While it might not come up in conversations for the greatest WWE SummerSlam of all time, the 2005 edition has its fair share of memorable moments. You have the fight between Edge and Matt Hardy, the chaotic ladder match between Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio that features a young Dominik Mysterio shaking a ladder with all the conviction of a pensioner trying to open a locked door, and Shawn Michaels doing his best impression of an octopus trapped inside of a tumble dryer in his match with Hulk Hogan.

Amongst all of that, you have a No Holds Barred match for the World Heavyweight Championship between Batista and JBL. Batista, still white hot after his feud with Triple H that ended a month earlier, was walking in as champion in his hometown of Washington D.C. to face John Bradshaw Layfield, who himself was just a few months removed from a barbaric “I Quit” match against John Cena, and getting blackout drunk at ECW One Night Stand. On paper, a beloved babyface getting one over on the dastardly heel, who also happens to be a very underrated brawler, should have gone over massively, but sadly something was missing.

I will say that keeping the foreign object use to stuff they had already lying around like the steel steps, a belt, and the World Heavyweight Championship itself was a nice touch, as well as the crowd brawling. However, if you have No Holds Barred match, which in WWE lore is a step above a traditional No Disqualification match, you would expect it to be a little more brutal than what we got here.

There’s no blood, which is kind of necessary in a match like a No Holds barred match, and while it’s understandable given that we had already seen Hardy busted open, and were going to see Hogan bleed even more immediately after, you could have at least had Batista shed some of the red stuff to make his comeback more fiery, or JBL wear the crimson mask to really put the champion over as a dominant monster. Sure, Batista gets the win by hitting a brutal Batista Bomb on the steel steps, a move he hit after pretty much guaranteeing the win after his initial Batista Bomb, but it felt like we needed a bigger exclamation point on this one to make it stand out more.

For me, this match falls into a category that’s actually worse than “a bad match,” it’s just kind of there. You don’t feel anything during it, and once it’s over you just sit there like “Yeah, that is a match that happened.” It’s a match that had a lot of potential, but left you feeling a bit short changed, and whether or not that’s a product of the other matches on the card already bloodier and more nasty looking spots, or other matches eating into their time, remains to be seen. With that said, this match isn’t recommendable, and that really is a shame.

Written by Sam Palmer