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John Cena has repeatedly stated in the last few weeks that he has to win the seven-man Elimination Chamber match or, for the first time in his WWE career, he won’t have a road to WrestleMania.
In all likelihood, Roman Reigns will win the Chamber match (also involving The Miz, Elias, Braun Strowman, Finn Balor and Seth Rollins) to set up a long-awaited Universal Championship match with Brock Lesnar.
That leaves Cena, whose recent rivalry with Samoa Joe ended before it began due to an injury to Joe, without an obvious opponent heading into WrestleMania 34, leading fans to believe that we’ll finally see him face The Undertaker in New Orleans in April.
The two WWE legends have met one-on-one at just one previous WWE pay-per-view event, Vengeance 2003, with ‘Taker picking up the win in a 16-minute match after hitting the Last Ride on the then-rookie of the SmackDown roster.
Since then, and throughout the years as “The Deadman” continued to keep ‘The Streak’ alive at WrestleMania, it seemed only a matter of time before he would come face-to-face with “Big Match John” at WWE’s biggest show of the year.
For whatever reason, the match never took place when the two men were in their prime but now, with Cena aged 40 and ‘Taker aged 52, it finally looks like WWE will go ahead with the long-awaited encounter at this year’s ‘Mania.
In fact, it’s a little bit surprising that the build towards the match hasn’t started already, with many fans expecting ‘Taker to call Cena out at Raw 25 or cost him from winning the Royal Rumble in January.
Instead, he delivered a cryptic promo at Raw 25 that offered no indication on his in-ring future, while he was backstage throughout the Royal Rumble to support his wife, women’s Rumble participant Michelle McCool, but he did not get involved in the men’s match.
Now, with just six weeks to go until WrestleMania, the build towards the much-anticipated match has to happen sooner rather than later, and all signs point towards it being kick-started in the next week, possibly at Sunday’s Elimination Chamber event.
'Part-timer' Cena is arguably on his worst losing run of all time right now, suffering pinfall defeats to Shinsuke Nakamura, Reigns, Kurt Angle, Elias and Rollins over the last six months, and any more relatively clean losses in the near future would start to significantly hurt his once-unstoppable character.
Those series of defeats make us believe he will not lose clean in the Chamber match, opening up the possibility of Undertaker making an appearance to start the build to their inevitable meeting at this year’s “Show of Shows”.
Whether he appears in person or if he simply appears in spirit (the ‘GONG’ alone is enough of a distraction!), there’s every chance that ‘Taker returns to cost Cena from winning Sunday’s match.
If it doesn’t happen at Elimination Chamber, then it’ll surely happen on Raw the following night.
Either way, it seems clearer now more than ever that “The Phenom” vs. “The Franchise” is about to go down on “The Grandest Stage of Them All”.
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