MID-Tier Match Reviews: John Cena vs. Rob Van Dam – ECW One Night Stand 2006

With 2025 being John Cena’s final year as a wrestler it makes sense to revisit big moments in his career. I’ve already covered his first WWE Championship at WrestleMania 21, one of his more infamous matches with Randy Orton from 2007, and some of his more famous matches from later in his career like his first match with The Rock and his match with Mark Henry. From all of this it’s safe to say that nostalgia tends to color our memories of past experiences since much of Cena’s career was…MID. He wasn’t an outright bad performer but he was very much a step down for a very long time. It took him over a decade to become consistently good as a wrestler. His first genuinely great match was against Umaga in 2007 and that was because he had both an experienced Samoan doing much of the heavy lifting and the entire WWE machine working hard to conceal his shortcomings. But not even the all-powerful WWE machine could protect Cena when he was literally in enemy territory in front of an audience that wouldn’t ever consider giving him the benefit of the doubt, as this match demonstrated.

The Story

Rob Van Dam won the Money In The Bank briefcase at WrestleMania 22. Then on May 22nd he became the first person to announce his cash-in ahead of time: that he’d cash it in at ECW One Night Stand. This was part of a larger project to revive ECW as a third brand in ECW following the overwhelming success of the previous One Night Stand show in 2005.

On one hand WWE attempted to add as much authenticity to this resurrected ECW as possible: the show would emanate from the Hammerstein Ballroom, the most famous venue in ECW history. Many ECW originals like Tommy Dreamer, The Sandman, and Sabu (RIP) would appear in segments attacking Cena and other RAW wrestlers. The show even featured ECW’s old color scheme and overall aesthetic, and who better to represent ECW going forward than RVD, arguably the brand’s most famous wrestler and the one outsider to survive the ill-fated Invasion storyline largely unscathed?

On the other hand putting all of these elements of old ECW were mere distractions to keep the focus away from the power behind the throne. Even with Paul Heyman serving as on-air authority figure and to some degree a creative consultant, this was WWECW, a.k.a. Vince McMahon-approved ECW, which meant that this brand would never achieve more than challenger/third brand status as it wouldn’t be allowed to question the “supremacy” of the main roster brands.

With this in mind, there was still an element of doubt circling this match. Few people expected Cena to lose the WWE Championship since he was well on his way to becoming an institutional figure in the company. And yet it didn’t make sense for RVD to lose in this big match and in the process bury himself, ECW, and the MITB gimmick. So with that many people came to the venue hoping for RVD to win, but could he do it, or would this all be one big swerve from WWE higher-ups just to kick a dead body one last time out of spite?

The Match

This took place on June 11, 2006. It was rated ***1/4 out of five by the Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer.

RVD comes out first and gets lot of cheers but not any huge giga-pop or anything like that. Then Cena appears and is showered with boos. There aren’t even any of those tacky “John Cena Sucks” sing-along chants that’ve followed him for the past five years or so, just legitimate vitriol and contempt towards him from fans who hate what he stands for. As such, Cena foregoes his usually proud and boastful entrance and just walks towards the ring with his title above his head and his face covered (read: protected) by his cap.

They do announcements and man the Cena hate is just overwhelming. Cena throws his shirt to the crowd several times and each time they throw it back at him. I think one guy actually wipes himself with it as an extra special middle finger to Cena to stand out from the sea of middle fingers already directed at him. As if that’s not bad enough someone throws toilet paper at Cena as the bell rings and a “Fuck You Cena” chant begins. The wrestlers lock up and the fans chant “Cena swallows”. Cena lands some punches followed by a fisherman suplex as the crowd chants “you can’t wrestle” for what might be the first time in Cena’s career. Cena does a tackle/dropdown spot but RVD counters with one of his spinkick variations. Cena bails to ringside as the crowd chants “whole fuckin’ show” for the challenger.

We get a long yay/boo punch exchange and then Cena lands a powerslam for two. Then he clotheslines RVD to ringside as the fans chant “same old shit”. Apparently this irks Cena because he follows with a top-rope ax handle to the floor. Kind of a weak payoff for such a high risk but whatever. This leads to some ringside brawling and an “over-rated” chant which ends when RVD lands a moonsault body block out of nowhere. RVD grabs a chair but Cena hits first and sends RVD over the barricade when RVD attempts another moonsault.

Cena brings RVD back to the ring (and rips a “Fuck You Cena” sign in the process) but RVD cuts him off on the barricade and lands a corkscrew leg drop from the apron. RVD follows with a baseball slide dropkick and a slingshot leg drop onto the apron. Then he dropkicks a chair into Cena’s face in a corner for two so he follows with a chair-assisted Rolling Thunder. One, two, Cena kicks out.

RVD slams Cena and goes for a chair-assisted split-legged moonsault but Cena gets his knees up. Cena hits back with a DDT onto that same chair for two. The fans chant “you can’t wrestle” again so Cena catapults RVD face-first into the chair setup in a corner. Cena gets another two-count so he lands his side suplex and five-knuckle shuffle. Cena goes for the F-U. RVD escapes and lands a wheel kick. Cena sends RVD into a corner. RVD blocks a charge and goes for another moonsault. Cena blocks and lands a one-shoulder tornadobomb out of the corner. That was impressive. But the crowd responds by saying “you still suck”. I guess not, then.

Some contrived rope spot appears to go wrong and Cena ends up on the floor. RVD lands a dropkick and then sets up a table in a corner but then Cena locks in the STF. But then RVS gets a ropebreak. Wait a minute, I thought this was being contested under Extreme Rules. There are ropebreaks under Extreme Rules? Doesn’t Extreme Rules = No Holds Barred = Anything Goes? Semantics, I guess. Anyway, Cena gets into a shoving contest with the referee and then punches his lights out. Then he cuts RVD off in a corner and lands a superplex. Then Cena smashes RVD’s face with the steel steps. Out comes a SmackDown (WWE) official to count the pin. One, two, RVD kicks out.

RVD blocks another F-U so Cena dumps him to the floor. Then he turns around and some dude in a motorcycle helmet spears him through a table and knocks out the SmackDown ref. he removes his helmet and…IT’S EDGE! The crowd thanks him for his contributions. RVD comes back in and jumps onto the top rope. Five-Star Frog Splash. RVD instinctively goes to wake up the dead ref but he’s completely limp. Then out comes Paul Heyman to make the count. One, two, three! RVD beats Cena!

Winner and NEW WWE Champion after 20:45: Rob Van Dam

You can watch the full match here.

Review

That was…not as good as I remembered. When I first saw this I thought the extreme anti-Cena comments were funny and novel. Watching back now it’s clear that in many ways the crowd’s reaction to Cena overshadowed the actual match. In a weird way the anti-Cena audience seemed more concerned with expressing their disdain than they were supporting RVD. Yes, Van Dam got a few cheers and chants here and there but their hostility towards Cena was far more pronounced and integral to the match. And in many ways that hostility was the centerpiece of the match because the action itself…was underwhelming.

For all the talk of the audience’s reactions the action they paid to see didn’t live up to the hype or the price of the ticket. Cena moved very stiffly and didn’t look like he know what to do at times. It’s said that the heel leads the match but who was the heel here? Cena? If so then he exposed his shortcomings as a wrestler here because the action was very disjointed and lacked flow from spot to spot. There was no overarching theme for the match or any sense of cohesion. There was little heat from Cena’s actual offense. The only real fan interest came from the meta idea of Cena losing and not from the in-ring story. In other words, this audience simply cared about the match result and not the match itself.

And even when they got what they wanted RVD’s win didn’t have that level of magnitude it should have. This didn’t have the emotional explosion of Austin versus Rock from WrestleMania X-Seven, the sense of historic impact of Cena versus Punk from MITB 2011, or the extended sense of celebration and closure of Reigns versus Cody from WrestleMania 40. Instead, it came across as a big moment that could’ve felt bigger but for one reason or another didn’t hit those same high notes. RVD big world title win came thanks to outside interference in a match that involved haphazard officiating and another bullshit ref bump that just screamed creative laziness. Maybe it comes down to personal taste but I think that ref bumps are the epitome of lazy booking, especially when there isn’t an immediate payoff to such a thing happening. Yeah, Paul Heyman came out to count the pin but even still there was something with how those closing spots flowed from one to another that made this final visual fizzle out. There wouldn’t’ve been any harm in Cena losing clean here and the Edge interference to further that story could’ve been executed in another way without making RVD the third wheel in his own coronation.

Final Rating: **1/2

This match had a unique crowd but that’s as far as it goes when it comes to outright positives. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with how anything was executed but if you take this crowd away or, worse, Kevin Dunn the shit out of it to make it sound like a lukewarm Thunderdome-era crowd with generic crowd sounds its drawbacks would be heightened. This was a mid-tier match between two de-facto babyfaces with neither person actually leading the match or creating any challenges for the other. It was as if they were both throwing things at the wall and playing the hits until it was time for Chekhov’s table to finally be used. This made the action bland with much of the entertainment coming from the crowd and not the wrestling. And it’s never a good thing when a crowd steals the show from the performers in the ring.

These guys tried but this just didn’t work as a main-event. The match lacked the violence and carnage expected of its stakes, setting, and stipulation. This was still 2006 WWE: blood was still allowed at the time yet there was nothing remotely close to a hardcore spot beyond a corner catapult and a token table breaking.

Ultimately this match is very much like ECW itself: better off left in the past because it just doesn’t hold up over time.

Thanks for reading.