Dropped Titles and Missed Opportunities

At a time when the WWE has so few new stars that it relies on The Rock and Steve Austin to pull in the numbers at WrestleMania XXVII and is looking once more to the old guard next year, it seems a strange decision to take the WWE title off The Miz and give it to John Cena for the tenth time, and the World Heavyweight Championship from Christian just days after he first claimed it, to award the belt to Randy Orton, for the eighth time.

The case of The Miz makes a little more sense though. He had after all been champion for 160 days – longer than any of Brock Lesner’s reigns – and he lost the title in the main event of a pay per view. He also had beaten pretty much everyone, and the draft left few potential opponents for him to feud with.



Christian by contrast was just two days into his first title run, and the draft offered up a wealth of potential feuds, Orton included. However, by having him drop the title to Orton, and on SmackDown so that the result was widely known days before the programme aired, a message was sent out that the WWE simply didn’t believe in Christian as champion. After 17 years in waiting, the only people to have held the World Heavyweight Championship for a shorter period are Jeff Hardy, who won and lost the belt in the same PPV after CM Punk cashed in his Money in the Bank Contract, and Dolph Ziggler, who had been awarded the belt in another display of foolish booking, only to drop the title to Edge in his first defence.

Having waited to actually see the match before commenting, I’m still of the opinion that the WWE made the wrong decision. Orton didn’t earn a title shot, he was gifted it. No number one contenders match was needed for Randy Orton, just the crowd to cheer him above Mark Henry and The Great Khali. Even allowing for that though, Christian and Orton could have put together the exact same match they did, except the champion could have kicked out of the final pin from the RKO and hit his own finisher, barely winning, but looking incredibly strong in the process. That then allows the pair to build towards a match at Over The Limit, where it would have been more reasonable for Christian to drop the title to Orton.

Where WWE are planning to go from here is something of a mystery. Christian may engage in a titanic feud to reclaim his title, possibly even a yearlong chase culminating in his crowning at WrestleMania. Equally possible though is that he drifts back into the mid card, his role only ever having been to get the company out of the hole Edge’s retirement forced them into. I can only hope that for Christian – and wrestling fans the world over – that the former is the case.