Welcome to another eWrestlingNews Question of the Day!
WWE Bad Blood takes place this Saturday night, and one of the most featured matches on the card will be CM Punk and Drew McIntyre stepping inside Hell in a Cell to likely end their storyline together. It’s been a “blood feud” in several ways, and the event is called Bad Blood, but is it an absolute necessary element for both to don a crimson mask here?
My question for you today is “Will fans be disappointed in this match if it is great, but doesn’t have blood? Do they HAVE to bleed as an absolute certainty in order to sell this properly?”
Remember to answer with your response in the comments below.
As far as my answer…
With most things in life, the real answer, in my mind, is to say “it depends” and start spitting out all the ways something can be interpreted in multiple ways. When push comes to shove, it’s not a popular answer and a strong “hot take” of me to say that it doesn’t absolutely need to have both guys bleeding, but only on the pretext that everything else that occurs in the match has to make up for that. Duh. That’s stating the obvious. If the match isn’t awesome, it won’t be awesome.
But the key to me here is that if the match sucks and they bleed, that won’t make it awesome for me. If the match is good, but bleeding will take it to the next level that puts it into great territory, then that’s absolutely a possibility. I do tend to think matches like this should be feud-enders and they’ve been fighting long enough that I’d like to see a definitive finale that puts out all the stops. In that equation, I do have it in my mind that they should leave each other bloody messes. But I don’t want them to blade or do anything too dangerous that would put their safeties at risk just for the sake of making sure blood happens.
I think Punk needs to win this match in order to set up a title shot against Gunther for either Crown Jewel or Survivor Series, but I don’t think he should come out of this looking great. McIntyre should put him so much through the ringer that it should look like it’s damn near an even contest and Punk just happened to get ONE move in that gave him the edge for a pinfall. That way, McIntyre doesn’t lose steam. I don’t want him scrounging around the midcard on Raw for the next few months and ultimately just being a guy lost in the shuffle in the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal on SmackDown prior to WrestleMania 41. He needs to stay strong. I’m not sure what that means as far as who he’ll feud with next, but I’d be down for a McIntyre versus Ilja Dragunov program, for example, where Drew is the man on top of most of that feud.
I want it to feel like Punk and McIntyre decided they need to let it all out there and give whatever is left of them. If they end up just lightly bouncing each other off the cage walls and using kendo sticks before a GTS finish, I’ll be thoroughly disappointed. But I do think there’s a way to have this match go down where they aren’t both profusely bleeding buckets. If that’s all it took, garbage indie wrestling that does nothing but that material would be the most over thing in the business right now, and it isn’t. But when I watch a Royal Rumble, I want to have some surprises. When I watch a ladder match, I want some stunts with the ladders. And likewise, when I watch a Hell in a Cell match, I want to see something akin to the very first (Undertaker vs Shawn Michaels) or the Taker vs Mick Foley match. Anything less than an attempt to come close to those two just ends up being forgotten by me, like all the ones that were shoehorned in over the years with Hell in a Cell being its own pay-per-view.
Is blood necessary? There are ways around it. But is it a good indicator that that’s where the match should go? I feel so.
What do you think? Drop your thoughts below!
