Sheamus on If He Enjoys Wrestling Cesaro, Having Something to Prove Going Into Their Feud, More

Sheamus recently spoke with The Mirror to promote the upcoming WWE UK tour. The full interview is at this link and below are highlights:

We spoke with Cesaro last month about your Best of Seven Series and discussed how it’s not often that two WWE stars get to be involved in this type of programme. Do you enjoy wrestling him?

Oh I love it man. I have to say the only other person who was as physical as him or who I’ve enjoyed wrestling as much as him was Daniel Bryan, and we wrestled a ton of times, on TV and off TV. I love wrestling him. The competition between me and him is great. It’s been an interesting couple of weeks since Mick Foley put us together as a team. We’ve had a lot of fun. Somebody asked me the other day ‘do you want to be Universal Champion or WWE World Champion?’ and I basically said ‘I’ve done all that sort of stuff, I’ve won the titles many times, a Rumble and stuff like that, but for me at this stage it’s more about exploring my character and having fun’. I feel like with the League of Nations, we didn’t have that range or that opportunity to delve into our characters or the interplay between us all, it was mainly just having matches, with no character stuff. Already there has been a ton of that with this. I’m really enjoying it and having fun – we’re bouncing off each other.

Going into the feud, did you feel like you had a point to prove?

Absolutely. Of course we did. It’s one of these things where I’ve always told people, I had a feud with Apollo Crews – I think he is a fantastic talent – and I said to him ‘in this business there are ups and downs’. I have been in the spotlight and I have been out of it. When I first came in I won a world championship pretty fast. Then I worked with John Morrison and Daniel Bryan, became King of the Ring, went back to SmackDown, became the world champion again, won the Rumble, did a lot of things, went away after an injury… I was down for a while and then I came back up again. As long as you are enjoying your wrestling and enjoying what you are doing, that’s all that really matters. But there are times you think to yourself ‘I’d love to do so much more, I’d love to do this, I’d love to do that, I’d love to show more character stuff’. There was a time when people were like ‘oh my God, Sheamus’ character is boring’. Well, when you’re just in wrestling matches all the time and you’re not doing character stuff, then it can be a bit monotonous. There’s good times and there’s bad times and as I said to Apollo, there’s a lot of things you can’t control.

It’s basically a case of working out, keeping yourself in shape, keeping yourself sharp, working on promos, challenging yourself, coming up with stuff. I’ve been doing a bit of MMA stuff on my days off, just keeping myself busy. When it comes to wrestling, the opportunity is going to come. And when that opportunity comes, you better bleeding take it. There are no excuses, you better be ready. There is no use sitting on your arse feeling sorry for yourself, an opportunity will come and when it does you have to be ready to snap it up and that’s what we [Cesaro and I] were. We saw it as a huge opportunity, it was a Best of Seven but there was really nine matches, with two matches before the Best of Seven Series started.

People had already seen the match twice and we knew that, so we went out there and beat the crap out of each other. We knew we had a point to prove so we wanted it to be the most physical, most exciting it could. We knew there was going to be a strong build over seven matches and Cesaro suggested the match in London which was a great suggestion, at the O2 it gave the match an extra flavour and gave it the feeling of a very important match that was part of a bigger series and I think it worked out fantastic. From day one we knew what we had to do. Cesaro is a world class talent. We wanted to prove we can go. People forget sometimes after a short amount of time what you can do. It such a fast moving business and people forget what happened two weeks ago. We went out there to try and show them we are the best.

You have held most of the titles on offer in WWE and are a four-time world champion. Looking back on your last WWE World Heavyweight Championship reign, which was obviously short-lived at 22 days, how did you think it panned out? Were you put in a fairly tough situation because it was a storyline that was helping to get Roman Reigns from one place to another, in terms of his feud with Triple H?

Yeah, you know, it’s not like anything else, obviously Seth Rollins got hurt so things changed, as they do in this business because people get hurt all the time. That’s why we say ‘don’t try this at home’. I really thought I was finding myself, I really thought I was finding how to get into this character. I had a lot of heat, you know? I had a serious amount of heat. It was real. There are a lot of heels out there who want to get a babyface reaction, but I was determined when i came back never to get a babyface reaction. I wanted to be a heel man, I wanted to be that guy that people hated. It ‘s funny, I look at the thing with Roman and it was great for me, because when we went to Philly [Raw took place in Philadelphia on December 14, 2015, the night after Sheamus retained the title against Reigns at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs], almost a year before at the Rumble [also at the Wells Fargo Center] they booed him out of the building. But when we were having a match, they were chanting ‘Roman Reigns’. So at that moment I knew I was doing my job. I had a job to do and that was to get Roman back where he needed to be you know. Do I feel like I could have gone a lot longer with this? Absolutely, I kind of felt like my legs were cut from underneath me. To be honest. I felt like I was really starting to get some steam, to get some momentum. But ultimately my job was to get Roman back to where he needed to be with the fans behind him and as a heel I was able to do that. Which was for me I guess a special moment.

Follow Marc on Twitter at @this_is_marc. Send any news, tips or corrections to us by clicking here.

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