Unforgiven 2004 was the night of the game as this was his 9th title win in a good solid match. The chair shot Orton takes is worth the money! A great match on the card was the Christian/Jericho ladder match for the IC title. These 2 worked their asses of which is something the intercontinental title lacks thses days. Hbk gets what he can out of Kane but not ur HBK classic that we are used to. Really a 2 match card but well worth the money with the good enjoyable main event and the excellent ladder match.

Cheated by my girlfriend? That's UNFORGIVEN.... Ladder Match... Okay! For the Intercontinental Championship.... better than! Against Christian?! Let kick some a&&...
The Match of the night... Y2J Chris Jericho vs. CLB Christian, in a Ladder Match for the Intercontinental Championship.
One of the best ladder matches ever.... a Must see....

With eight months of 2004 already gone, what had promising by early-Spring to have been a halycon year in professional wrestling had, in fact, become something of a disappointment. Respective Raw and SmackDown World Champions Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero, the causes of so much joy at WrestleMania XX, had both lost their titles, and WWE in general was stuck in a creative rut. Summerslam was a near-washout, Raw was being plagued with silly storylines and SmackDown was a shadow of it's excellent self just one year ago. One of the few bright spots on the horizon was the ascent of new World Heavyweight Champion Randy Orton, who was to make his first title defence in the Unforgiven main-event against former Evolution ally Triple H. Could this Raw-only pay-per-view give WWE fans something to be thankful for?

Held in Portland, OR on September 12, the event was opened by a tag team contest pitting the rather makeshift team of Chris Benoit and William Regal against Evolution's former World Tag Team Champions Ric Flair and Batista. In a matter of weeks, 'The Rabid Wolverine' had gone from main-eventing PPVs as a defending World Champion to the rather more familiar surroundings of mid-card/opening match wrestler. Still, a feud with Evolution was quite prestigious for Benoit and especially Regal, who had issues with the stable for many months thanks to the group's treatment of his friend Eugene. The babyfaces won a reasonable bout when Flair tapped out to the Crossface.

Trish Stratus retained her Women's Championship over Victoria in a passable encounter. This prompted one of the worst impromptu matches ever witnessed in WWE when Trish's "Problem Solver" Tyson Tomko challenged Victoria's cross-dressing buddy Steven Richards to a match. Tomko and Richards had a dire 6-minute match that was personally my least favourite match of the entire year. Absolutely dreadful, and the Portland audience wasn't impressed either.

Thankfully the in-ring action improved ten-fold with the next match, as Chris Jericho won the vacant Intercontinental Championship in a tremendous ladder match versus Christian. Next was a No Disqualification match pitting Shawn Michaels against Kane, reluctantly accompanied to the ring by his "pregnant wife" Lita. 'The Showsptopper' got the win in a good match after some Sweet Chin Music.

A boring match for the Tag Team Championship pitting title-holders La Resistance against Rhyno and Tajiri bridged the gap between the No-DQ bout and the main-event. Randy Orton's first World Heavyweight Championship defence would be against the man who ordered the violent expulsion of 'The Legend Killer' from Evolution one night after Randy won the title, Triple H. In what was, at the time, quite a shocking development (considering most felt that Orton was due for a long-run as champion), Triple H became World Champion again for the first time in six months, in a match that was entertaining enough, but had an unusual and rather annoying conclusion. The first "Age of Orton" was cut short mere weeks after it began, and after a failed run as a babyface for the rest of the year, it would be three years before Randy would capture a World title in WWE again.

Unforgiven was barely an improvement on the dismal Summerslam; in fact, in many respects, it was even worse. Matches such as Tomko-Richards and the World Tag Team title bout were either unneccesery or just plain awful. And though in hindsight, the decision to take the World title off Orton may have been for the best, at the time it smelt of 'The Game' exercising his not-unimpressive company stroke and figuratively castrating the main-event career of 'The Legend Killer'. It had some fine moments, mainly the ladder match, but Unforgiven was, for most WWE fans, somewhat of a miserable evening.