The Best And Worst Of WWE Hell In A Cell 2019

Previously on the Best and Worst of Hell in a Cell: WWE turned Hell in a Cell into the TNA Steel Asylum to make watching matches inside of it as annoying and difficult as possible. Also, WWE tested out ending their Hell in a Cell main event with a no contest and thought, “this worked great, let’s do it again next year.”

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Here’s the Best and Worst of WWE Hell in a Cell for October 6, 2019.

We had some pretty low expectations for Hell in a Cell going in, with only four matches announced until literally Sunday afternoon when they added four more. When we were only two matches into the show, though, we were suddenly wide-eyed and hopeful that WWE had turned the pay-per-view it cared the least about this year into one of its best.

The opener between Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks is one of the best WWE matches of the year, and should be in consideration for one of the best WWE pay-per-view openers ever. Yes, it would’ve been improved by existing in a magical, amalgamated WWE where women’s wrestling had some respect on its name and Hell in a Cell matches were still actually violent because of the Cell structure, but they worked with what they were given to build an intense, creative match that brought the crowd and the audience at home along.

Highlights include Lynch building on the New Day vs. Usos kendo stick trap to create a makeshift lifeguard chair for Sasha Banks, just so she could dropkick her into the cage. I think Banks is the only person light enough to do this spot without their weight breaking the sticks.

I don’t know why there are a bunch of kendo sticks under wrestling rings these days, especially since Steve Blackman hasn’t had a match in 17 years, but there’s both a functioning court system and literal Christian Hell under there, so it’s more of an existential question than a nitpick.

Banks was especially great inside the Cell, going full big match CIMA to break out every creative Meteora she could imagine. We got a Meteora off the ring apron into a ladder and a Meteora through a table, not only popping the crowd but righting the wrong of what happened with tables the last time she was in the Cell. The finish is a full-on ECW special: someone throwing a bunch of chairs into the ring only to get thrown onto them and lose the match.

I wasn’t expecting Lynch to retain the championship, especially not after they made such a big deal out of the Raw Women’s Champion being a focal point of Friday Night Smackdown. I’ve never agreed with the idea that “wins and losses don’t matter,” but if I can punch it up, I’ll say this: wins and losses don’t matter as much, as long as the match is good. If it’s a shitty match, the result matters. If you leave the bout thinking better of both competitors and actually enjoyed watching them compete, yeah, sure, then it can be more about the journey than the destination. This’ll become important later.

The women’s Hell in a Cell match is followed up with an interesting choice: another “hardcore” match where we’re all expecting one thing, but get another.

I was really hoping for a Daniel Bryan Horseman swerve, as it felt like the only thing that made sense after weeks and weeks of ridiculous murder mystery, but Bryan reclaiming his spot as a conquering underdog hero who kicks the yes out of people and hugs it out is fine. I love evil conservationist asshole Bryan, but he’d probably make them more money the other way.

This ended up having some surprisingly great action from bell to bell, with the tornado tag helping out a lot more than I was anticipating. I like the drama of southern-style tag team wrestling, but if you’re going for a wrecking ball-style brawl with dramatic saves and combo attacks, you could do a lot worse than these four. Bryan is the best wrestler in the world, full stop. Reigns is the epitome of the John Cena archetype and is big and strong enough to believably crash through walls and tables and shit. Erick Rowan is super secretly very good at this, even if he looks like a gamma-radiated mole-rat got trapped in a Virginia teenager’s closet, and Luke Harper is on the short list of guys who most deserve big match opportunities. If anything, it over-delivered.

One thing, though …

Dear Daniel Bryan,

I assume this was you selling the violent match you’d just had, but the combination of you having once had to retire due to injury and the camera quickly cutting away from it made it feel disconcertingly real. You are not allowed to be this good at selling damage to your head and neck in this tense sociopolitical climate.

Love, everybody.

p.s. please do not running knee Luke Harper out of the company on Friday night

With the first two matches in the books and the final two still 45 minutes away, WWE decided to cram in a bonus episode of Monday Night Raw. It’s not the worst thing they could’ve done, I guess, and some of the wrestling’s watchable-to-good, but it gets less and less engaging as it goes on. Maybe they just wanted to emotionally prepare us for the main event

Anyway, the best of the randomly occurring matches is probably Randy Orton vs. Ali, but suffers the same “boring as shit until the RKO” as every other Randy Orton match ever. Lots of stomping, lots of plodding. It’s what he does. Ali did his best, though. His headstand counter to the RKO — somebody’s been watching PAC! — is awesome and memorable (and probably should’ve been the finish), and hurt only slightly be the fact that his dumb ass followed it up by doing a forward roll into a JUMP INTO THE RKO. BRUH, YOU JUST AVOIDED IT.

After that, we get a Women’s Tag Team Championship match with not even a Sunday afternoon’s worth of build. The good news Asuka and Kairi Sane leaned heel the entire match, Asuka has added POISONED ASIAN MIST to her WWE moveset, and The Kabuki Warriors are the new Women’s Tag Team Champions. Finally.

The bad news I’m pretty sure Alexa Bliss losing the Women’s Tag Team Championship means WWE’s going to forget about it again, and we’re never going to see it defended on TV. Maybe they’ll move Sane and Asuka back to NXT to defend the championship there for a while Sasha Banks and Bayley established it as a cross-brand championship that could be defended at Full Sail, and oh man, how hard would Jessamyn Duke and Marina Shafir shit their shorts if Kairi came back for revenge and brought a Dilophosaurus-ass Asuka with her

At the very least, I hope Paige shows up on Monday or Friday like, “hooray, we did it,” only for them to mist and elbow her. I’ll save my, “AND THEN PAIGE GOES AND GETS TENILLE DASHWOOD AND THE ACTUAL PIONEERS OF THE WOMEN’S REVOLUTION COME FOR REVENGE,” fantasy booking for another time.

I guess we can’t mention the women’s division content from Hell in a Cell and how much all of it felt like Raw without mentioning Lacey Evans vs. Natalya on the kickoff show. I tweeted this as a joke …

— Brandon Shroud (@MrBrandonStroud) October 6, 2019

… and then about halfway through the pay-per-view, they announced this.