Since WWE moved to a more robust pay-per-view schedule almost three decades ago, the company has struggled to juggle this increased obligation without exhausting its Big 4 PPV-worthy matchups. This hesitance to burn through matches often leads to B-PPVs that are often filled with hollow rematches that end with finishes that often necessitate…more rematches. The Backlash shows embody this creative copy-and-paste mentality.
It has reached a point where WWE now leans into this reputation and has renamed the event WrestleMania Backlash, a shameless attempt to entice fans to watch the show on the residual strength of the promotion’s premier supercard.
Despite this designation as an SEO wasteland, though, Backlash has played host to some tremendous matches over the years.
In preparation for the upcoming WrestleMania Backlash PPV, let’s rank the top five matches in the event’s history.
For this list, we will look back at five classic matches, ranking them in ascending order based on quality, and discuss the storylines that led to these bouts, the participants, key spots and plot points that made the match great, and the aftermath.
A couple of things to note: this list will NOT have any Chris Benoit matches on it, regardless of quality, and it will NOT have the “Greatest Wrestling Match Ever” between Edge and Randy Orton. If you like those matches, you know where to find them.
Best Backlash matches of all time No. 5: Seth Rollins vs. The Miz- Intercontinental Championship (Backlash 2018)
For as talented as Seth Rollins is and as likable as he can be, WWE never really got it right with him as a babyface, for the most part. Whether it was waiting too long to turn him, framing him as a someone who fans had no reason to cheer other than “the heels didn’t like him anymore”, stalling his momentum with random title changes, or matching him up with a popular cool heel, WWE’s constant missteps with him illustrated their recent difficulties with producing quality protagonists.
For a few months in 2018, though, it seemed like WWE — and Rollins — had finally figured something out, and who would’ve thought the “it” would be presenting Rollins as a fighting Intercontinental Champion with who defended his title against anyone who wanted a title shot.
At Backlash 2018, “anyone” came in the form of The Miz.
Now, let’s get some things out of the way as it pertains to Miz. At best, he is a very, very mediocre worker, and is a midcarder right down to his bone marrow, regardless of how many times he’s held the WWE Championship. But there is a formula for him to have good matches: put him opposite an over babyface who can bump and sell his tepid offense, have the match in front of an engaged audience, and simplify his responsibilities.
In this match with Rollins, all of those things came to fruition, with Miz doing his best to keep up with “The Architect” during several sequences. Of course, Rollins made much of this match work, and while you could rightly argue that anyone could’ve filled Miz’s role (as we saw a month later when Rollins faces Elias), Miz made for a good foil here and the mix of him, the crowd, and Rollins performance helped turn this into a modern classic.
Best Backlash matches of all time No. 4: Edge vs. Kurt Angle (Backlash 2002)
After the failure that was 2001’s Invasion storyline, WWE (still the World Wrestling Federation at the time), had entered a weird transition period in 2002. While many of the stars that brought them to unprecedented heights were still there (The Rock, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Triple H, The Undertaker, etc.), the company was also looking for young athletes who could carry the load once those names moved on.
Once wrestler WWE tried to position in this way was Edge. Now, we all know that future “Rated R Superstar” would eventually author a Hall of Fame career that’s still ongoing — even though it has gotten weird since he turned heel — but in 2002, he was still trying to establish himself as a top singles star after spending years in a successful tag team with Christian.
As a singles wrestler, Edge had a lot of things going for him, but he still needed that definitive program to cement him as a building block for the company. Enter Kurt Angle. After seeing his momentum dwindle toward the end of the Invasion, Angle was stuck in a holding pattern after facing Kane in a forgettable bout at WrestleMania X8, but as WWE’s ultimate utility player, he was the ideal choice to help Edge get over as a top babyface.
That started in this banger of a match. The former Team ECK pals’ chemistry shined through here with some crisp, fast-paced work. Even the smaller details, like Angle using suplexes for nearly all of his cutoffs — highlighting Angle’s wrestling prowess — or Angle countering and Edge-O-Matic with a punch to the kidneys to give him an opening to hit the Angle Slam, showed how comfortable they were with each other in the ring.
Angle picked up the clean win in this one, which led to a similarly great Hair vs. Hair match a month later.
Best Backlash matches of all time No. 3: John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels vs. Edge vs. Randy Orton- WWE Championship (Backlash 2007)
Heading into WrestleMania 23, the quadruple of Shawn Michaels, Randy Orton, Edge, and John Cena filled a considerable amount of Raw’s runtime interacting with each other. At first, this merely consisted of Cena taking the injured Triple H’s place as Michaels’ tag team partner (they even beat Edge and Orton for World Tag Team Championship), but as the Cena/Michaels program heated up, things devolved into “can they co-exist?” between the two teams.
This bickering culminated in a fatal 4 way at Backlash 2007. Of course, these four were/are good, shrewd workers, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone to hear how good this was. In addition to effectively playing up the interpersonal animosity throughout the main event, they mixed in plenty of well-timed spots that maintained the match’s steady, entertaining pace.
It all crescendoed with an amazing, albeit confusing, finishing sequence that saw Edge spear Orton after Cena blocked the RKO, Cena hit the F-U (now the Attitude Adjustment) on Edge, and Michaels nailing Cena with Sweet Chin Music…which caused Cena to fall onto a knocked out Orton to score the pin and retain.
Now, this finish seemed to point to another Cena/Michaels match, but given that Michaels got written off of TV not long after this match and Cena feuded with The Great Khali after this, that clearly didn’t happen. That made this finish a bit baffling in the macro, but in the moment, it reinforced how chaotic and random these matches can be.
Best Backlash matches of all time No. 2: Roman Reigns vs. Cesaro- Universal Championship (WrestleMania Backlash 2021)
For years, WWE fans yearned to see Cesaro receive a sustained singles push, and in 2021, it looked like it would finally happen. Fresh off of pinning Seth Rollins in a good match at WrestleMania 37, Cesaro became the number one contender to Roman Reigns’ Universal Championship.
Sure, the program came with the usual WWE issues, such as centering it more around Jimmy Uso’s allegiances to The Bloodline or the framing of the 41-year-old Cesaro as a “young upstart”, but some were still hopeful that this would lead to “The Swiss Superman” becoming a fixture at the top of the card.
Well, as evidenced by Cesaro’s departure from the company, that didn’t happen, but at least we got to see this great match at WrestleMania Backlash. Despite the two not having a crowd to play off of, they told the story of the challenger fighting from underneath despite a shoulder injury well.
Yes, you could argue that the match leaned a bit too much into melodrama, but that’s to be expected in a WWE main event, and Reigns and Cesaro were so good in their respective roles that those bits still resonated with most viewers.
Of course, Reigns would win this match clean and Cesaro would tumble down the card immediately after this bout, but for a moment, it was great to watch this talented worker demonstrate how broad his in-ring skills were (after all, how many wrestlers can execute a corkscrew plancha and deadlift a 280-pound man in the same match?).
Best Backlash matches of all time No. 1: Randy Orton vs. Mick Foley- Hardcore match, Intercontinental Championship (Backlash 2004)
Whenever WWE needed to elevate a young heel in the mid-2000s, the company often turned to Mick Foley as the guy to hand out that signature win. Makes sense, as he was the guy who essentially christened Triple H as the company’s top antagonist via two brutal classics at the turn of the millennium.
Four years later, it was Triple H’s Evolution stablemate Randy Orton’s turn to endure this baptism-by-barbed-wire-and-thumbtacks on the path to superstardom, and boy, is this an arduous path.
This match — contested under hardcore rules — set out to wrap up a feud that started in December and included a fun handicap match pitting Orton, Ric Flair, and Batista against Foley and The Rock at WrestleMania XX (Rock’s last match for over seven years). It gets off to the correct start tonally — Foley going after Orton with a barbed wire-wrapped bat like a Terminator, shattering through Orton’s bravado — and from there, Foley spent most of the match torturing the future Hall of Famer.
For his part, Orton provided opportunistic cutoffs that accentuated his smarmy persona and the cathartic bumping and facial expressions that maximized the punishment Foley dished out (his selling after landing in the thumbtacks was excellent). Plus, he gained some needed credibility for simply withstanding everything Foley did to him and picking up a relatively clean win over the legend.
The chemistry between these two and the simmering hot crowd make this for a fun rewatch (plus, it’s a pretty safe match for 2004 and by Foley’s usual standards).