Penta kept the WWE Intercontinental Title on Sunday night at WrestleMania 42 Night 2, surviving a six-man ladder match at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas that turned into a barrage of crashes, splashes and steel. He climbed to free his title after a match that never settled into one rhythm long enough for anyone to control it.
The match featured Je’Von Evans, Rusev, Dragon Lee, JD McDonagh, Rey Mysterio and Penta, and it turned violent almost immediately. Rusev attacked everyone before Penta even entered the ring, then Evans flew in with a diving splash over the ropes onto McDonagh outside the ring. Dragon Lee answered with a springboard Hurricanrana that sent Evans into Penta, while Rusev kept using a ladder as a weapon and McDonagh took a back body drop that sent him crashing into the steel.
The biggest risks kept coming. Evans later knocked McDonagh from the ladder with a springboard clothesline, Mysterio trapped Dragon Lee in a ladder for a 619 spot, and Penta launched Mysterio over the ropes onto Rusev, who crashed through a ladder. Dragon Lee then hit a Spanish Fly off the ladder to McDonagh, and Penta finished the sequence with a Mexican Destroyer onto a ladder bridge on McDonagh before climbing to pull down the championship.
Penta entered WrestleMania 42 as the reigning Intercontinental Champion, and the match lived up to the kind of chaos that usually comes with a ladder bout of this size. There were few pauses, fewer safe landings and no stretch where one man looked fully in control for long. By the end, the champion was the one still standing, and his brief reaction said as much as anything else: “And still.”
The result leaves Penta in the same place he arrived, but only after a match that put every contender through a series of punishing ladder spots and near-misses. JD McDonagh was at the center of several of the hardest moments, and the last one ended with Penta pulling the title away and leaving Las Vegas with the belt he brought in.
