This was for Asuka’s NXT Womens Title.
In their first meeting, four and a half months earlier, Asuka basically carved up Bayley to win the title. It was one of the more fascinating matches of the year, offering a large scale expansion on the idea of caution and defensive wrestling. Bayley spent the match doing what worked so well for her, waiting for a mistake, only for one to never come. Defensive wrestling turned into desperation, with Bayley’s loss feeling like a of fixed point in time that nothing could be done about. Sometimes there’s not a lesson and sometimes you just lose.
For all that that match did right, this one is even better.
The body of the Dallas match was maybe a little better. They got to live in it a little more and get into nuts and bolts. This is a Bayley NXT epic though, and what that means is that what it lacks in next-level mechanical brilliance is made up for in other areas. That Sting/WCW style match construction once again, where everything means something. Everything that happens is either cool or it has value to the larger story, and even including how interesting their first match was, what this match has to say completely blows that away.
More dramatic, more exciting, and somehow, far more interesting.
Because in this match, there is a lesson, or at least a definitive thing to be said.
(Do I believe any of this was intentional or planned?
No, of course not. At least not to this extent. Not only is there so little effort put into NXT stories at this point that I doubt the intentionality of what this match wound up saying, but it’s also not really a WWE style story at all. Like most great WWE stories this century, it is at least 40% fanwank and it largely comes together through pure circumstance and a series of little things that all happen to line up really well.)
Going in, so much is put on the idea of coming home. Bayley puts off going up to the main roster, as she was obviously going to for the last several months, to try and win it again in Brooklyn, in an attempt to make history kind of repeat itself, and live that triumph one more time. Bayley wears gear here that is very clearly in tribute to what she wore a year ago in that division defining match, only with blue instead of gold. Same design and everything, even using part of Sasha Banks’ gear the previous year for her entrance gear headband. Sasha Banks and Becky Lynch are even in the crowd again to cheer her on. There’s a confidence in Bayley at the start here, and even through 90% of the match that didn’t exist in Dallas. Caution replaced by confidence. A feeling to the way she moves, executes, and reacts that feels like something will work out this time, but a proactive approach as well, as if the positive feeling will work hand in hand with all the work, as it did a year ago.
Immediately, Bayley presses when she didn’t before. The entire match, she’s going for it in a way she didn’t before. For most of that, it feels exactly like a match Bayley would have won if this was 2015. It’s classic stuff, Bayley against a challenge that got the best of her before, learning and adjusting. She’s got counters she didn’t have before, offense she didn’t have before, she even lays it in a few times in ways she hadn’t really done before against a far more physical opponent, all classic and perfect babyface stuff.
The great part about this it’s not just Bayley leaning on the return to this place, the scene of her career defining triumph, and how good that feels. There’s substance behind it too, the alignment of both feeling and preparation, creating a really memorable and wonderful performance.
The heartbreaking part about this match is that it is never enough.
Asuka cuts Bayley’s initial offensive off with a god damner of a knee to the face out of the air, and while Bayley isn’t the sort of frontrunner to get hit in the face once and fold, it sort of feels like it sets the tone. Whatever Bayley does, Asuka tops. When Bayley gets tougher with her, Asuka hits harder. When Bayley is the first one to really see some of Asuka’s stuff coming and catch and/or counter, Asuka goes to the bad knee that put Bayley out for a few months in the spring.
Even when Bayley counters the Asuka Lock in new ways, makes sure to never get stuck in it for more than a few seconds, something that for the last year has felt like it would be the key to finally beating her, it’s not enough.
Crushingly, it’s not just that it’s not enough, but that it doesn’t even matter.
Bayley comes closer than ever to beating Asuka, maybe than anyone ever did in NXT between the Bret/Austin counter and between the Bayley to Belly, but it’s just throwing stuff at the void. In desperation, Bayley gets up in her face and tries to strike with her and gets absolutely crushed. All the preparation in the world doesn’t matter when she can’t see Asuka’s hands and feet flying in fast enough to do anything. Bayley caught her once or twice early on throwing a kick or a slap, she even tried to get Asuka to strike herself out in the middle, but late in the match, neither of those work any more. Asuka lands a spinning heel kick to the face that’s hard enough that you can feel everyone’s hearts drop into their stomach. Another kick to the head finally drops her and Asuka gets the pin to retain her title for once.
We don’t think of Asuka as a monster in the way we traditionally do others, but this is one of the great monster victories of the decade. The People’s Champion, Our Hero, with everything on her side that could ever be on her side, showing all of this clear progress and improvement, only to get eaten up in a totally different way. It’s made all the more devastating because there’s no excuse for it, nothing to hang a hat on. In Dallas, Bayley did nothing wrong and still lost. Here, she did everything right that people imagined for a year that someone would have to do, and lost in an even more definitive way.
A genuine tragedy, both seen up close in terms of pure wrestling psychology and storytelling and especially when looked at from any sort of a distance, considering what it is that a match like this and a promotion like this has to say.
Despite this show’s branding, and despite continuing to trade in on the reception of that initial breakout for years to come, what TAKEOVER BROOKLYN (2015) was is all gone now.
NXT is a much less joyful place now, and this match formally exists as the funeral for that Hulu/Full Sail only sort of an era, not only in marking the departure of NXT’s last remaining pillar, but in what it has to say about the sorts of stories NXT used to tell and the way they used to tell them. A year ago, the correct mindset paired with all of Bayley’s improvements would have done the trick. Hell, it did. A year later though, that magic is no longer present. Leaning upon nostalgia, hoping a positive feeling could get her over the top, even just trying to repeat things throughout the match, this is what happens to Bayley. In a crueler NXT, one more about science than spirit and one that offers very little in the way of endearing/uplifting content in the future as it takes on more and more main roster traits (heel territory), there is no place for her or this sort of philosophy in NXT any longer.
Bayley tried to turn the clock back, pull some magic out of the past, but all the match had to offer in return is to state as brutally as possible that lightning does not strike twice, some things can never be replicated, and specifically, that you can never really go home again.
That’s not a fun story, it certainly doesn’t feel good, but unlike so many stories wrestling has to offer, it is real. There’s something to it that I think just about anyone with real life experience can relate to on some level.
It’s maybe the cruelest lesson life has to offer. Time’s arrow neither stands still or reverses. Cities and buildings do not have memories, despite all the ones we have of them. They are wholly indifferent. Bayley suffers the literal defeat in the way that many of us have and will take mental ones in similar scenarios, the wrestling version of going back to your hometown as an adult or visiting friends still in college after you graduate. Buildings are different. Old pizza shops or burrito places are closed. There’s an entirely new street. Or maybe nothing’s changed, and it all looks the same but that feeling is gone, because you have changed. You can’t go back, at least never like you’d want.
The past is another country and we are all expatriates.
However great it felt — and it felt incredible — NXT Takeover Brooklyn, no number after it, was a year ago and it will only ever grow older and older and more and more distant, both in timeline and in spirit as NXT changes. It’s a stunningly brave decision by NXT to send off its heart and soul, the Ace of the company for the last year, with a story so firmly about the past being dead, about how sentimentality isn’t enough, and this being a different NXT than what everyone fell in love with, but it’s hard not to respect the honesty of it too.
One of the best wrestling stories of the year, even if it is also one of the worst feeling.
HANDWERK 