#14
Randy Orton vs. Daniel Bryan
Hell in a Cell ’13
This match was so close to being one of the all-time Hell in a Cell greats. Another ten minutes and a whole lot less Shawn Michaels turning “heel” would have bumped this up to the Top 10 for sure. The potential was there – how could it not be? Without a story, Randy Orton and Daniel Bryan could produce a 4-star match without breaking a sweat. What’s sort of ironic, is that the story both built this match up to be huge, and tore it down for how disappointing it all turned out.
A little background information, just for context: during the same night, fans were promised Paul Heyman in Hell in a Cell, and didn’t get the match that was advertised. The year before, the main event went a total of 11 minutes, and is on our list of bad Hell in a Cell matches. Two years before that, Kane beat the Undertaker with a jar of light in the main event of this same PPV. One month before this PPV, Randy Orton and Daniel Bryan went to a “no contest” in the main event. The month before that, Bryan actually won the title, and then had it stripped from him. The month before that, Bryan won the title, and was screwed over by the formation of The Authority. So, you could see how at this point, fans were pretty upset at yet another awful finish to this Hell in a Cell PPV.
I could ramble on, and on about the booking for this show, and how Shawn Michaels and Daniel Bryan never even resolved what happened here, but this list is about 27 individual matches. So we’ll simply say that the meat of the action was good enough to land this entry at #14, far above a lot of the slop at the bottom, but it just barely missed out on the top half.
