This was for Banks’ NXT Womens Title.
Both in terms of being the real main event on a show that is NXT’s crowning moment to this point (and still really maybe ever) and also being the payoff to perhaps the best story and character arc in the history of the show, it’s the absolute peak of NXT.
More than any other match and any other story, it is a testament to how great NXT could be at this point at creating stories, characters, and environments like this.
Because while there’s some fine Davina Rose work in SHIMMER and I’m sure someone can point to a good Mercedes KV match from a small New England independent, they weren’t exactly El Generico or Kevin Steen or PAC or whoever else yet to come. Those are great stories, but in large part, they traded on the reputation of those wrestlers in the past. That wasn’t the case here. They built this thing from the ground up entirely. So while Sami Zayn was a better actor in 2014 than Bayley is and while the best parts of the better things that Gargano and Ciampa did together (both against The Revival and later against each other) stand out from the crowd, this is a more impressive production and one of the greatest booking accomplishments in WWE history.
Bayley and Sasha Banks both came into NXT around the same time, with a similar kind of outlook on everything. Bayley was more of a cartoon than a young bland babyface Sasha Banks was, but both filled a similar role. Young star-struck wrestlers, lacking in confidence. The road forked, as they often do, and while Bayley stayed the course, Sasha Banks ran afoul of the Evil NXT Mirror. She went bad and became The Boss. The reading I’ve always preferred is the one that stands out looking at these shows years later, which is the idea that it was all a veneer. Faking it until you make it. Trying to project confidence to fool the world, until eventually it began to work. Sasha Banks influenced first Charlotte Flair and then Becky Lynch to turn on Bayley, before stealing the title for herself in February. Since then, Sasha’s confidence has slowly become less of a put-on and more genuine, while Bayley spiraled down after her third failed attempt at the title and seeing her greatest rival succeed. After coming back from a broken hand (!!!) to find her former peers all now called up to the main roster. Sasha faked it, she made it, and it’s now Bayley left all alone, still with something to prove.
Despite all of the success, Sasha Banks still clearly seeks that legitimacy and recognition, and beyond that, a definitive win over Bayley to prove once and for all that her way was correct. Through the build to this match and the match itself, Sasha is painted clearly as seeing Bayley as the old version of herself, having the confidence not to ever change who she was. For Bayley, it’s the same thing. To prove her way was the right way, that Sasha has been wrong all along, and that she can actually do this, and that she isn’t just the other Horsewoman.
In this match, everybody gets what they deserve.
Right off the bat so that we all eat the damn veggies first, it is not a match without flaw. There are a few clunkier moments. When Bayley’s bad hand does get worked over, she doesn’t really bother selling it much, if at all. Their striking needs work. These are very minor complaints though. The match covers or minimizes all of them, and while this is not a flawless match on a mechanical level, it is one of the more emotionally superb pieces of professional wrestling to ever happen.
The big thing is that every bit of this, big or small, of this feels one hundred percent essential to the entire package.
Like the build itself, all the pieces matter.
That begins with the entrances and everything before the action too. So much of the feud has been about Bayley’s sentimentality running up against Sasha Banks’ ruthlessness and hostility towards everything else, and the entrances spell that out. Bayley comes out with her usual fanfare, wearing an ensemble paying tribute to the Macho Man, and with a headband and wristbands paying tribute to the recently departed Dusty Rhodes. Both a childhood hero and a more recent mentor. In response to that, Bayley comes out with security out of a black Escalade, sporting Red Sox colors if only to rile up the fans in New York.
In a wonderful bit of cover work, Sasha Banks covers up the camera catching her smiling before the bell at the enormity of the moment, before adjusting it into laughing and poking at Bayley’s polka dot tributes. It’s a hell of a thing she does, turning what could be a weakness into an immediate reestablishment of the themes of their feud, the match, and who they are as characters.
In a macro sense, the match is basically perfect.
Not a wasted moment, momentum swings that feel gigantic, increasingly big and nasty cut offs, increasingly large set ups and payoffs, and stellar performances on each end, with a slow escalation into a handful of genuinely jaw dropping moments.
Sasha Banks is as despicable as she’s ever been, relishing in getting to bully Bayley again. Once again, she does a remarkable job of illustrating the way the veneer slips as Bayley keeps fighting her and her plans don’t work. Initially, it’s enough to just be aggressive and take over. When Bayley fights back, Sasha makes a show of going to the hand with a few truly nasty spots involving the steel steps (in addition to the famous stomping of the hand in the Bank Statement later), and taking off the one polka dot wristband before unwrapping the soft cast. The sentimentality will not protect her, in short. When those things don’t work, she gets pettier and her game gets looser, giving Bayley more and more openings to fight back, until something finally works itself out. Sasha took control early in the match by kicking Bayley’s leg out as she climbed the ropes and sending her down into the top rope and outside, and it’s a wonderful mirror spot to see it end in the same way. She makes a show of taunting Bayley before giving in to a little sentimentality of her own with an Eddie Guerrero style attempt at a top rope arm drag while holding Bayley’s bad hand, only for Bayley to now shove Sasha off the top and down to the floor.
Bayley is perhaps just as great. The one weakness of the match belongs to her, but in a macro sense, she’s perfect. Sasha Banks has to really do specific things as a character, whereas the match tells Bayley’s story for her, both in the result and in the things that they chose to do when constructing the match. All the same, the big things in a babyface performance that have to go right are things she completely nails here. Sympathy, energy, facials, things of that nature. It would fall flat if she couldn’t deliver as a babyface, no matter how great Sasha Banks is on the other end. Once her comeback begins especially, there’s probably not a finer babyface performance all year than the one that Bayley gives out here, and this isn’t exactly a weak year for great babyface performances.
Where the match takes a step up to another level is the booking and construction of that same final stretch.
Like in past NXT Womens Title matches, the first Bayley to Belly of the match doesn’t work. Typically, Bayley can lose her head here, but as the recent match against Charlotte showed, there’s another way. Banks blocks the version off the top though, and in classic fashion, Bayley overreaches and suffers again, missing a Frankensteiner off the top rope and face planting on the ground in a real disgusting spot. Unlike in the past though, Bayley is able to make good and not have the mistake be the end of her. It’s the entire story in a three move sequence, as after Sasha follows with a Meteora, she too gets caught on the top rope. Bayley not only corrects her earlier failing, but finds a way to hit a better move with a greater chance of success, with a reverse hurricanrana off the top rope instead.
In a beautiful little moment before the end, Bayley throws off the other polka dot wristband, before grabbing Sasha. The most impactful Bayley to Belly of all time hits again, and as the entire world counts along, Bayley pins Sasha Banks to become the NXT Womens Champion.
Despite some imperfections, it just gets too much right to say anything truly negative about and to deny as the absolute all-timer that it is. Minor stories about moves and cut offs, some cool and inventive work, a white hot crowd, and some of the greatest longer term character work in WWE history. NXT is a different machine, but the same things hold true. This, more than any other match because of where it began, is how the machine is supposed to work.
Bayley finally makes good and becomes the champion and the new post-Sami Zayn Ace of NXT. Like his journey that culminated eight months earlier, it’s a show that you don’t have to change to succeed. It’s about heart and guts, but also about progress and the value of learning from your mistakes. A victory in the name of sentimentality and positivity. On the other side of that, Sasha Banks finally gets what she was after, but only in defeat. The match legitimizes her and gives her that respect finally as a result of her incredible performance in it. Sasha Banks didn’t get what she want, but as her breaking down and hugging Bayley again after the match shows, she did get what she needed. Sasha’s fake confidence tends to give way to a realer feeling confidence after this on the main roster, and give or take a few more months of TEAM BAD (it takes them a few months to catch up), it’ll lead to her spending most of the next five years as a more celebrated and respected figure herself.
In the end, everybody gets everything they needed.
(this includes the WWE, as they can shove Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch out there for a photo op and a curtain call for the Four Horsewomen era, where most of the official WWE.com photos that I like to use for these have Charlotte in the foreground and even obscuring Bayley.)
We say all the time that WWE is about moments, and this is one of their best ever. Pro wrestling is supposed to feel good, and very few wrestling matches in 2015, this decade, and maybe all time have felt as good as this did. An all time testament to what happens when you take the time, invest, and treat everything with the care that it deserves.
One of the great feelgood wrestling matches that’s ever happened.
****+
HANDWERK 