WWE has made a few questionable booking decisions through the history of the company and SummerSlam 2010 certainly contained one very questionable booking move. The Nexus was the hot new stable of rookies and they were primed to face Team WWE in an elimination match to main event The Biggest Party Of The Summer.
But much to the surprise of many, Team WWE came out victorious thanks to Super Cena. Wade Barrett was the leader of The Nexus and recently spoke to Inside The Ropes about what really went on during SummerSlam when John Cena hulked up ended up the last man standing.
“Not only did we think we were gonna win. It was the first test of this killer group that we had” Barrett said. “It was like ‘okay this is the first time we’re put to the test against these top WWE Superstars, we’ve been termed rookies the whole time. We can’t lose this because we have a ton of heat, we have all this attention. Now is our chance to prove our credibility — we’ll win this.'”
“And then we were told a week beforehand by one of the agents — I don’t remember who but ‘you guys are gonna be winning, we’re just figuring out all the details.’ So a week later we turn up at SummerSlam and it’s in LA at the Staples Center — huge arena and we get there and we get down to the ring and Edge and Chris Jericho who were part of the team we’re fighting against — they’re down by the ring and we all go down in our suites looking all smart and being good boys still and and we just go over to say hey and they say ‘hey guys, we’re just figuring out how to make you look like stars today.’ And we kind of chuckle about it and go off to catering to get some food.”
“And we come back down later on and get pulled to one side and Arn Anderson says, ‘hey guys here’s the finish it’s gonna be you eliminating him he’s gonna eliminate this guy, he’s gonna eliminate this one.’ It’s kinda like dominos are falling, and we finally get down to the final three which is myself and Justin Gabriel and on one side against John Cena. And then they say Cena’s gonna beat you both and go over. At which point I kinda thought he was joking just to gauge our reaction.”
“Now I realize he’s not joking John’s going over we bring up ‘why’s John going over? We really need to win this match.’ And Arn puts his hands up and says ‘nothing to do with me, you’ve got to go speak to Vince about this.'”
“So trying to get your hands on Vince during a pay-per-view day or a TV day is tough so it took about an hour or so to track him down and wait outside his office and get to speak to him. And we go in there and have a chat with him we say, ‘hey Vince here’s the situation we’ve just been told that John’s going over in this match. We think it’s a bad idea — we need to go over.’ And Vince looked me in the eye and told me ‘the reason we’re doing this is because SummerSlam needs to have a happy ending.'”
“There’s not a lot we can do in this case. ‘Vince we need to go over’ — ‘nope, here’s what I need you to do the kids need to be happy.'”
“So I knew at that point I was being lied to. I knew it was nonsense — it was a nonsense reply, I didn’t believe it at all. I don’t believe it to this day. I think it was a terrible idea.” He went on to say how booking the rookies to lose in the end during that SummerSlam encounter was not the right move and Barrett said anyone would be hard pressed to find anyone who could back up that bad call.
He went on to say how booking the rookies to lose in the end during that SummerSlam encounter was not the right move and Barrett said you’d would be hard pressed to find anyone who could back up that bad call. Now this just leaves us wondering how different do you think history would have been if Nexus would have come out on top?
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Credit for the quotes in this article goes to Inside The Ropes with a H/T to WrestlingNews.Co for the transcription