5 biggest botches in the history of WWE Elimination Chamber
One of WWE's biggest and most daunting match types, the Elimination Chamber, has featured some memorable moments over the years.
This Sunday's event will be the 11th edition under the Elimination Chamber PPV, with the two World Championship matches that night being the 27th and 28th ones in its history. That is a lot in numbers, but not all editions of the match were successes.
There have been several botches inside the Elimination Chamber, mostly relating to the nature of the dreaded structure. Some of them may not have been noticed by the fans at the time, while others were much more obvious. Either way, these moments served to hinder their respective matches.
Some of the matches on this list recovered well from these mishaps, while one or two of them fell apart. We will get to that. There was also a major botch that did not happen inside the Elimination Chamber Match but just before it.
Anyway, here are the five biggest botches in Elimination Chamber history.
#5 The wrong pod opens in the first Elimination Chamber Match
The first-ever Elimination Chamber match at Survivor Series 2002 ended up being a rousing success. However, while it was going on, the match unraveled for those in it. It was a disaster for the six RAW Superstars involved - Triple H, Booker T, Kane, Rob Van Dam, Shawn Michaels, and Chris Jericho.
A couple of massive botches happened during this Elimination Chamber Match, with the second one regarding the order in which the participants entered. Shawn Michaels was booked to enter second-to-last, while Kane was supposed to be the final Superstar out of his pod.
But after the clock counted down, Kane's door was opened first. Jericho, who was expecting Michaels, got attacked by the Big Red Machine instead. He said the following in a 2017 interview with ESPN:
"They open the wrong door. They open the door for Kane to come out rather than Shawn Michaels, so all of the stuff that we had come up with in the back, and all this effort and time we'd basically wasted ... thrown out the window. We had to call it all on the fly."
The stars in the ring had to change the match up on the fly due to the production mishap. This happened also came moments after a much bigger botch. While it seemed like the worst scenario possible inside the Elimination Chamber, the match still holds up as one of the very best.