WWE Cyber Sunday Results: Batista Defeats Jericho for Fourth World Title Reign

>Batista defeated Chris Jericho to become the new World Champion with Steve Austin as special ref: Let's push ahead to the good stuff: Austin was taken out of the match by an errant spear by Batista. This prompted Shawn Michaels to come out and pull a slow count on Batista.

This prompted JBL to come out and attack Michaels and Batista...Randy Orton then emerged and let Jericho hit Batista with a belt shot. After Batista kicked out, Austin recovered and stunnered Orton. Jericho shoved Austin and Austin attempted to stunner Jericho. Y2J avoided it, but walked into a spinebuster/Batista Bomb for the pin.

Austin won the vote by a convincing margin: 74%. Michaels was second with 22% and Orton was third at 4%.

>WWE Champion Triple-H defeated Jeff Hardy: Good match. Hardy hit a flurry of his well-known moves to get a lot of near-falls, which made me think it would be nice to add some new ones in there. Finish came when Hardy was crotched on the top rope giving Triple-H the chance to drag him down and pedigree him for the win.

Apparently Koslov hasn't grasped anyone's attention as this match won by a large margin, nabbing 57% of the vote. Hardy/Kozlov got 38%, while just Koslov got 5%.

>Undertaker defeated Big Show in a Last Man Standing Match: A well-executed match between two heavyweights featuring some extra-long 10-counts by ref Charles Robinson, one in particular after a Show chokeslam through a ringside table.

Finish came when Taker caught Show in his triangle choke and Show couldn't respond after he let go. Mind you Taker applied this seconds after being blasted with a chair shot, but whatever. If you like guys punching each other, you'd probably rate this at five stars. LMS won by a good margin—49%—to I Quit's 42% and Knockout Match—9%.

>ECW Champion Matt Hardy defeated Evan Bourne: Finish came when Hardy came out of a backslide pin attempt and caught Bourne with a Twist of Fate for the win. Bourne seemed fresh as an opponent as he won the fan vote by a huge margin (69% to Finlay's 25% and Mark Henry's 6%. Yikes, Mizzark).

>Rey Mysterio defeated Kane in a no-holds-barred match: Are there are "barred" holds anymore? Can we just scrap this term? Finish came when Mysterio reversed a chokeslam attempt into a hurancanrana, 619 and springboard splash for the win.

Did we ever hear what happened during this time when Mysterio went missing or is that time just ret-conned like a good comic book? Final voting was 39% for the NHB match, 35% for falls-count-anywhere and 26% for 2/3 falls match. C'mon now America...who wouldn't want 2/3 falls for these two guys?

>Miz/Morrison defeated Cryme Tyme: Not a good sign when your tag champions aren't involved in a fan vote match, but then again, tag belts don't mean anything anyway. Finish came when Morrison hit the Moonlight Drive on Shad for the win. The only thing that stood out to me was JTG, who I thought was really good.

>Honky Tonk Man defeated I-C Champion Santino Marella by dq: Lame. HTM won barely over Roddy Piper (35% to 34%) with Goldust taking a surprising 31%. The two jabbered in the ring for a bit and did a little dance off. Finish came when the ref saw Beth Phoenix hit HTM to give him the DQ win. Marella was upset at Phoenix. All three oldies came out to hit their finishers on Marella to close out the segment.

Other Notes:

-Survivor Series is officially being billed as the return of John Cena.

-Show opened with a montage similar to the one featuring celebrities pretending like they don't want people to vote. Nice use of pop culture that probably 1/3 of the audience got.

-Mickie James as Lara Croft won the Halloween costume contest. All you need to know: lots of hot girls in skimpy outfits and a mini-brawl broke out during the announcement.

-I think the term WWE Universe was used about 800 times...rough estimate.

-The show came from the US Airways Center in Phoenix, AZ.

Josh Nason has written and maintained Ropes, Ring and Cage since 2007. He can be reached at [e-mail].