This was a ladder match for the Smash Bros’ PWG World Tag Team Titles.
One of the defining spotfests of the era, and on a shortlist of the best ladder matches of the 2010s.
This is a match that will live forever as long as there are people making gifs and as long as the million highlight videos of it still exist. It’s a famous match in the history of independent wrestling in the 2010s, and with good reason. A million totally ludicrous things happen. I didn’t feel like capturing any of them because you can find them in so many other places, and this is as much a sonically pleasing match as it is a visually pleasing match. But there’s more to a great ladder match than that, which this match totally understands and works to.
Like any truly exceptional ladder match, there’s virtually no dead space and a real sense of brutality in addition to all of the incredibly cool things they’re doing. This isn’t a riff sessions to create gifs and highlight videos. This is a fight. They go some truly spectacular things later on, but this is a fight, and it brings out the best in everyone involved. The Young Bucks are in their stride as cowards slowly revealing themselves to also be a pair of little psychopaths, and the match falls apart without them acting as this lightning rod of hatred. Everyone’s good in this though. The blistering pace means everyone is boiled down to only getting to do their absolute best stuff, leaving no room for anything bad like SSB having to fill space between cool double teams or Kyle O’Reilly trying to sell.
In the end, the manic behavior of the Bucks in the first half comes back to cost them. At a point, they took out Rick Knox with an obscene ladder shot to the face that left a referee bloodied and carried away. It’s maybe an accident, but considering the feud they’re suddenly involved in with Rick Knox, it just as likely wasn’t at all. They luck out near the end and maybe have it won, only for Rick Knox to make the big time return. He shoves the ladder over AND DOES A FLIP DIVE OUT ONTO THE YOUNG BUCKS??????? Player Uno and Stup are then able to go up and retrieve the titles to retain.
The Young Bucks have only had a handful of matches (or perhaps only one) better than this, but for the other four, this is very likely the best match of their careers.
One of the nicest things I can say about this is that it’s one of only a handful of ladder matches since the mid to late 2000s that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to either be the near-perfect first Money in the Bank or trying to be the first Ladder War. There isn’t a slanted-ladder-climb or a ladder bridge spot to be found. It’s not quite as brutal and simple as something like Sheamus vs. John Morrison in 2010, but it walks one of the tightest ropes ever managing to bring both a back-to-basics approach to this while simultaneously offering some of the cooler spots in a ladder match all decade. A lot of wild stuff happens, but it all feels like it stems from either the Bucks being insane, the other teams wanting to hurt them in addition to trying to win, or just simply trying to win.
In addition to the wild setpieces displayed, there’s just as many really horrific shots with a ladder or chairs that keep this grounded in something much realer and easier to understand. All of the insanity springs forth from the foundation laid by a chaotic brawling first third, rather than the match seeming to be explicitly about insanity. It’s the magic of these peak era PWG brawls and big gimmick matches, and this is among the very best of them.
HANDWERK 