.

Few of these women were been given a chance to explain to the fans why they were wrestling and why the fans should care about them. This is why the elimination match felt so inconsequential. It didn’t lead to anything important, and most of the action was threadbare at best.

Unfortunately, this sort of booking was a sign of things to come all the way until 2015 with the begininning of the women's revolution in WWE.

#2 Big Show vs. Great Khali – Backlash

Here we have a match between two giants with a combined weight of over 900 pounds. Someone backstage thought this was a good idea, and must’ve also thought this match was taking place in 1982.

The problem here is that while Big Show can be athletic despite his size, Khali could not. As a result, you had an underwhelming ‘giants’ match that featured very little exciting action. Khali was easily the less-impressive of the two of them, only doing moves that requires the least amount of mobility possible. He did his usual big overhand chops, his slow kicks, and a nerve hold that the commentators tried to sell as a big deal but the wrestlers didn’t.

Big Show ended up winning with a chokeslam, which, I’ll admit, was cool because of how big his opponent was. Unfortunately, this giant match didn’t really lead to anything for either man, which in turn made this a giant waste of time (pun definitely intended).

#1 Edge vs. Triple H vs. Vladimir Kozlov

This match being listed is due to a combination of bad booking before the match, predictable nonsense at its conclusion and awful in-ring action between two wrestlers that seemed to lack all chemistry.

Jeff Hardy was ‘written out’ of the match before it started by reason of ‘stairwell attack by mystery person’. This attack was never shown, so we were left to ‘presume’ that Hardy was just gone from the match. So instead, we were given a singles match between Kozlov and Triple H, and it was so….boring.

Kozlov, despite having an athletic background, had no charisma and his moves didn’t keep the audience engaged. He kept doing traditional mat wrestling with Triple H, which would’ve worked if this was happening in Japan. But this was WWE, and the fans wanted fast-paced action, which they didn’t get from either of these two. That led to some of the loudest ‘boring’ chants ever heard on WWE programming.

To ‘save’ this match, out came then-GM Vickie Guerrero, who announced that there would indeed be one more participant: Edge. Yet despite being the heel that was getting title shots because he was the GM’s then-boyfriend, the audience cheered loudly for Edge because he was going to breathe new life into a dead match.

Shenanigans continued further as Jeff Hardy did appear for a few moments, only to get Speared by Edge. Ultimately, Edge won the match and became champion again, leaving the audience flummoxed as to why Hardy was written out of the match in the first place.