So, the best matches of the decade.
Being the first ever one-hundred item list, as well as being quite the important one, this is by far the longest thing ever published on this site. Be warned, break it up into chunks if you have to.
Some things to cover, first:
I am ranking individual matches, of which there were many great ones. Maybe take the numbers a lot less seriously here. The list is effectively split up into sections. Honorable mentions through like 86 are about on the same level. 85 through the mid 40s, the mid 40s through mid to high 10s, and then the real end of the list. Outside of the top five to ten, which genuinely are on another level, there is very little separation within those groups. Please focus less on the numbers and more on the praise, or what is written. Those numbers — within those groupings, at least — could feel completely wrong if I looked at this a week from now (whenever you are reading this). These are the absolute best matches from a ten-year span, it is hard to make these decisions, and outside of the real big ones, I have far less confidence in them than the usual ones I publish.
You have likely read a lot of this before, if you’ve been reading for a while. The idea here is more to host a lot of this together, more so than writing entirely new material about one hundred matches. As with YIL lists, it is about putting those down into blurbs, although those are not always so short themselves. I expanded on many of them, wrote largely new ones for older matches I had written less about, but generally speaking, I put the most effort into the matches I like the most, and so in most cases, what I wanted to say was already mostly there.
For newer readers though, it may be helpful to get what it is I am looking for in a match. The graphic above may give you some helpful context clues from five matches in the top one hundred. The mechanically perfect violence of a FUTEN classic, the looser but still wild frenzy of a Reseda bloodbath, the emotion and narrative function of an Atlantis mask match or Sasha vs. Bayley in Brooklyn, or all of the above working in concert like a John Cena vs. CM Punk match. Neither pure mechanics nor story/narrative alone tend to get it done for me all the time either. Typically either I need something truly revolutionary or impactful, but the majority of matches on this list are a result of the two working in unison, along with either a stunning display of feeling from the people involved or a significant amount of buy-in from me, if not both.
You may not — and likely will not in some cases — feel the same things about the same people, stories, styles, or ideas. But, as you are reading my list, I trust you both knew that and can handle that without getting mad. If you would like to yell at me about the minutiae of this list, feel free hit the ko-fi, where I will respond to you for ten of God’s very own American dollars.
This is the most strenuous and stressful list making process I have ever undergone, having to make something like fifty plus cuts from a shortlist, and also the home to more mid-writing re-shuffling than any other list I have ever presented, before adding that first part about sections of the list. It was also very stressful trying to walk a line in between accuracy and how upsetting I found it to have too many matches from one year or one promotion or even one wrestler all in a row (unless, as you will see a few times, there was some thematic unity). My hope is that it is much more pleasurable for you to read than it was for me to put together, but if you’ve been reading all along or went back for the older lists, a lot of these maybe quite obvious.
Either way, I hope you enjoy it at least a little bit.
First, here are the final twenty five cuts, which are largely indistinguishable from the first quarter of the list outside of pure gut feeling.
HONORABLE MENTIONS (CHRONOLOGICAL):
- CM Punk vs. Rey Mysterio, WWE Over the Limit (5/23/2010)
- Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Satoshi Kojima, NJPW G1 Climax XX Final (8/15/2010)
- Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Shinsuke Nakamura, NJPW G1 Special 2011 (9/19/2011)
- Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Tetsuya Naito, NJPW Destruction 2011 (10/10/2011)
- Big Van Walter vs. Sami Callihan, CZW Back in Germany (10/1/2011)
- Burning (Jun Akiyama/Kenta Kobashi) vs. Kensuke Sasaki/Mitsuhiro Kitamiya, Diamond Ring ~ KENSUKE OFFICE CHANGES (2/11/2012)
- CM Punk vs. Mark Henry, WWE Raw (4/2/2012)
- AJ Styles vs. Christopher Daniels, TNA Destination X 2012 (7/8/2012)
- YAMATO vs. Masato Yoshino, DG Gate of Victory 2013 Day Five (10/10/2013)
- Randy Orton vs. Daniel Bryan, WWE Raw (2/3/2014)
- AJ Styles vs. The Amazing Red, HOG Revenge is Phenomenal (2/15/2014)
- The Shield vs. Evolution, WWE Extreme Rules (5/4/2014)
- Mil Muertes vs. Fenix, LU 1×19 ~ “GRAVE CONSEQUENCES” (3/18/2015)
- Shuji Ishikawa vs. Daisuke Sekimoto, BJW (3/31/2015)
- Jay Lethal vs. Kyle O’Reilly, ROH Conquest Tour: Hopkins, MN (4/25/2015)
- Bayley vs. Sasha Banks, WWE NXT Takeover Respect (10/7/2015)
- Aja Kong vs. Meiko Satomura, Sendai Girls (4/8/2016)
- Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Yuji Nagata, NJPW G1 Climax 27 Day Five (7/23/2017)
- Kazuchika Okada vs. Satoshi Kojima, NJPW G1 Climax 27 Day Eight (7/27/2017)
- Kenny Omega vs. Tetsuya Naito, NJPW G1 Climax 27 Final (8/13/2017)
- Asuka vs. Ember Moon, WWE NXT Takeover Brooklyn III (8/19/2017)
- Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns vs. Samoa Joe vs. Braun Strowman, WWE SummerSlam (8/20/2017)
- Ringkampf vs. The Rottweilers, WXW World Tag Team League 2017 Day Two (10/7/2017)
- Virus vs. Metalico, CMLL Juicio Final 2019 (5/31/2019)
- Blue Demon Jr. vs. Dr. Wagner Jr.., AAA Triplemania XXVII (8/3/2019)
MATCH OF THE DECADE:
On any list, the first few are pure vanity. The creator putting a little thumb on the scale, either because a process like this tends to results in final spots going to the entries the creator feels something for, or in a more artistic sense, as a way right off the top to let people know the sort of thing that they’re in for. The former I come by honestly, and the latter is why I have no interest in fighting it. No list is objective, these are matches that I think of more immediately.
Do I have a vanity #100?
No.
The vanity is much more spread out among the first ten or so, with the usual display of some matches simply climbing their way up.
More than any other part of the list, narrowing what was leftover down to the last three or four felt impossible and stalled me out for longer than any other portion, so I simply went with my gut. All things being fairly close to equal, I went with what felt better or what I felt a stronger instinctual pull towards, rather than the nth match between certain rivals or other similar circumstances. Both because it felt good, but also because that’s maybe the point of all of this in the first place, operating on pure instinct and feeling.
You could make an argument for any of the honorable mentions over the first few of these and I wouldn’t/won’t argue it. But these are the matches of the decade, and when I think of the decade, these are a few I would rather have at the bottom of this list.
100. NICOLE MATTHEWS VS. MADISON EAGLES, SHIMMER VOLUME 77 (10/10/2015)
Context matters.
This isn’t really going to land as well without the years of backstory, as the culmination to one of the decade’s secret greatest feuds. So, for the less informed, maybe people perusing this and making a list of things to watch and referring back, here you go.
Close to two years before this, these two had one of the more charming matches in company history and of the decade, in which best in the world Madison Eagles took endlessly endearing dirtbag Nicole exactly lightly enough to allow a time limit draw that accidentally legitimized her as a top level wrestler. They spent a year buddying up to each other, but constantly also quietly insulting each other, before a rematch happened. In that match, there was still no conclusion, this time because they went to the classic simultaneous pin and tap out draw. The next show, at the end of a four way for the belt, they executed a perfect turn when Matthews used a fireball, of all things, to beat Eagles definitively while also becoming SHIMMER Champion, as Eagles focused on proving something while Matthews gave up after the second draw and focused on pure careerism. A third match in the spring of 2015 saw Eagles absolutely beat Matthews’ ass, only to now lose definitively one on one because she got too caught up in delivering a beating and nothing else.
Long story made shorter yet, in this match, SHIMMER’S greatest feud comes to an end.
Once again, Eagles and Matthews have the perfect match for the moment and this time, the moment calls for them to knock everything off the table that they’ve spent the last 721 days setting up.
What also works so well, about both wrestlers and this match between them, is that they never lose sight of the big unifying ideas behind all these sick moves. Here, Nicole Matthews deserves a beating, and Madison Eagles badly wants to give one out. It’s simple enough, but the devil is in the details, as always. Eagles is always just on the edge of once again getting too comfortable and getting caught like she did in April, but the match offers a new story in the end as well. As Nicole is more able to trap Eagles and outsmart her as a result of the occasional overzealous nature of the beating, her schemes also get too complex and fall apart. Matthews finds her advantage fairly in the end, but cannot help herself, and in the most perfect ending, blows it all trying to prove a point.
They have a genuinely brutal and violent match that’s spent years earning all of that. From Eagles’ offense on Matthews early on when she’s beating her around the building, even going to the back to find the first woman she can (Kay Lee Ray) and hurling her into Nicole as a weapon to Nicole’s own offense, that’s far meaner than usual, while also feeling more desperate than ever. At every moment, the story is told through offense that she’s not as good and has to resort to either lower lows (trying to use her sash belt to tie Eagles to the ropes for a fireball) or riskier attacks (a dive), almost all of which either fail or take as much out of her. At all points, there is a sense of struggle present that’s so important in a match like this.
It helps a lot too that they find the perfect ending for the story in the match itself.
Nicole eventually gets there, even if it takes her way more effort than Eagles, but insists on getting dirty with it. The schemes finally fail and Matthews takes the loss she’s spent two years avoiding. Questions initially raised by those two draws are answered, and the answers benefit each of them. Yes, Nicole Matthews can be as great as a top level talent. At the same time, she hung on against Eagles because of plots, schemes, and plans. Without any of that, the truth becomes clearer and clearer. Madison Eagles is the best in the world.
SHIMMER doesn’t often deliver the big great match to go with the quality of stories and performances in the ring, but this time they did.
The result is one of the company’s crowning moments and a finale as brutal and satisfying as their initial match was charming. A wonderful and fitting end to what is — even still after a spotlight from a pal with a far larger audience and some of us thumping the drum for years — one of the best and more underappreciated stories and in-ring series of the decade.
99. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. TORU YANO, NJPW DOMINION 7.5 (7/5/2015)
Speaking of my favorite feuds of the decade, this other one from the same year might be my actual number one favorite.
Following a heartbreaking loss of the IWGP Heavyweight Title to AJ Styles in February, Yano took advantage for a shocker in the New Japan Cup, and has some eluded revenge for the last four months with inventive new ways to screw over Tanahashi, and every time that the Ace has tried to go down to Yano’s level or has figured one trick out, there’s a new one that confuses and traps him. They’re a perfect fit for each other, the ultra serious athlete Tanahashi and this goof who can’t take anything seriously, including himself (Toru Yano may as well be blowing in Tanahashi’s ear at this point), but lives so down in the muck and in the cracks between things that someone so used to advanced high level concepts would never be able to see him coming, or even understanding the game being played. It’s a beautiful thing, once again paid off perfectly in one of the decade’s most interesting, entertaining, and satisfying matches.
Arguably, this match sees the best use of learned match-to-match psychology and storytelling in New Japan all decade. If not the best, it’s certainly the most likeable, if only because nobody’s spent every second since posting on Twitter about “subtle” storytelling or shouting about how great it was.
That’s some of the beauty about this match, that it’s a classic New Japan epic when you get down to it, but because it involves Toru Yano and it’s under twenty minutes long, it exists in this truly beautiful blind spot where all of the most annoying people in the world can never find you.
For once, it’s a relatively big singles match on a New Japan show free of any airs or notions about that it is. It’s not unserious, there’s still a competitive feeling, but it leans entirely into what it is. Yano being out of his league, having annoyed The Man for the last four months with stolen win after stolen win, and finally having run out of rope. With no more tricks or time, Tanahashi finally sees him coming, sees every little trick coming, and finally gets him and makes him pay with all the silly little receipts he has coming.
Genuinely, it’s just a perfect wrestling story.
There have been a dozen versions of the Low Confidence Okada story where he gets briefly thrown off by someone who briefly has him figured out, goes a little crazy, and eventually gets it done, and not a one of them has been carried out or blown off with a hundredth of the charm and skill that this was.
98. HIROMU TAKAHASHI VS. KUSHIDA, NJPW DOMINION 6.11 (6/11/2017)
The vanity keeps coming.
A pet match of mine, and while it is maybe not as impressive as what New Japan did with deeply flawed wrestlers on the top of the card in the back half of the 2010s, it’s still the sort of thing I find so admirable and endearing, an absolute pitch-perfect efficient and captivating feud blowoff in a promotion that doesn’t always make that sort of thing its business.
Hiromu Takahashi and KUSHIDA have told maybe wrestling’s best story and certainly its most classical story throughout the year. Cocky and weird new guy comes in, takes a position away from Our Hero in embarrassing fashion, makes him question himself and forces him to learn something before coming back and taking his crown back. In short, KUSHIDA’s gone through some shit in the last six months, come back, and he is ready to make sure Hiromu Takahashi and LIJ do NOT shut down the Rec Center, even if it takes a ski race breakdance competition and a beautiful French foreign exchange student who helps KUSHIDA learn how to fix cars to do it.
It’s a lovely lovely story and it just so happens that the match whips ass too, combining all of the cool moves in the world and stunningly great construction with a kind of classical story about offense, which itself is ACTUALLY a cover for an even better story about confidence.
What these two offer up in the conclusion is that while it’s admirable for KUSHIDA to have fixed his problems, developed his game, prepared a better attack, and regained his confidence, it’s not really what does the job for him. The plan, , the use of the Hoverboard Lock to go into the new Back to the Future finish, doesn’t work. Hiromu is just as ready for every new trick, revealing that new tricks alone were never going to get KUSHIDA the title or his position back. Following the block of the Back to the Future, Hiromu gets by KUSHIDA in the same way he did April to embarrass Our Hero, only for KUSHIDA to have a counter this time. For the first time since his return, it’s Hiromu whose plans — so much as he ever has any — don’t work out like he thinks they will, and the spell breaks. He opts to do more and to go bigger and to repeat himself, where KUSHIDA didn’t for once. KUSHIDA’s new plan falters, but there’s no panic to him now where there is to Hiromu, in that position for the first time himself, and instead, it is a return to what was always there.
This is a story about staying the course, growth, self knowledge, all of the important things. It’s admirable to come in prepared and have all these counters and new ideas. It’s a thousand times more admirable for all of that to go wrong yet again, only for Our Hero to finally be comfortable adapting, now armed with the confidence, gut, and will to succeed where he couldn’t before.
Is this the best match of the decade? The most intelligent, the most grandiose, the biggest feeling, the most perfectly assembled and executed?
No.
What it gets right though is maybe more important than all of that though, a perfect conclusion to one of wrestling’s most charming start to finish stories all decade. A story initially about offense and attack that, in the thick of things, becomes a match more about character and heart than anything else. Initially strategic turned purely guttural in the moments that mattered most, allowing for a finish to a match and a finish to a story that became as satisfying as possible on just about every level possible.
At the start of the summer, a story like this ends at the time of year and in the fashion it was always supposed to. A resolution, always on prom night. The villain finally gets what’s coming to him, and the hero gets the title.
97. MEIKO SATOMURA VS. IO SHIRAI, STARDOM YEAR END CLIMAX 2015 (12/23/2015)
A true Encounter.
Two absolute forces of nature collide, and go entirely insane with every incredible idea that they’ve ever done before or even thought of. It’s a little long, they do a little much, but like any great Encounter, it’s all just absolutely undeniable.
Meiko and Io have a true god damner that not only perfectly expresses who they are individually and what their philosophies on wrestling are, but also that brings an emphatic and satisfying conclusion to yet another perfectly executed outsider story. Io uses the moves of her friends that Meiko spent the last six months bullying, and rises to superstar status in the process. Meiko Satomura is as rude and domineering as she’s ever been, Io Shirai has the first performance of her career in which she feels like both a superstar and like this unbeatable entity, but one in which she grows into that over the course of the match.
A clump of matter being put under pressure until a diamond comes out, all in real time.
96. SAMI CALLIHAN VS. FIT FINLAY, EVOLVE 9 (7/26/2011)
A remarkable ass whipping.
What it could have used in a little editing work was made up for in pure meanness, specifically on one side, because Fit Finlay is a mother fucker.
It is not a decade without some truly mean, nasty, and spiritually violent beatings and performances, but this is among the meanest, nastiest, and most violent in all ways. Every strike feels both specifically hateful and also dismissive. He is constantly talking shit. He is constantly doing new and terrifying things to the human body, seemingly just to make it as painful as possible, experimenting with this little freak. The main thing about it that works, maybe more than the physicality behind it, is that, at no point, does Fit Finlay respect Sami Callihan. At various points in the match, he is amused by him, vexed by him, and enraged by him, but he holds absolutely zero esteem for this disgusting mongrel and it drives Sami insane. In an analytical sort of way, Fit Finlay wins this match in the first ten seconds. It takes him another twenty or so to properly seal that victory, but the match is won psychologically almost immediately.
This is Finlay’s match more so than it is Sami Callihan’s, delivering one of the best old man performances of the decade and maybe the century to date, but at the same time, with a lesser wrestler (at least at the time), it would have been far less interesting. He’s full of enough spit and piss and vinegar and spite, managing to convey both a physical and mental harm at all times, that it makes this more than just a one sided beating. It’s a fine line, one Finlay occasionally failed to walk so cleanly in this final run, but it’s walked more successfully than ever here due to what this stupid little weirdo offers up.
Mostly, it’s Callihan’s very nature — a total shithead, one who taunts and fights and shouts his way into a more voracious beating time and time again, but one who still feels sympathetic through it all (again, at least at the time, you really probably had to be there) — that makes it work out so well in the end.
One of the decade’s most gripping displays of violence, earned at every step.
95. JOHN CENA VS. CESARO, WWE RAW (2/17/2014)
The future runs through John Cena.
Cesaro and Cena have an incredible match, while also showing the best of both worlds, as Cena’s airtight story and character work meets Human GIF Machine Cesaro on the roll of a lifetime. It’s a mentally satisfying match that’s also constantly thrilling. Every third or fourth move is all-time career highlight reel material for either man.
To call it a PWG Jawn match is beyond fraudulent though, because while their later matches were like that, this catches Cena at the perfect time when he’s experimenting with those ideas, but hasn’t entirely given himself over to them yet, offering up a lot more than just pure excitement. It’s one of the all time Cena stronger-in-defeat rubs, an entire match worked around the idea of Cena being shaken up against another physical freak. He’s stuffed at every turn, even with the usual Hail Mary spots against someone with Cesaro’s background like the sloppy rana or the fancier moves. Even when Cesaro is once again revealed as lacking the ability to close out, Cena still has to push past and become the most aggressive version of himself that’s existed maybe ever to get it done. Cena’s ultimate strength isn’t just power or experience or heart, it’s the ability to immediately see when the door is open, and the ability to break it down before an opponent can stop him. This doesn’t have the history that something like the final John Cena vs. CM Punk match did when working with a similar idea, but there’s a lot of shared DNA between the two. Cena grabbing something suddenly at the end and creating a win out of nowhere, and most of all, this sensational story where he’s called into question by someone who seems better than him for 98% of the match, only for Cena to yank it out of the air in the last moment in a way that only enhances the both of them.
It’s an ideal sort of WWE television match. A near perfect sort of realization of what the ethos has always been on paper and what it can be. Big larger than life seeming superstars doing incredible things to each other, all bound together with enough story to elevate it into feeling even more important. A near all-time performance in the career of each man.
Had this world we got to look at in 2013 and early 2014 continued, we’d speak of this not only as one of the best of the decade, but one of the most important ones too, and for more reasons than just what it meant for John Cena.
94. HARASHIMA VS. SHIGEHIRO IRIE, DDT NEVER MIND 2016 (12/25/2016)
It’s here in which DDT’s second or third greatest rivalry reaches its zenith, as contrary to the lesson learned in the last match on this list, sometimes that coal just breaks apart.
Shigehiro Irie comes home off of an on-and-off self-imposed excursion overseas, armed with new tricks and at least the pretense of a new attitude, all in the hopes of finally getting past HARASHIMA. This will be his eighth singles match against HARASHIMA, and of the previous seven, he has won zero.
In this match, the stage is perfectly set up for Shigehiro Irie to finally beat HARASHIMA.
He does not.
The match is beautifully assembled and performed to lead one into belief in the opposite direction. HARASHIMA wrestles the sort of match an Ace or a similarly dominant champion/promotional tentpole does before he passes the torch, one seen in several other matches all decade. Irie wrestles the match with a confidence not seen in any of his matches against HARASHIMA since he first lost the KO-D Title to him back in 2013. The construction of the thing is pristine. They get the most out of every single near fall and big burst of offense in either direction. The execution of it is on a higher level entirely. HARASHIMA makes the remarkable choice to grow weaker with his strikes as the match goes on, seemingly to sell a sense of diminished strength while Irie grows stronger and stronger, and it makes such a difference. Once more, it’s a major HARASHIMA title match that succeeds on every single level that a major professional wrestling main even ought to.
Fascinating on every level, mean, cool, and at all times, completely sensible.
An ideal sort of professional wrestling.
It’s an absolute heartbreaker, but in making that choice, it makes this one of the more unforgettable moments in company history. Shigehiro Irie makes every correct choice, for the last ten months before this match and in the match itself, only to still come up short. The mark of any great champion or great athlete is that others in your era do not get to eat. The mid 2010s Pacers never got out of the East. Same with the late 2010s Rockets or Blazers or the 2000s Suns. The 1990s Knicks, probably these current early 2020s Buffalo Bills in another sport, and so forth. What happened to Shigehiro Irie is a tragedy, but like with all the best sports stuff that this seems to take notes from, it’s one I have a hard time ever being truly upset by, because my guy won in the end. All that’s left is HARASHIMA dropping the Mike fist pump.
Go Ace.
93. THE SHIELD VS. RANDY ORTON/TEAM HELL NO, WWE SMACKDOWN (6/14/2013)
Respectfully to some and disrespectfully to others, it’s one of the best payoffs in wrestling all decade.
There are some edges that you can pick at, sure. It’s on Smackdown so there’s some editing that’s weird and despite the visible crowd reactions and audible real crowd reactions on top of the audio file, there’s still some smackdown_crowd.wav stuff that’s unnerving and always will be. And most of all, yes, it should have been on pay per view. On top of that, so many of the Shield six man tag matches during this run through the spring and early summer have gone fifteen or twenty minutes and on a few occasions even longer than that. This gets twelve. So there’s all these caveats to it, or it seems like there could be. But like the Kenta Kobashi retirement tag, I simply just don’t care. None of it bothers me, because very little of that gets in the way of what they’re doing here.
What it lacks in that delightful sprawl they’d all gotten so skilled at over the last two months, it makes up for in the history behind just about everything that happens. It all comes out here. The different Shield set up spots get paid off. Randy Orton figures them out more and more and avoids the ways he’s been cut off before in his own attempts to get at The Shield. Kane, who’s been the real weak link all this time, finally comes through for Bryan when it matters. Randy and Bryan manage to not implode despite still clearly not getting along.
The big moment is this frantic final minute as all of this goes off at once. They finally take Roman Reigns out first, which always felt like the key but could never be done. Kane hurls Ambrose onto him after it too, finally pulling his weight and using the anger in a productive way. Orton intercepts Rollins off the top with the RKO, leading perfectly into the Yes Lock for the long awaited win. It’s a WWE formula match, but it deals with all of this stuff you never get in the WWE. Minor pieces of in-match psychology that develop over months, trends in a repeated match, individual character roles and arcs within a larger team vs. team story, all paid off at the same time in such a way that not a single one of the “yeah, but” caveats matter much at all in the end. Beyond just the thrill of this thing happening for the first time, of getting this stunningly well built up payoff, it’s also the foundation for the greatest wrestler of all time having the platform in which to become that. Beyond that, it’s also the platform in which he somehow became the most popular wrestler in the world. A million great things happen after this, and very few of them could have happened quite like they did if not for this feud, and for this payoff.
When you have importance and match quality and just raw energy on top of everything else, you get one of my favorite matches of and one of the best of the decade.
92. THE YOUNG BUCKS VS. KEVIN STEEN/EL GENERICO, PWG DDT4 2013 (1/12/2013)
A fond farewell, and if not one not as real or genuine as some later in the list, it’s definitely not one lacking in weight.
Not to diminish an utterly despicable performance from the Young Bucks or one of Big Kev’s finest ever babyface performances, but this is about El Generico. It is his show, it is his stage, and it is his match. In his last performance, at least under that name and this mask, he turns in one more classic babyface performance. He’s one of the best in-ring babyfaces of all time. The match highlights that, it highlights him against the best heels in PWG history, and it’s perfect.
More than that though, the match allows the thing to finally happen in the only way it ever could.
In their last chance to ever do it, Kevin Steen and El Generico finally make amends and come together one last time. It’s not enough to beat the Young Bucks, but the moral victory of it, Steen not turning on him and letting him just have his moment, all feels so much more important than another DDT4 win would have been. In retrospect, it’s the eventual impetus for Kevin Steen’s turn later in the year. In the moment, none of that matters. PWG might not tell any stories, so some people say, but for the way they took an obvious El Generico farewell and built the show around it and built up the story of he and Kevin Steen reuniting for the tournament, so that both the final match and everything around it felt that much bigger, they deserve all the credit in the world.
The match and the moment is everything El Generico deserved, and under either this name or another, one of the last times he got even half of that.
91. MONSTER EXPRESS (MASATO YOSHINO/AKIRA TOZAWA/BIG R SHIMIZU/SHACHIHOKO BOY) VS. VERSERK (SHINGO TAKAGI/T-HAWK/NARUKI DOI/CYBER KONG/BROTHER YASSHI), DG GATE OF VICTORY 2016 DAY SEVEN (10/12/2016)
It’s the twilight of the monsters, as Dragon Gate’s all-time greatest and most likeable stable says goodbye.
The beauty of the thing though, and the beauty of both Dragon Gate and pro wrestling done right in a larger sense, is that while Akira Tozawa’s departure makes this something of a foregone conclusion from afar, up close, you never really know. It’s a matter of waiting for that sword of Damocles to finally fall, knowing that something bad is going to happen to this thing we all love, but also constantly teetering on the edge. When you tease time and time again that it’s going to happen, only for Our Heroes to keep pushing it back, you sort of get that feeling without even trying to. The most impressive and beautiful and altogether stunning thing about this is the way they further reach that place with the performances of all involved, that it pushes “but maybe not” as far as possible, and winds up turning what was a foregone conclusion at the start into one of the more emotionally devastating moments of the entire decade.
Not to recap every single elimination and comeback and thing that happens in the match, but the entire match rides on the momentum of that feeling while also succeeding on a level that I think almost anybody, even novice fans, can appreciate on some level (although my instinct here is to gatekeep). It does it in so many fun different ways too, and does so many different things with the format of the match, utilizing everyone to the very best of their abilities for a myriad of hyper-dramatic moments, before Our Hero is slowly and heartbreaking gunned down by the odds against him outside and the power of Takagi inside.
This is a match that’s thought up and assembled with precision, executed as well as possible. In general, it is nearly perfect, outside of the fact that in a rarity in company history, they opt to rip the hearts out of everyone’s chests instead of providing the feel good ending that you almost always get. Here, with these stables and their histories, it is an absolute all time mother fucker of a time and a place to do that, and it makes this one of the company’s most memorable hours.
More than most matches in company history, it stands out as the company effectively summed up in one match. The good, the bad, the ugly, the uplifting, the heartbreaking, the totally and completely unforgettable. A classical style Dragon Gate epic, but one that aims straight for the heart with an unmatched force and accuracy.
90. RUSH VS. L.A. PARK, LLE ON LUCHA AZTECA 7 (7/14/2016)
This match is a cathedral.
A generational monument to violence.
Every single thing anyone ever said about it was correct. Every story was true, every glowing review was completely on the money, or arguably, somehow not overwhelmingly positive enough. Every single bit of this is incredible. Zero time is wasted, there’s no more than maybe ten seconds of this that isn’t great. The mask is torn immediately. A crowd brawl wastes zero time before becoming unlike anything else when Rush finds some ancient looking steel foot locker of all things and runs halfway across the floor area and hurls it into Park’s face. Park responds in kind, using a non-folding chair and whipping it so hard at Rush’s head that the legs go flying off near and potentially into the crowd, on top of giving Rush a cut to match his own.
The referee, after the stunningly reckless chair shot to the head, attempts to call a disqualification in Rush’s favor. As if he has any power here to do such a thing.
As if this isn’t the most lawless, reckless, and least governable match in recent memory.
Beautifully, both Rush and Park decide that they are not done yet, go back to the ring, and continue on in this fashion. Less hurling old objects at each other, and more drawing as much blood out of those cuts as they can, snapping off a handful of moves with as much animus as they swung weapons at each other with, and leading to a real gorgeous Park tope.
After that, they return, and do it again, all while different sound and light cues go off to try to tell them to take it home and get out of there, as if any governing body in the world could get in the way of a show like this.
God bless them for it.
89. MASASHI TAKEDA VS. JUN KASAI, FREEDOMS/JUN KASAI PRODUCE TOKYO DEATH MATCH CARNIVAL 2018 ~ JUN KASAI 20TH ANNIVERSARY (8/28/2018)
The violence continues.
For the main event of a show commemorating his twentieth anniversary, at the end of twenty years that have seen him become one of the great deathmatch wrestlers of his generation and maybe of all time, Jun Kasai faces off against the undisputed best deathmatch wrestler in the entire world in his prime and in the middle of a career year. On top of that, the match happens in a type of match that is both unique and brutal and visually interesting in a way many other deathmatches simply are not.
As I’ve written about previously on this site, the thing with deathmatches and deathmatch fandom maybe even more than that is that when you watch a lot of them and when you watch them for years, you stop being as amazed by things. The result of that is that there’s often a disconnect a lot of the times between older and newer deathmatch fans that isn’t the fault of anybody, it’s just sort of how these things naturally shake out, but in this match, none of that happens, because it manages to shock and amaze even longer term fans of the genre.
Kasai and Takeda have the ideal sort of deathmatch here. A match filled with, almost exclusively, spots and moments that are stunning and cool. A gimmick and an environment unlike anything else in wrestling with the bare wooden boards, which frequently come loose, creating a real sense of genuine danger, on top of how thrilling it looks visually when covered with all the blood and debris. Above all, the sort of clear and obvious emotional stakes throughout, that work every other element of the match to create something as powerful as it is violent, with yet again an old veteran doing their best, but unable to quite get over the hump.
It’s a mother fucker of a thing.
None of this deathmatches for people who don’t like deathmatches shit. This is a deathmatch epic for people who love deathmatches, made more important by the history of the genre, and maybe just as mind blowing to newer fans as it is to those with a little more experience. It’s everything that it ought to be, and the sort of genre classic that ought to be preserved and studied.
88. DICK TOGO VS. KOTA IBUSHI, DDT JUDGMENT 2011 (3/27/2011)
Somewhere between vanity and pure epic.
I’ve spoken of miracles, but this seems like something beyond that.
This is a thirty six minute Kota Ibushi singles epic that I genuinely really really love.
So much Ibushi stuff doesn’t hit with me on the next level because he’s so obviously this soulless brain dead vagrant murdering himbo that anything that asks me to feel sorry for him or relate to him in any way is going to fall short, because we are not approaching Kota Ibushi from the same place. I can however respect him as a dead eyed killing machine, and anything that approaches him from that angle, I can get. Dick Togo (and seven years later, Tanahashi) completely understands me and not only turns Ibushi into such a thing, but into this brazen representation of the idea of time and youth itself. Dick Togo could do some crazy things once upon a time, but when Ibushi can do things like this, none of that matters. Ibushi’s wilder moments are as demoralizing as they are spectacular. It’s like watching a Warriors Third against a BIG3 team or a Mahomes 4th quarter comeback against the UConn Huskies. It’s beyond unfair, and frankly, pretty fucking rude.
For once, Dick Togo stands and takes it though. He adapts and prepares for Ibushi’s borderline sadism, doing things he wouldn’t expect, be it the moves of his then most famous foe, or inventing a Butterfly Destroyer. Somehow, Dick is able to come through. Against this maniac of all people, Dick Togo takes his stand, and it’s beautiful and inspiring, and more importantly, kicks so much ass.
The high point of a reign itself that was one of the decade’s high points.
Relative to people who like most of the same wrestling as I do, I’m on an island with this, but that’s fine. Give me a volleyball and some spare FedEx packages, and I will live with it.
87. T-HAWK VS. TAKEHIRO YAMAMURA, DG GATE OF PASSION 2017 DAY FOUR (4/7/2017)
A match so great that, the first time I saw it in April 2020, I skipped years ahead and wrote a review of it as soon as I finished watching it, as it left me too hyped up to do anything else but want to talk about it as much as possible, as publicly as possible, and to anyone who could ever possibly read about it.
We’re gonna do that for a third time now, because this match FUCKING ROCKS.
It’s a classical kind of puro middle of the card slugfest, the kind you don’t get nearly enough out of Dragon Gate, or many other promotions this decade past a certain point for that matter. A surly established wrestler meets a young supernova who will not be denied anything and who will absolutely show zero respect for his opponent. The result is that yet another vicious circle opens up, in which neither man learns anything because both men are so insistent on remaining as they are, and punishing the other man for occupying the same space as them. The same also holds true here about the obvious result not mattering, as more than most all decade, this is about the journey, and it is an absolute mother fucker of a route they take.
Yamamura and T-Hawk have what feels like one of the least cooperative matches in the history of the company (a low bar, but one easily cleared), fighting over every single possible thing. There’s the beautiful refusal to sell early on, making the later bits mean a little more, the nastiest punches thrown in the career of either man, and generally this tone of greater violence and contempt than you normally see out of either man or than you normally see out of any matches in this promotion, even the other ones more based around this kind of wrestling. Perhaps even more impressive is how much they communicate through simple striking through modulation of force on each blow and construction of the sequences, using super similar moments to communicate their anger early on, T-Hawk’s mid-match bullying, and then the idea that Yamamura really might have a chance at the thing in the last third. These are not complex ideas, but when wrestling so rarely delivers in the way that this match does anymore, a match like this really has a way of standing out in a way that it might not have in, say, 2005 or something.
It’s mean and efficient and cool as hell and, at least I imagine, a rarer kind of a Dragon Gate match with a more universal appeal. I cannot say enough nice things about it. It feels like a match from a decade or two earlier, as well as a devastating in retrospect look at a future we never totally got to see to fruition because Yamamura really only lasted a year. If only for a moment though, as the best match of that remarkable year, it’s a hell of a thing.
The best Dragon Gate singles match of the decade to not end with one man being shaved bald by the man he hates the most.
86. SHINGO TAKAGI VS. BXB HULK, DRAGON GATE KOBE WORLD 2010 (7/11/2010)
Speaking of, here’s that one, where someone picks a fight he can never win, and loses his wonderful wonderful hair because of it.
There have been a few crushing defeats on this list so far. Your Asuka/Bayley IIs of the world, El Generico losing his final match in PWG, Naito being taken down to Earth as insultingly as possible (crushing defeats can feel awesome if you root for the other side), but in most of them, there is some kind of a lesson or a moral victory.
None of that here.
Sometimes you just fail.
BxB Hulk wanted this so bad. The feud was over, Shingo Takagi had turned over a new leaf as a fan favorite, but BxB just had to have his match when tempers flared again. He put his hair on the line to get it. Want doesn’t get though, and over the surprisingly breezy thirty or so minutes that this fight lasts, he very painfully realizes that. BxB Hulk slowly accepting what everyone else in the world knew, that he had gotten himself in over his head and fighting his best anyways in the face is the work of his career, among the best babyface work of the entire decade, and Shingo’s almost-pity-but-mostly-indifference towards his plight in response creates one of the most dramatic contrasts in Dragon System history. It just so happens that for once in a BxB Hulk singles match, the wrestling is exactly good enough not to let everything else about the match. Everything planned out allows them to start from an easier point than usual in this company, and especially for these two, but Shingo and BxB also wrestle with a spirit and heart and a narrative simplicity that either covers up or circumvents all the problems that held them back virtually every other time this match was held.
Gigantic and more than a little dumb and so brazenly emotional, it’s a match that is so up front about everything that, combined with being a real DG sicko years before this when the whole thing began, I cannot help but be a little moved by it.
If there’s a must watch DG singles match this decade, this is at least on the shortlist.
85. SUPER SMASH BROS. VS. THE YOUNG BUCKS VS. FUTURE SHOCK, PWG THREEMENDOUS III (7/21/2012)
Welcome to Ladders.
All due respect to some other hits, like a few dozen other Young Bucks matches, the John Morrison vs. Sheamus miracle, Dolph Ziggler vs. Luke Harper, AJ Styles vs. Dean Ambrose, or even WeeLC, this is better than all of them but one.
It’s also the best pure spotfest of the year. Again, it doesn’t all have to be so serious. Let cool stuff happen and step out of the way. This match is a perfect example of how good it can be when you just let guys like this try stuff, go as insane as possible, and make sure there’s nothing for them to trip over. The match is not especially complex, but it is an incredible stunt show. It’s remarkably well put together, and more surprisingly, is executed with a real charm and heart to it. Most importantly, as with all the great non 1v1 ladder matches, every team in the match is really different, so the match — at least as much as one of these can — avoids becoming too samey. They all wrestle with just enough slight differences to matter, they represent different styles and/or different tactics, so the match becomes a fight about how to win a ladder match just as match as them trying to win said ladder match.
Like so much of the best wrestling, the match rewards straight forward honest work when applied by the Smash Brothers, and like so much of the best Young Bucks work, it also feels at times as if a spirit of wrestling itself reaches down in one of these big PWG matches to declare that this sort of behavior simply cannot be rewarded.
Dumb and wonderful.
84. CHRIS HERO VS. EDDIE KINGSTON, AIW CHARGE IT TO THE UNDERHILLS (12/26/2014)
The best stories grow with you, and this is one of the best that wrestling has ever told.
Hero and Kingston meet one last time, their only meeting all decade, to not only have a great match as an epilogue to one of the best feuds of all time, but also to have a familiar match up that doesn’t rely on nostalgia for even a second.
It’s the usual masterful performance from two all-timers. Hero is petty and cruel against Kingston, even when not overtly antagonistic. Working from above brings out elements of the bully Hero was already turning into, even without trying. Kingston is the best seller in the world and an all-time babyface, even when positioned in AIW as something of a heel. Against each other, they have a way of reverting back into who they used to be, and this time, it is absolutely to their benefit.
They hit as hard as always on the surface, but there’s a desperation to this that wasn’t quite so present in the past, all culminating in Eddie taking the sort of route he wouldn’t have taken against Hero in the past. All the credit in the world to King and Hero both for recognizing that you can’t ever go home, and instead creating something more in line with where they both were now, and where they would both be going. With years having passed since they last met, it’s a more mature sort of a match too. It’s not about wanting to hurt the other or settle any score, there’s almost this resigned sort of feeling early on. The 2007 work is classic pro wrestling stuff, but this feels more in line with the kinds of emotions a normal person can understand, a petty want to simply do a little better than the person you hate most in the world.
If they have to do it again, all either man wants is just not to lose, a far more relatable motivation than pure snarling rage, and one that takes the match to a new place for them by the end, a grimier, filthier, and less honorable place than ever before. The sort of match where nobody ever gets away clean. If time heals all wounds, it’s a match built around scar tissue.
The perfect epilogue to independent wrestling’s greatest feud.
83. ASUKA VS. BAYLEY, WWE NXT TAKEOVER BROOKLYN II (8/20/2016)
The match itself is spectacular.
To what extent I’ve written elsewhere on this site about how AJ Styles was able to blend that old Sting/90s WCW style main event ethos with the WWE style, it’s Bayley who does so much with simply that old style of movement and construction. This isn’t a long match, but it’s worked with the energy and immediacy of one of those matches. Everything that happens in this match feels important and consequential, choices made in response to all that happened in their first match, increased aggression from Bayley and Asuka fighting dirtier and meaner, albeit in small ways, than she did the first time around. It’s a match that is stunningly efficient and secretly among the very best womens matches in WWE history, and of the last decade period. Although, to be honest, that is not simply a result of the pure magnificent mechanics and construction of the thing, but the ends that they utilize those towards.
As a story, it is one of the more memorable and heartbreaking ones told in wrestling throughout the entire decade. 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.
Further than just that though, it’s a match with something to say, and that’s 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.
In a year that, personally, was marked by an era being concretely over and without an obvious direction for the first time ever, I don’t think I felt any other match this year in the way that I felt this. That’s never the entire battle, but when you get it it as right as this match did, sometimes that matters more than anything else.
82. BROCK LESNAR VS. DANIEL BRYAN, WWE SURVIVOR SERIES (11/18/2018)
Alright asshole, I hear you. Listen. Obviously, it is not the ideal version of this match, the one everyone first saw back when it broke out in bright lights following Bryan’s vacating of the WWE World Title in 2014, and a match between the best bully heel of the century and maybe the best underdog babyface of the century became not only the most obvious great match in wrestling, but also one with more narrative meat on the bones than anything else, only for it to never happen, for a million different reasons, each and every one of them bad.
You can do one of two things with that, I suppose. (a) You can choose to focus on everything something isn’t and you can be mad forever about the thing that you never got, I guess, or (b) You can look at what something actually is, and if what’s there is great also, you can appreciate it for those qualities.
I am always going to choose the second option.
Brock Lesnar and Bryan Danielson wrestle each other, and it is outstanding.
As a match, it is so interesting in a narrative sense that, I think, it would be easy to forget the other stuff, and that isn’t fair. Bryan and Lesnar, two of the best wrestlers of all time, make their only meeting ever count. On a performance level in terms of character details and how they carry themselves from start to finish, Bryan walks a line perfectly in between sympathetic underdog and conniving shitheel, and Lesnar matches him in the same regard in between bully and aggrieved asskicker. Mechanically, Bryan’s bumping for all the suplexes is unbelievable, and Lesnar once again excels when a smaller U.S. indie legend asks him to sell a leg. They are each incredibly good at every aspect of the match, and there are moments here where I think I could be watching the two best active professional wrestlers in the world.
The match manages to thread one of the most impressive needles ever, managing to be both a Brock Lesnar style spectacle, but also a Bryan Danielson style shell game, eating shit until he reveals a hidden plan about midway through, going after the leg. The combination results in another stellar Lesnar selling performance against a smaller former independent wrestling hero, in yet another success for one of the best match formats of the entire decade. The magic of the match, and wrestling at large, lies in that moment when everyone forgets what they know about the WWE and Brock Lesnar and the politics of pro wrestling and lives inside that well, maybe that the match forces you to believe in.
Still, they are who they are.
Bryan fucks up in the way he is always capable of fucking up though as an antagonist of a match, as in the moments after accomplishing something nearly miraculous, he gets exactly full of himself enough to allow an opening, resulting in him eating shit again now that the big killer has had the fear of God put into him.
It’s not perfect and it probably only hits like 60-75% of this match’s ceiling, but given that the ceiling on that vision is “potentially the greatest wrestling match to ever happen”, I’m pretty content to settle on a really really great match. A rare super fight that lives up to the implicit billing, and above all, it is just so cool and good to see what even some version of Brock Lesnar vs. Bryan Danielson looks like, with even the WWE not quite inept enough to run a version of that match that isn’t one of the best of the decade.
81. KAZUCHIKA OKADA VS. TETSUYA NAITO, NJPW 40TH ANNIVERSARY (3/4/2012)
2012 again presents the best ever version of Kazuchika Okada, on display best with his performance here.
In his second ever title match, I’m not sure this isn’t a top five or ten Okada career performance period. Detached and mean spirited to hobbling and desperate. It’s not a star making performance, but it’s maybe something more important: a sign that New Beginning wasn’t a fluke and wasn’t all Tanahashi. For his part, Naito is incredible too, maybe matching an Okada career-level performance with one of his own, in a match that not only feels enormous, but is constructed with a stunning degree of deserved confidence, and that unlike all future efforts, never once seems to look back or struggle to fill space.
The escalation and construction is among the best in an IWGP Heavyweight Title match all decade. The knee work is great and is matched by some of the best Okada selling ever. There’s a level of desperation from Naito too that’s so captivating. A natural striver trying to get through a door that he thinks is open at a much wider angle than it actually is, before once again blowing it at the last minute by being too sure of himself. He blows it in the same way he blew it against Tanahashi five months prior, by being a half scale imitation of something Okada’s already gotten past.
I’m no Okada fan, but few things in wrestling in 2011 (and 2012, 2013, and 2014) were as satisfying as bright eyed young would-be babyface heir Tetsuya Naito gleefully flying far too close to the sun, lighting his wings on fire, and being sent careening downward into the sea.
Little Kazu isn’t quite Tanahashi, and this isn’t quite the joyous occasion that it was in 2011 when he tried to be Robert Ford but tripped over a floorboard, missed Jesse James, and shot himself in the dick, but it captures something close enough to that same feeling in an even better match.
The only problem with this is that this is their first meeting of what feels like a thousand and a half, and they’ve yet to top it.
80. KAZUCHIKA OKADA VS. HIROSHI TANAHASHI, NJPW G1 CLIMAX 28 DAY SEVENTEEN (8/10/2018)
The first of a few.
What I like so much about this match, beyond the incredible Tanahashi knee selling or another great kind of casual Okada performance as the slight antagonist and the usual great layout and escalation, is that this is a match with something to say.
Rather than the widely expected Okada to win to back to his eventual recovery of the title in the easiest way possible, or even the kind of draw where now the clock runs out on Okada once he’s finally the one fighting against it, they opt for something that is not only less expected and less common, but like so much of the best Tanahashi work, winds up standing out as some kind of larger commentary. The best matches are about something larger, whether that’s more than wrestling or simply an ideological statement about professional wrestling, and this is a match with something to say.
Hiroshi Tanahashi starts this match simply wanting to survive and advance, but at some point — to me, a moment where Okada first collapses during a strike exchange, and Tanahashi’s eyes light up — Tanahashi shifts away from that, and begins explicitly trying to win. Chalk it up to any number of things that all feel true. The why doesn’t matter all that much compared to the action itself, the heroism of choosing to go for it rather than playing it safe when the risk is that much greater. Babyfaces do babyface shit, and this is some of the best babyface storytelling and wrestling in recent memory.
Very often in this series, it has felt like one man deserved to win or lose based on strategy, but in this match, strategy feels as if it has absolutely nothing to do with what happened at the end of this match.
Sometimes, in sports, it feels like some higher universal power has intervened, and made a judgment.
Be it on some specific player, a style of play operated by a team, other sorts of behavior, it sometimes feels like some force far greater, more powerful, and less comprehensible than any of us could imagine has made a decision and [player/team x] is simply not going to succeed on the highest level. They may get cut off in the title game or before then, but it feels fated that they are never going to succeed. Things fall apart so often for them in one way or another — be it injuries to themselves or teammates, a team mentally breaking down around them, bad coaching, or my favorite, their team missing twenty-seven straight three point shots in a closeout Game Seven — that it cannot help but feel like a moral judgment against them from on high.
The opposite feels true here.
What we have is not a match where Kazuchika Okada is going to lose because of some universal judgment, but a match in which Hiroshi Tanahashi feels explicitly at moments — particularly the last third of the match — as if he is being rewarded for approaching this the right way, trying to win outright rather than game the system. The result is that, rather than their previous tournament draws where it felt like a failure for one man or the other, a draw at the end of this manages to feel like a genuine victory for Tanahashi and a defeat for Okada, whether you want to call it moral or ideological or whatever else. The draw feels like a genuine achievement, a triumph to cap off a shockingly successful G1 season, and improbably send Our Hero back to the finals after looking like it was all over only three months earlier.
Watching this match is not only this moral lesson wrapped inside and already great match, but the incredibly rewarding process of watching, in real time, one of the all-time greats come alive with the power of self-belief again, and the theme of the year 2018 beginning to really take shape.
Somehow, somewhere, an arrow begins to slow down.
79. SHUJI ISHIKAWA VS. HARASHIMA, DDT OSAKA OCTOPUS 2016 (12/4/2016)
Not DDT’s greatest match, but in all in all considering action and narrative and all the various nuts and bolts of the matter, all the various things that create great pro wrestling, one of its greatest displays of power.
After spending a year having The Big Dog run through everyone on the roster, from would-be next great hopes to the actual next great hope to DDT’s greatest monsters and most beloved cult figures, it all falls to the Ace not only to try and regain the title that Ishikawa’s DAMNATION stable previously stole from him in April, but to beat someone he’s always struggled against now with the highest possible stakes.
Yet again, as with the majority of the truly great DDT matches, it is an ultra potent mix of well thought out story and remarkable execution. Shuji Ishikawa is wrestling’s best bully in a post independent Roderick Strong world, HARASHIMA is one of the more likeable and intelligent wrestlers of an entire generation. While every other major Shuji Ishikawa match in DDT in 2016 has been built around the idea that this time, someone might have finally found the secret, the beauty of this one is that the tease now is that there is no secret.
Everything HARASHIMA tries fails, and the transition now is a perfect 180 from every other match like it, in that bit by bit, he simply starts to succeed. HARASHIMA never figured out Shuji Ishikawa. What he did was wait and wait and get his ass kicked and wait some more, until he found the openings to throw the biggest shots of his life, all in a row, and that was it. There’s no magic fix. Instead, it takes the stuff that the real iconic heroes and babyfaces are made of. It’s just about guts and heart and staying in the fight.
2016 is a year full of iconic sports moments, virtually across the field, many of them upsets. The easy comparison for an underdog victory over an unstoppable behemoth is right there for the taking, but this is not a match with basketball rhythms and I am not going to be that rude to either HARASHIMA or one of the most fun teams to watch of all time with that comparison. Instead, later in the year, there is something that feels much closer to this. Our hero(es), clad in blue and white, overcome the oppressive weight of history, both recent and far-reaching, and find a way to do it almost impossibly late in the game. At 8-7 in the bottom of the 10th, HARASHIMA finds the key, and finally stops him. “Go Ace” doesn’t feel quite strong enough.
As sure as God made green apples, HARASHIMA would one day again be the KO-D Openweight Champion.
At the end of a year of gains surrendered and with an overwhelming sense of loss, DDT ends it with not only one of the year’s greatest feeling moments, but of those moments, the one with the most care and craft put into it. The result is the elevation of HARASHIMA vs. Shuji Ishikawa from a reliably great match into something beyond pure mechanics, a titanic struggle and a monument to the oldest ways of them all.
78. CHRIS HERO VS. MARK ANDREWS, PROGRESS SUPER STRONG STYLE 16 2016 NIGHT ONE (5/29/2016)
Despite my frustrations with the Hero Formula on occasion, especially this year, this is what it looks like when executed perfectly.
The veteran Hero run in the mid 2010s is built on a foundation of no longer doing things he doesn’t have to do, and this match expresses that SO WELL, total confidence that he can get away here with doing even less, only finding that he has to do more and more and more and more. A lesser wrestler would immediately start shit, and that would be fine enough, but Hero setting the baseline at an eyeroll instead and working his way up to that makes such a difference.
It helps, of course, that Mark Andrews is one of the best underdogs in wrestling in the mid 2010s. His offense is crisp and exciting, he’s likeable in a way that other British fliers and wrestlers generally aren’t. A tiny little man capable of being hurled around in terrifying new ways, sent flying by strikes, things of that nature. Andrews genuinely seems to get completely obliterated by things like the Rolling Elbow or a Cyclone Kill, even taking a 450 degree rotation off the classic release suplex spot. His shotgun bump off of a Rolling Elbow in the back half, bowled over, instead of sent down like a falling tree or something, makes such a difference here.
Any Chris Hero match like this in 2015-16 has a tightrope to walk due to the way many of these could blend together for the sickos who watched a lot of them, but this one walks that tightrope better than almost any other Hero match in the run. It succeeds just as much through what it does do than what it doesn’t, and specifically how those big pieces of offense are spaced out and set up. As a result of the size difference and economical pacing creating a feeling of both horror and hopelessness, the kick out spots work better than they have in a major Hero match in a really really long time. The piledriver and Rolling Elbow kickouts not only feel like significant accomplishments for Andrews, serving their purpose for once, but they are genuinely surprising in a way nearfalls in these matches virtually never are.
The finish of the thing takes it to its logical extreme, Hero going from half-hearted action to the start, to delivering the SINGLE grossest Tombstone Piledriver he’s ever handed out for the win. Taken from ambivalent to the most violent that he’s ever been, from doing as little as possible on offense to doing as much as possible, just about. It’s about the journey, and very few other matches like this illustrate as far nor as fascinating of a journey as this one did.
Near the peak of one of the decade’s greatest formulas.
credit to thewrestlinginsomniac.com
77. EDDIE KINGSTON VS. SARA DEL REY, CHIKARA THE GREAT ESCAPE (7/28/2012)
Functionally, this is Sara Del Rey’s unofficial retirement match. She has a mixed tag in ROH two weeks later teaming with Eddie Edwards against Mike Bennett and Maria, sadly, but there’s no reason to respect the canon of a company that used her better as a manager than they ever did as a wrestler. This is it.
And honestly, it’s one of the best final matches anyone could ever hope for.
Intergender wrestling is largely for perverts and seemingly booked to get Youtube hits in foreign countries in recent years, but this was so much realer and better than virtually everything that came after it. Not everyone should do it and people who really love intergender wrestling are perhaps the truest and most honest perverts in our midst, but I’m a firm believer that the difference between hating intergender wrestling or shrugging at it and going “fine, go for it” is watching a great Sara Del Rey (or Candice LeRae in PWG) match. Fittingly for a career marked by the seemingly inevitable crawl towards these sorts of opportunities and matches given a lack of competition on her level amongst her own gender, Sara Del Rey goes out with the best intergender singles match I’ve ever seen. Hard hitting, violent, intelligent, emotional. Eddie Kingston limb selling. The transition from joking to taking Del Rey as seriously as anyone else. Everything this sort of thing can be at its best and most serious.
This is as great as this could ever be, from maybe the most ideal pairing and most ideal place that could ever attempt it.
Like Moses, Sara Del Rey gets to the promised land, but doesn’t quite get to walk through. An incredible curtain call that both provides a map for people who want to follow her and also a match that completely sums up a career.
76. SHUJI ISHIKAWA VS. MASASHI TAKEDA, BJW (6/30/2013)
The best Japanese deathmatch of the decade, and second greatest overall period, topped by one with even more going for it than this could ever have.
Not so much by definition but more so through many of the people who partake in it, deathmatch wrestling is going to have some overlap with dumb meathead wrestling. They scratch different itches, fans of the latter may deny all association with the former, but behind each, there’s a joy taken in extreme punishment, horrific violence, and the inspirational journey to see just how much the human body can take.
Rarely does it feel like they cross over as perfectly as they did here.
A stark and startling display of violence, and if you need more than that, it’s got more than that. Invader with the title, big man vs. smaller man, all of it. Really though, it’s a showcase for some of the most audacious spots in Big Japan history, all constructed and built in the most effective possible way. Beyond everything they get right on a mechanical and intellectual level when assembling the match, it’s a beneficiary of some good old fashioned Korakuen Magic, and it elevates the proceedings that much further. It’s not deep. I don’t have a few hundred words to write about payoffs or what it means for the future or what it meant to me either in the moment or what it meant to me years later. It’s just a match that grabbed me by the throat and throttled the shit out of me without ever loosening its grip.
Sometimes matches are just fucking great.
75. THE YOUNG BUCKS VS. CANDICE LERAE, PWG ELEVEN (7/26/2014)
I get it.
It doesn’t stand up quite as the definitional moment that it did at the time, given what we know now. However, given how the team always felt a little weird and had that element of heat leeching to it, my feelings on it haven’t done the complete about face in the way that other things like this have. Every one of these Candice tag matches was already tinged with a sense of “ugh, why’s he here?” so it’s not as if I’m robbed of something, as if some hero fell from grace. I already only ever enjoyed them for her half of the equation as it was.
It’s still an unbelievable match, and the incredible work of the other three shouldn’t be erased, especially given how little the other party had to do with any of this. (In fact, with almost anyone else, it’s an even better match.)
For as good as the Bucks were when on their best behavior against the Time Splitters or the Hardy Boyz, this is them in their best element. A twenty minute PWG gimmick match where they both totally understand how and why the act works and have every shortcut in the book. It’s also the bladejob of the year and really maybe the entire decade. LeRae herself is incredible, delivering one of the best babyface performances of the year. Certainly, I would say, one of the best ones that doesn’t belong to one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. It’s an immaculate performance, carrying the weight of an entire team herself, more in retrospect than even at the time, before having one of the most joyful and uplifting babyface payoff victories of the decade, warts and all.
All the same, it’s one of the only matches on these lists that I’d never in a million years tell you that you absolutely have to see. It just happens to also be one of the best matches of the decade, and at least in terms of Candice finally rising up and getting her moment, also one of the best feeling, so long as you can maintain a kind of tunnel vision. That’s the gross part.
74. TWIN TOWERS VS. STRONG BJ, BJW (1/2/2017)
My main thought here is that it is incredibly rude of this match not to be exactly great enough to land in the 69th spot for a very easy bit.
The other thoughts are all about how much this rules.
Generally, one never ought to ascribe intent. I can’t say for sure if these teams knew that — despite combinations in singles matches or three of the four colliding in tag matches forever, unable to ever totally extract themselves from each other’s lives in what I find to be a beautiful sort of a thing — this would be the last time that they ever met in this specific combination. It’s hard to know how far in advance Shuji Ishikawa’s All Japan run that began in the spring was planned in advance, but that wound up taking him away from Big Japan permanently, and so this was the end of the series.
Either to their credit or to the credit of some divine universal force, this is wrestled like the finale that it is.
As always with these four, and with this combination specifically, it is a lizard-brained thrill unlike few other combinations in recent wrestling history, boasting several of the grosses lariats, knees, headbutts, and especially elbows in recent memory, but it also offers up so much more than that. The real quality from this match and from matches like this, once again, comes just as much from those horrific shots as it does from everything in between and all around them. For the millionth time, it is often imitated and rarely duplicated to the same success, and that people trying to do this often miss the reasons why this works so well. Nobody in this match and no section of this match wastes any time.
The match is a hair over twenty one minutes and feels as purposeful as their half hour classic did, both delivering the expected hits along with a new approach, showing Sekimoto as more beaten down and human than ever before, leading to the most exhilarating and shout inducing finishing stretch out of any of these matches, sharing more in common with the best match in this style all decade than any previous version of this match, with Sekimoto coming full circle, being made human and cast as the Yoshihito Sasaki in this match, bloody and frantic, hurling his body at the bigger, stronger, and more unbeatable force until something breaks, resulting in a victory for Our Heroes that feels a million times better than any other Sekimoto victory had ever felt before or would ever feel again.
If not the absolute best, both a fitting end to the series by hitting on every element that made this one of the decade’s most satisfying and spiritually fulfilling match ups, and a fascinating new approach that hit in ways I never would have expected it to. Not quite the greatest thing they’ve ever done, but up there next to it as an example of everything this style was and could be at its peak. Like any great series, it’s impossible for them to top the inconclusive and defining outing in the middle of the story, but it’s a better finale than most stories that number this many or of this magnitude tend to receive, and an all-decade level God Damner on top of that.
73. AJ STYLES VS. SAMOA JOE, WWE SUMMERSLAM (8/19/2018)
The first part of this is how cool it is to see Joe and AJ get to have a match like this, for this title, and on this stage. It’s a match that gets time to stretch out and be something, a match that is genuinely over, and a match that sees a large arena briefly chant “TNA” at the two of them.
Joe and AJ, somehow, find the best of both worlds, but find it in their own unique way, eschewing a prestige wrestling under the WWE umbrella epic like a Bryan or Punk or whomever might show you, but instead something that feels more spiritually aligned with where they used to work. It’s a match about feelings, and they’re all bad. This is a match wrestled with emphasis and a whole lot of tension, but one also one that is so god damned mean.
Nearly every single inch of this match feels insulting, and it comes from both men. Aside from the opening moments of AJ trying to take it to the mat (which baby brain freaks will say is Bad, because every grudge match must begin in fisticuffs, despite Styles clearly playing it as him knowing Joe is up to some bullshit, and thus the opening moments being Styles trying his best not to fall for it), everything that happens feels like it happens with an “OH YEAH, MOTHERFUCKER?” in parenthesis after it. The way the big offense is metered out, small things like AJ trying to do a leg work match initially only for Joe to check the leg kicks like nobody ever has and send AJ FLYING on the back of his head with one of his own, the steady escalation not only of the pace but of the physicality of the moves, all of it. It feels hard fought and genuine, but there is also some classic independent charm hidden somewhere in there that really speaks to me, en route to a perfect bullshit finish where Joe calls out the Styles family in the front row and AJ erupts in response, beating his ass until a DQ gets called.
It is the best non-finish or bullshit finish the WWE has seen since Eddie Guerrero vs. JBL some fourteen years and change prior.
The level of blood is nowhere near the same, but the feeling is close enough to count. This absolute monster (in a wholly different way) stepping over the line and getting his ass beaten for it while Our Hero and Our Champion eventually celebrates with his family. The crown jewel on the entire thing is AJ stopping when his wife asks him to, walking over to console his family as his daughter says, “daddy, you’re bleeding” before he says it’s fine and leaving with them through the crowd. Joe is able to retreat with the victory on paper and guaranteeing a probable title rematch against an even angrier AJ Styles, but it’s AJ proving it was all bullshit and still driving the monster away at the end of the day, turning a loss into what feels like a major victory.
Pro wrestling ass pro wrestling.
It’s still not Turning Point 2005, but for a pairing that hasn’t even come close in a really really really long time, it’s a hell of a thing. We’re in the top five, you already know this is one of the best matches of the decade, but it’s also one of the most heartwarming, affecting, and impressive.
72. KENTA KOBASHI/JUN AKIYAMA/KENSUKE SASAKI/KEIJI MUTOH VS. KENTA/GO SHIOZAKI/YOSHINOBU KANEMARU/MAYBACH TANIGUCHI, NOAH FINAL BURNING IN BUDOKAN (5/11/2013)
Not their best of the decade, but certainly Pro Wrestling NOAH’s series finale.
Everything about NOAH is on display here, as the final remaining one of its main characters (Misawa, Kobashi, Akiyama) says goodbye. It’s too long, the young are eaten alive by a team of old men where the only one still active and contributing to the genre in any meaningful way is the one who gets to do the least, and there’s way too much of one or two guys who don’t belong there. Maybach sucks, he doesn’t belong here. Mutoh’s a fossil. The old guys take too long to do it. KENTA and Go never seem to get treated quite as well as they should, given how much of this is put on their shoulders, tasked with supporting their father’s weight across the finish line.
And yet…it doesn’t matter?
It should. It usually does to me, and I especially think it would when in celebration of a guy in Kobashi who I’ve never been head over heels for like a lot of other people (this is a Kawada blog, sorry). It just doesn’t.
The length feels like product of nobody actually wanting the match to end rather than any pretense that it took this long, one of the all time great all star tag riff sessions. The bad wrestlers in the ring mostly stay out of the way. As for the classic Pro Wrestling Noah “FUCK THEM KIDS” mission statement, if there was ever a time to be like that, it’s in a match like this. Go and KENTA are good enough that they don’t come out of this losing anything. Kanemaru is here as your loss post, and does a fantastic job of being a real piece of shit throughout the match’s prodigious runtime to get to a place where it’s the most rewarding outcome. So it’s a match with all of these flaws and little things that usually bother me, and it just doesn’t. I’m not weepy eyed watching this, I’m not even particularly sentimental, it just rules. So much of that is because nobody ever treats this like it’s some sad thing. Saying goodbye sucks, but for once, it feels like a celebration of a career instead of a meaningful attempt to put a proper end to the thing. There’s not a hint of tragedy here.
It’s not the best retirement match of all time, not even the best one on this list, but it’s the most joyful one that I’ve ever seen.
A forty minute long victory lap.
71. KATSUYORI SHIBATA VS. TOMOAKI HONMA, NJPW G1 CLIMAX 24 DAY EIGHT (8/3/2014)
One of the greatest sprints of all time and an absolute stylistic classic.
They run at each other and hurl appendages with an open disdain for safety and caution. While they can’t come close to the emotional release of the Shibata/Ishii match due to booking, what they can do is have a match that’s probably even more reckless and wild. Honma goes right for it, and is too dumb to ever change tact. Shibata is better and faster and tougher, but it never once matters. Honma is exactly lucky enough to avoid Shibata here and there, talented enough to make something of it, but never quite lucky and talented enough at the same time, so it only gets some so far. Mostly, they hit each other really hard in the face and head and do it with a ton of passion and energy, all matched by an obscenely hot Osaka crowd.
A horrific spectacle of violence given what eventually happens to each man in the few years following a match like this and a series of matches like this. It’s stylistic classic on par with the first Shibata/Ishii match or the highlights of the 2012 Yoshihito Sasaki run, both seen even later on down this list.
Given everything that happens, it’s some real blood curdling shit. But there’s a reason all the best movies are horror movies.
70. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. KAZUCHIKA OKADA, NJPW THE NEW BEGINNING 2012 (2/12/2012)
Sometimes, a match can be so important that it becomes easy to forget how great this is. While I don’t think this is quite as overlooked as the 2018 matches between these two, I think that’s the case here.
Everything in this match that could go right, on every level, seems to not only go right, but goes impossibly correct.
Hiroshi Tanahashi puts forth a career performance in the most necessary and important loss of his career. Kazuchika Okada shows up, following what should have been a dooming-him-to-the-midcard level embarrassment at the Dome, now fully formed. The Marlo Stanfield of pro wrestling (at least for this initial run as a bad guy), casually cruel and naturally gifted in all aspects of the game. It’s the nightmare scenario. Instead of coming back from a two year long rumspringa having learned something about the world and having become his own man, Okada instead forgot every good thing he was taught and returned home an ardent capitalist and a real piece of shit. Instead of being radicalized on the campus of Universal Studios in Orlando, Little Kazu came back from college and he wants to kill his dad.
This match also does one of my favorite things in wrestling, which is when a match earns an improbable ending over the course of the match. The sort of thing where you read a result somewhere, go “nah, fuck off, no way” like it blows the illusion for you, only to then watch it and be forced to just nod in acknowledgement. Tanahashi is maybe the all time best at doing this, because it happens almost every time he elevates someone. Being that this is his finest elevation work ever, this is maybe the best ever version of that trope. We always talk about strategy when it pertains to why someone won a match, but the far more interesting thing to me (as discussed in Tanahashi/Naito from October 2011) is when a strategy or an approach to a match directly causes someone to lose. It’s just about the only interesting thing about the Brock Lesnar vs. The Undertaker match at WrestleMania XXX, it’s the sort of thing that makes that still a really interesting match to me, and it’s what always keeps this match higher for me than it does for most.
It’s the sort of match that earns the surprising outcome from start to finish. It’s such an impressive thing to be won over like that, not just by this new character being suddenly elevated past almost everyone on the roster, but by the match itself that does it. Most impressive is the way that they go about it. It’s not simply that Okada is impressive and nails all the character beats, but it’s that Tanahashi wrestles a match that he deserves to lose. He treats Okada like a mid level challenge and pays for it. Okada treats it like the most important match of his life, so it becomes that. In real time, Kazuchika Okada invents himself in counter to everything Tanahashi tries to do.
An incredibly bold decision that probably should have fallen as short as every attempt to mimic it in the years since. A credit to both Okada’s performance as a young heel and to Tanahashi’s both as someone to be toppled, and his genius in the way this was approached from a character perspective. It’s not quite Jumbo on June 8th, 1990 (although Okada is better here than Misawa then, or than Misawa was in any match until like 1993-4), but it’s closer than most other wrestlers have ever come.
I think higher of this first one than most. I know I’m on a little bit of an island in saying this is a top five Tanahashi/Okada match, but it’s real hard to look at what they had in front of them, what they accomplished, and not be SO impressed.
69. THE KINGS OF WRESTLING VS. THE BRISCOES, ROH DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR VIII (6/19/2010)
The Briscoes and King of Wrestling have a match so great that, at a glance given the values on display, you might actually think Cornette era ROH was good.
It’s a match sparse with gimmicks and weapons and nearfalls but unlike so many gimmick matches in ROH in the years to follow, never in a way that feels stifling or limiting or in any way like the wrestler are holding back and/or being influenced to hold back. It’s a physical match with a feeling of real intensity to it that always feels like a competition, if not an outright fight, and the bullshit at the end is just limited enough to not only work, but stand out. Most appealingly of all, it’s a total bloodbath in a way and to an extent that I’m not sure ROH would hit again for another twelve years, until the last Briscoes match. At the same time, very little happens here that does not feel like it exists in the correct place. Everything is separated out for as much impact as possible, from the basic tag structure of the thing (an arguable weakness given the stipulation and the greatness of ROH tag brawl over the last six years or so, but something that still works) to where the big prop spots get used to even things like how Hero and both Briscoes are all busted open at different moment, making each gusher not only a bigger part of the match, but they stand out as unique moments and feel cooler when they don’t come all at once.
Start to finish, his is a balancing act the likes of which you just don’t see all that much anymore, or really when considering success and quality, that you never saw all that much in the first place. It has basically everything I want out of wrestling. A feeling of real competition, intensity, violence, cool moves, hard shots, big gimmick spots but spaced enough to all feel special, tons and tons and tons of blood lost, escalation, remarkable pacing, in the middle of an already great narrative, and nearly airtight on top of everything. Not perfect, maybe a little too efficient, I wish this was a main event match rather than clearly one designed for an earlier spot on the show, but given all that it gets right, I find it a little too hard to be all that upset.
Equal parts a mirage and the last gasps of something beautiful.
68. MATT TREMONT VS. NICK GAGE, GCW NICK GAGE INVITATIONAL 2 (9/16/2017)
Independent of anything that happens in the match, the stipulation of a cinder block canvas alone adds so much to the proceedings. It’s never been done in the United States before, supposedly, and it just looks SO unbelievably cool. Barbed wire instead of ropes, Caribbean spider webs, different cages and scaffolds, there are so many ways that advance death match set ups can make a match feel bigger before anything even happens, and while it’s hard to say any one of those is the absolute best (for overall timelessness and reliability, I have to side with NRBW), the cinder block canvas ticks every box.
It’s both interesting to look at, and impossible to deny mentally, even beyond going through glass or being brained with something, a totally different sort of feeling going into a match.
Yet again, it just so happens that the match is out of this world great too.
Gage and Tremont benefit so much not just from the more measured approach that this match demands, building and treating basic moves on the cinder blocks like major offense, but also simply from the existence of the stipulation itself. In the same way that there was just something different about looking at the cinder block canvas before the match, there is just something different about seeing people slammed and thrown onto god damned cinder blocks. Deathmatch wrestling has always benefited from feeling more genuine than other wrestling, in the sense that you know some of this simply is a real reaction to horrible pain, and this match is one of the most extreme versions of that I’ve ever experienced, becoming this unforgettable experiences in and of itself.
Beyond the violence, it is also assembled in such a beautiful way.
It’s not to say this match is exactly sparse with the violence but there are really only three (3) major major spots, and there isn’t a lot of filler here. It’s not a match that I would call especially thoughtful, but it is measured, even if that comes out of necessity more than artistic choice, with the human body really not being able to take like twenty plus bumps on the cinder blocks. It is an artistic choice though to not linger on too long with anything else though, and it’s one that gets the most out of everything this match has to offer. Over the course of this match, there are three distinct sections, between the early light tube war en lieu of going to the blocks, moves on the blocks themselves, and then the last third when the toll begins to show. Each of these feels distinct and leads perfectly to the next section, while increasing not only the level of violence and brutality, but the desperation and sense of feeling to their movements as well.
Such familiar and still thrilling light tube bits go into the less familiar cinder block works, and there’s something delightful about that. Something we know to warm us up for something we don’t. A comforting hand grabbing us firmly but reassuringly, and walking us into the unknown, with a more thoughtful and even more violent take on their first match waiting on the other side of that.
The best deathmatch of the 2010s.
67. ATLANTIS VS. LA SOMBRA, CMLL 82 ANIVERSARIO (9/19/2015)
This one snuck up on me.
Initially on the list because I liked it so much, it survived cut after cut, because unlike maybe some other matches in the same year (or in general) ranked above it on that year’s piece or on some spreadsheet somewhere, I simply could not imagine making this list and excluding it. Few matches all decade got me like this did, even fewer stuck around with me like this did, and maybe no other match all decade stood as greater proof that those numbers are more guidelines than any final judgment, the latter of which comes from the gut and the heart far more than the brain, who often struggles to catch up before eventually relenting, as was the case here.
Right before leaving, La Sombra finally gets a chance at something more than the 400th Volador Jr. singles match. The result is a must-see anniversary show spectacle, and one of the great apuestas matches of the decade.
Atlantis follows up the old man classic a year prior by running that same success back in a perfect sequel against La Sombra. The story is different, as he’s now fighting a young killer instead of a longer term rival, but the result is the same and the match plays perfectly to that story. Atlantis is overwhelmed by youth, power, and speed, but has the heart that Sombra just doesn’t and it slowly and slowly slips further away. Giving Atlantis the first fall by disqualification was an especially masterful approach, creating the feeling that he might not be able to beat La Sombra at all, putting just a little doubt into what I imagine felt fairly open and shut at the time, given all the rumors.
Few other matches all decade have captured the feeling of a great sports almost upset in the way that this does. The sort of result that doesn’t feel like a true UPSET after the fact, but that probably shouldn’t have gone the way it did on paper. A seemingly sure thing that slips away minute by minute. A “wait, maybe” appearing in the mist that slowly turns into a more hopeful confidence as more and more goes right in the final period. La Sombra drops zero out of twenty seven in a row, loosens up a grip on a twenty-five point lead leaving halftime, and while what should be collapses into what is, Atlantis finds a way to persevere.
Just barely able to get La Sombra into La Atlantida finally, Atlantis performs a public service by forcing La Sombra to show everybody his face.
On top of being an expertly assembled apuestas with a universal kind of a story, it’s really just a beautiful spectacle, carried forward and up several hundred feet into the air by that special sort of feeling.
66. CHRIS HERO VS. TIMOTHY THATCHER, WWN MERCURY RISING (3/28/2015)
The changing of the guard, executed as well as it’s ever been.
Like all the best EVOLVE work, it’s a victory both of set up and execution.
The set up and execution could barely be more perfect, but that’s the part you ought to have known already. Every Hero/Thatcher match is great, two others made the initial shortlist, but the reason this makes the cut is everything else.
Going into this, their first meeting, Chris Hero’s spent the last few months lashing out at the younger generation for a myriad of reasons, and has gone through Thatcher’s peers in Gulak and Busick over the previous few weeks. He’s done it largely through baiting them off of the mat and into trying to throw bombs, but with neither having Hero’s level of versatility nor his experience that allowed him both the massive arsenal and the ability to switch in between different attacks on a dime. The same holds true here, as Timothy Thatcher eventually finds himself drawn off of the ground, and Hero makes a show out of it. However, wrestlers like Timothy Thatcher are not Timothy Thatcher himself, and so he’s able to grab his hold entirely out of nowhere.
None of it mattered, because Timothy Thatcher is special.
For a company and a style of wrestling so into themes and ideas closer to real sports, it’s a really beautiful Hard Left to take, and one that makes this stand out so much.
It’s an endearingly courageous move out of EVOLVE, to set up this perfect story, only to have it completely not matter. It’s a well that they would return to time and time again with Thatcher’s big matches in his time at the top of the company, and it’s one of the more memorable and distinct ways that a company has created a new top guy all year.
Never was it put to better effect than it was here, creating something not only mechanically great and historically important, but also incredibly distinctive and interesting.
65. KAZUCHIKA OKADA VS. KENNY OMEGA, NJPW DOMINION 6.9 (6/9/2018)
Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada are, somehow, a perfect marriage topped only by the matches both men had with Tanahashi. They are immediately and constantly on the same page. These matches go for so much, but they go for it so well. They have perhaps not mastered anything, but understand construction and proper escalation in matches like these better than ninety percent or more of the people who have tried to have matches like this in the years before and after this quadrilogy. Simply put, these matches work because they commit entirely to the premise, and care enough enough to not only pace and construct these matches in such an intricate way so as to get as much as possible out of every inch of them, but to also offer the lizard brain thrills alongside them.
Do I have minor problems with this?
Yes.
They go a little too long, you can cut out ten to twenty minutes and lose basically nothing. There’s repetition, the usual more minor level flaws in the games of each man, even if they have a way of negating those in large part. All of that.
However, the hallmark of this match and the true sign of its greatness is how little I care about any of that at the end of it, and these thing become reasons it isn’t even higher on the list. It feels exceptionally good to see Kazuchika Okada beaten in a title match for the first time in two years, and even better for it to come at the hands of someone even half likeable in Omega, for which you have to go all the way back to January 2015. Little Kazu isn’t quite moved to tears by his loss this time, but being much more of a shitter by now, it feels almost as good.
It is big. It is dumb and smart in equal measure. It is ambitious on a level that few other matches and/or stories can live up to. It is not the last major tentpole of Peak New Japan, but if you want to call it the final all-time classic of this peak run, I will not fight you. It’s that great. When Ibushi and the Young Bucks all join Omega in the ring to celebrate with their titles, it feels like a big deal. The dismissive thing to say is that people who became NJPW fans in 2016 finally got their moment, but being the open hearted and kind eyed sort of a person that I am, I cannot deny the feeling on display.
Like their match a year ago that charts even higher, a true monument to excess.
64. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. KOTA IBUSHI, NJPW G1 CLIMAX 28 FINAL (8/12/2018)
Hiroshi Tanahashi improves on a match earlier on our list.
One of the great tournament finals of the decade, working in the way all great finals ought to, as a well built up match within the tournament with two wildly different journeys, a great match on a purely mechanical level, but also most importantly, as seen with the dueling corner men of Shibata and Omega respectively, a struggle larger than just the match itself.
Narrative heft and pure feeling aside, the match also just fucking rocks.
Following getting over the hump in their last match at the end of the previous year, Tanahashi and Ibushi finally have a handle on what this match is. The exact amount of knee work Ibushi can handle selling, the escalation, how to maximize all the stuff they’re the best at, the specific things they saved for right now, the biggest possible moment, like the most horrifying possible Ibushi attacks and grossest bumps from both guys, and specifically, the way the match builds so in the back half, every move successfully hits feels like its own individual victory.
Mostly though, this succeeds in a way their other matches don’t and in a way most other Ibushi matches fail to because it’s one of the rare Ibushi matches to recognize him for what he is (horrifying inhuman psychopath who wants to drain the world’s oceans so he can find, kill, and become God) and to transform him into a hurdle for someone else to overcome as part of their own larger arc. Once the last half or so hits and Ibushi begins unloading, barely phased by a Tanahashi attack that in their last match at least paused him enough to let Tanahashi work, every Tanahashi comeback feels like a monumental struggle. Not only between Tanahashi and Ibushi, but between Tanahashi and himself, between the heart and the brain on one end and his failing body on the other. There are these moments when Ibushi is absolutely dismantling him with slaps and kicks and elbows where Tanahashi either falls down or stumbles back and just barely stays up, where he begins nodding and slightly pumping his arms, and it’s the best expression of the idea of someone willing themselves to keep fighting as I’ve seen in wrestling in years, especially as, in the end, that’s exactly what happens.
It is the ideal meeting in the middle for the styles of both, a huge and bombastic Kota Ibushi fireworks show, but with the thought, care, and feeling of the very best Hiroshi Tanahashi matches ever. A match that works on every level, the sort of thing that shows some the best stuff that this style of pro wrestling can achieve, and one of the most purely satisfying things to come out of New Japan all decade.
A grandiose epic, and at the same time, something wonderfully human.
63. CLAUDIO CASTAGNOLI VS. EL GENERICO, PWG KURT RUSSELLREUNION II: THE REUNIONING (1/29/2011)
Claudio and Generico meet for the first of two times on the list, beginning with the prestige wrestling title match version.
This is one of the greatest rivalries in the history of wrestling, and they are once again perfect against each other. Beyond simply the big vs. small stuff, there’s a terrific contrast with every little thing where Castagnoli can do the most incredible things effortlessly, while Generico struggles constantly to do anything against him. They naturally emphasize the best things about each other without trying all that hard.
A significant difference between this and their other matches — hence the prestige wrestling label — is that Generico makes a decision early on to sell a slightly hurt leg all throughout the match, despite a sparser focus on it from Castagnoli. Not known traditionally for being a great limb seller, Generico puts on one of his best performances all decade, always in some kind of trouble, and helped significantly by the more casual focus meaning the match never requires him to do too much. Free to walk a line between it mattering and him still being able to do the things he needs to do offensively, at which point he shows an unmatched skill at reeling his big offense off on one leg while never feeling showy.
Castagnoli eventually wizens up, goes after the leg, and once he does, Generico is toast. Perfect wrestling, presenting a challenge in a new way, seeing it nearly overcome, only for the mountain to grow even taller at the moment right before Our Hero pulls himself on top of it.
If all wrestling was this great, it wouldn’t be such a tragedy that they shared a ring so infrequently this decade as they did, despite spending so long around each other.
62. TIMOTHY THATCHER VS. BIFF BUSICK, EVOLVE 48 (8/16/2015)
Only thirteen minutes and change, perfectly summing up Busick’s EVOLVE career in his farewell by never getting quite the time or attention deserved, and still having possibly the best match in company history.
As Busick comes in with and is constantly hindered by a bandage on a broken thumb, it’s one for the “what is the name of this blog?” file, but not in the usual way. Thatcher spends the match aiming for it, but as the climax of the match comes when Thatcher can finally grab the thumb at the very end and slowly crank it until it snaps, it’s far more about the brutality Busick inflicts on him in his attempts to keep Thatcher away from it for the majority of the match.
In a lesser company in a lesser year and performed by lesser men, that might mean the attack on a limb in return, or a lot of big dangerous moves, or even in a next-best-case scenario, a respectfully nasty bloodletting.
In EVOLVE in 2015 and with these two, it means EAR BLOOD.
(is this better than 6/3/94? shit, maybe!)
Thatcher’s equilibrium selling is unmatched anywhere in wrestling, and as far as Biff/Thatcher matches where Tim is the protagonist, this is hands down the best because it’s hands down the filthiest and most violent feeling. It’s also the best version of what this style can be when things get a little more personal and violent. As great a match as you’ll get for this length of time, making the smart and memorable decision to focus on simple violence and taking it to enough of an extreme that it stands the test of time.
To their ultimate credit, it’s not even the best Thatcher/Busick match built around a hand injury all year.
61. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. TOMOHIRO ISHII, NJPW G1 CLIMAX 23 DAY TWO (8/2/2013)
One of the very best Ace Upset performances in the history of wrestling.
Not to be rude to these two, but it is 90% location.
Big Tom and Tanahashi had another match at Power Struggle 2013 that was also really great and another tournament match three years later on the same level. But this is in Korakuen Hall, and Korakuen Hall is the only place in which this match could have been this match. Korakuen Hall loves the underdog, anyone with a passing historical knowledge knows it. Anyone fighting from underneath, virtually any incumbent, they’re gonna be with the. Even then, even with that well established trend, this is different, this is more than that. If you went into this blind, you would assume that Tomohiro Ishii was born in Korakuen Hall. Functionally, he might as well be. He was raised here. He became a man here, and he’s here now to kill God, not because he hates him, but because he has to know if he can. Across virtually every promotion in Japan, I have never quite seen them adopt somebody like they have Ishii in this period of time. The entire crowd is related to him. They are living and dying with him to a point rarely ever seen in wrestling matches. Forget simply being from here or being raised here or whatever else.
Tomohiro Ishii is the mayor of Korakuen Hall from 2013 through 2015 or so, and this is his inauguration.
Ishii wrestles this early tour G1 match like it’s the most important match of his life, like it is the only match of his life, and it makes all the difference. Tanahashi is Tanahashi. He’s great. To emphasize New Japan’s blue collar hero, he puts on his crispest and whitest shirt, metaphorically speaking. He’s not a prick, but he’s honest, you know? He’s Hiroshi Tanahashi. Come on now. Slowly but surely though, Ishii just stays in it and fights and has more than Tanahashi or anyone ever thought he did. Spiritually, physically, and even intellectually, keeping one gigantic move in the chamber that Tanahashi never expected. In the end, local boy makes good, and they do it in the most emphatic way possible, so as to make it completely undeniable.
One of the greatest upsets of the generation, and one of the greatest upset matches of all time.
The shock has worn off, but this is still so completely correct in every major way that really matters, most importantly as one of the most spiritually correct and satisfying matches of the decade. The perfect meeting of time, place, and performance, and that goes for both men.
60. SAMI ZAYN VS. KEVIN OWENS, WWE BATTLEGROUND (7/24/2016)
The first of three meetings on this list, and also despite lacking the environment of Reseda or the total freedom to do all of the most insane things they could ever dream up, their third best match together ever.
Big Kev and Sami, given the benefit of a long and well written and executed feud, make this final match feel so much bigger than it would have been without the benefit of those things. Great mechanical wrestling combines with all the other stuff, creating something that is not only lizard-brain thrilling, but also enormously satisfying, and that inspires that special feeling that only the best and/or most emotionally perfect pro wrestling can provide.
The emotional journey Sami guides everyone through, once again, is fantastic. The anger is always there, but it’s more restrained after it cost him in their last pay-per-view meeting. You get ebbs and flows to it, the big hockey fight coming late in the match as a transition to a wild final run instead of right off the bat (this is perhaps the best illustration of the ways in which a system benefits them, and also the sort of thing you can easily argue they may have figured out on their own also), and Zayn has such a terrific mad energy. Moving faster and more frantically, swinging with more erratic movements, but also all in the eyes. The end of the match especially offers up this gigantic chance for an ultra memorable facial sell from Zayn, and as with everything else here, he gets it perfect. It’s not just catching Big Kev after one Helluva and shoving him back for another, it’s the way he shows the gears turning. Not just the act, but the struggle and then the decision behind the act. Questioning if it’s worth it, looking down at Owens again, deciding that it is worth it, and kicking his head off. There’s echoes of NXT and the past, but the realest echo that comes out of this isn’t any of that. It’s what started this all, two promotions away, at FINAL BATTLE 2009. One man holding the other up in a near-embrace, realizing what they’ve done and are about to do, thinking about it, and going forward anyways. The initial act mirrored in what feels like a final conclusion.
For as often as WWE would go to the well with stories about the moral cost of revenge later in the decade, what this match offers up is something so much better. That, yes, there’s something to it, but that the decision ultimately shouldn’t be all that hard. As much as grappling with that cost might fascinate as an intellectual exercise, nothing feels quite as good or correct in this genre of entertainment as revenge, and this is one of the finest displays of that in recent memory.
The simple thing is that a series of evil acts adds up to one hell of a bill, and for once in the WWE, it’s one paid in full.
To everyone’s credit, there’s a finality to this that none of their truly great matches together ever quite got to have. These two never really got a clear end before. Steen and Generico teaming together on Generico’s way out, showing Kevin Steen’s growth at that time, was a beautiful and unexpected direction, but this is the sort of a match and complete package that feels like the conclusion of that, with everything to follow feeling like some kind of an epilogue.
It ends as it spent most of its time. Simple, direct, and undeniable.
59. TREVOR LEE VS. ANDREW EVERETT, CWF-MA ABSOLUTE JUSTICE 2016 (6/18/2016)
A common criticism of Trevor Lee title matches that you’ll find on this site is that they’re too ambitious.
Sometimes that means they go for too many things and juggle too many ideas, but for the most part, it just comes down to length. This is not exactly the opposite of that, it’s still a thirty-nine minute match, but it is the closest Trevor Lee ever came to my knowledge of pulling it all together into something perfect.
The match itself is less the story of any one point of attack, so much as it is that easy and wonderful story of old friends starting quietly annoyed with each other, and then growing from there. At some point, impossible to really pinpoint (a positive, in this case), a dam breaks and the match becomes pettier and meaner, including the decade’s only good “WHY AM I SO VIOLENT?” moment, achieving that status through the match building it up and through the moment passing very quickly. The trick is moderation, of course, not dwelling on it to an extent that it becomes this act of pantomime. A look at his hands, realizing how far this has gone, and shaking it off before going to something else. In that moment, it feels like a genuine reaction, and that makes all the difference.
Following the first half or so (as said moment may indicate), the match transforms into being something far more frantic and dirty, if more in tone than tactic. Even still, it’s hard to say why specifically Trevor won. You can put it down to Everett coming to his sense at the worst possible time. You can put it down to Trevor having more guts and grit to him. Put it on Trevor learning the value of going all the way after wavering himself early on and almost losing for it, opting instead for a full-measure with his back to the wall. You can probably watch it yourself (either again or for the first time), and maybe come up with another angle that I didn’t think of. I love that. It works for a million reasons, one of those “the best matches are about something and the real special ones are about everything” sorts of things that always wind up standing the test of time.
My favorite part of the match comes after the match though, as in a wonderful wonderful accident, Trevor Lee’s music (the Ruby Friedman cover of “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” from JUSTIFIED) lines up just perfectly with Trevor and Everett embracing again post-match. As Lee helps Everett up with their arms around each other, the part of the second verse with the lyric about walking together out of the mouth of this holler plays over it. (Trevor feels like more of a Boyd Crowder than Everett does, but nothing is ever perfect.) Independent wrestling, and wrestling as a whole, rarely puts something together that feels as perfect as this one little moment. It’s after the match, but as much as anything that happened at the end, feels like the real conclusion here.
The second piece of this is, as other fans will know, the return of local veteran Brad Attitude to initially celebrate the incredible work by offering the kids beers, only to turn on them and horribly beat down Lee to start one of the year’s best feuds. That’s not as related to the match as the beautiful post-match segment, but it’s worth mentioning, because it’s yet another great piece of wrestling extending outwards from this match.
From introductions to the post-match, CWF Mid Atlantic’s finest hour.
58. CHRIS HERO VS. TOMOHIRO ISHII, RPW GLOBAL WARS 2016 NIGHT ONE (11/10/2016)
The trick to having the best British wrestling match of the decade, as it turned out, was to not involve any British wrestlers.
One of independent wrestling’s greatest bullies goes up against perhaps the best underdog hero in all of wrestling, and the math is quite simple. However, while one can easily imagine that Chris Hero vs. Tomohiro Ishii is great, and that in 2016 it is especially great, there is a sort of magic to this that I’m not sure anyone could one hundred percent completely account for, even beyond just that (a) everything in this match that can go right, short of the other result and the thrill that would accompany it, winds up going right & (b) that it is the year’s best performance from two of its ten greatest wrestlers, eliciting Hero’s best performance of 2016, and one of Ishii’s five or so best of the decade.
More than any other match in the most celebrated Hero run of the decade like it, Hero and Ishii make it clear that more than the hard hits and the no-sell spots, it is every smaller and quieter moment that allows a match like this to truly succeed. Hero’s transition from disrespect to panic, Ishii’s anger building up, doing spots early on only for them to mean more later on when blocked or when Ishii refuses to allow it to work a second time. Some of these spots are bigger than others, of course, and not every single one works. I don’t love the Rolling Elbow being shrugged off, and I never will. Mostly though, it works. Ishii getting punched in the head, but tensing his body up and gritting his teeth, that’s a little different than Ishii being even more fired up when he stands up after one of Hero’s piledrivers, but these things work for the same reason. When someone as talented as Ishii is at the helm and when those spots are reacted to the way Hero reacts to them, no-selling isn’t always no-selling.
Even in a year where Hero already had one incredible underdog match already, this is the best of them, because when Ishii does come back and really starts giving it to him, he’s kicking his ass, and the transition from Hero’s disrespect to Hero’s terror makes that one of the most thrilling things in wrestling all year. Mark Andrews and Chris Hero had enough chemistry to really make the back half of that full of believable nearfalls, but there’s that and there’s seeing a prick bully get his ass kicked. One is better than the other, and you and I and everyone knows this as a universal truth.
Among the decade’s preeminent Dudes Rock masterpieces.
57. THE REVIVAL VS. DIY, WWE NXT TAKEOVER TORONTO (11/19/2016)
It is very easy to want to disrespect and insult this match.
Given everything NXT became and was already becoming, given how annoying everyone involved in the match became in any number of ways, and given the level of hyperbole often coming out of fans of this company and this era/brand especially, the gut instinct is to want to tear it down. Hell, we can make it personal, that was my gut instinct too.
The match is just too great though.
It’s one of those perfect NXT matches.
The Revival have had a bunch of great matches, here and in the future elsewhere, generally all employing the same general idea. A bunch of really cool shit and modern pacing, but adhering to the classic principles. It’s hardly an original idea, people have been doing that for 30 years and they’ll keep doing it as long as there are expectations and established routines to subvert, in wrestling and every other genre and subgenre of media. Of all of the versions of this in wrestling, this is one of the few very finest that I’ve ever seen in my life. Long term payoffs, games within the game, a beautiful chunk of storytelling, both long and short term.
Mechanically speaking, everyone here is great. Gargano’s knee selling at the very end is once again both sympathetic and functional, walking a tightrope there perfectly much in the same way he did in August. Both Revival members are perfect in their own roles too, managing to stooge and take these huge bumps and eventually eat shit without it ever feeling phony or like any part of an act. It’s balanced out by how mean they are in offense, both in terms of what they’re doing and the way in which they do it, allowing so little daylight in any direction. They work both with a snap and a snarl, physically delivering everything with a lot of force, but always looking so intent and in the moment as well.
On a construction level, this is immaculate, and it goes hand in hand with the story told.
For the duration of the match, there are roughly one hundred ideas teased and paid off. From those larger stories of the match to more mechanical ideas, ways to avoid double teams, and different way things work out. Gargano’s first big comeback almost immediately cut off into the Shatter Machine for that first fall to a shockingly long period of control. They cut off hot tags and little hope spots to the extent that the tag itself finally happening feels like its own achievement. Ciampa’s tag goes poorly, leading to it feeling like its own little success when Gargano’s able to help him and things go just right enough for them to get the sandwich spot and even it up.
The last fall in particular is a stunning achievement in terms of doing all of these incredibly dramatic things, getting so much out of every single nearfall in terms of believable finishes. It’s the sort of a match that moves with such confidence and purpose that it’s hard to tell if everything that they do is the best possible way to do it, or if it simply feels correct because of a kind of force of not only talent but of pure will as well. Gargano gets his hold on to thwart the return to the leg work, Ciampa finds a way to make a difference this time, and The Revival are no longer able to save each other. It’s perfect payoff, not only to the last year of The Revival with the Tag Titles, these plans all finally faltering and blowing up in their faces, but of Ciampa and Gargano’s chase since coming into NXT a little over a year prior. It’s a match full of little teases and callbacks, but done without any of it becoming overpowering, instead managing to naturally fit them into a match that is the purest ever distillation of The Revival’s tag team style and ideology. The career work of everyone involved to date.
A genuine masterpiece.
56. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. SHINSUKE NAKAMURA, NJPW G1 CLIMAX 25 FINAL (8/16/2015)
New Japan’s THE END OF HISTORY (both in how it feels and how Okada-ism will eventually doom us all), as Nakamura and Tanahashi deliver their comprehensive history condensed into one half hour block.
At all times, both Tanahashi and Nakamura seem acutely aware that they will never wrestle each other one on one again. There’s a real sense of conclusiveness in this from the start. That’s a curious feeling to it that time has only intensified, and that grows with every counter to something old and every little bit that calls back to something else. It’s a match very deliberately wrestled with a period at the end instead of an ellipsis. Half an hour of two of the most experienced foes in wrestling trying for something new when nothing old works anymore. It’s only ever solved once Tanahashi finally takes something from Nakamura by seemingly inventing on the fly and pulling a new thing out of the aether to beat him the one last time.
When they shake hands after the match, the long history of neither man partaking in such maudlin gestures gives it a feeling of importance and finality that few other handshakes have ever had. It’s the end of a decade of hostilities. Sometimes quiet, often loud, but always important. That’s what the match was, this one last story to tell together, encompassing their entire time together and bringing it to the best and most dramatic possible close.
Never had the “end of an era” part of 2015 felt more explicit than in this match, save for perhaps the final exit of Nakamura himself six month later, as New Japan’s two top stars effectively wrestle a series finale for their time steering the ship, bringing a close to the last ten plus years of history.
55. L.A. PARK VS. EL MESIAS, AAA TRIPLEMANIA XIX (6/18/2011)
It’s a complete goddamned mess from bell to bell, and I say that in the best possible way.
Big and dumb and more than a little silly, but also a real pleasure.
The match is absolute chaos, a specific fight that I know I like more than many many other people in the world, but I watch it and I just am unable to give a shit. There’s a powerbomb off the apron through a table in the first five minutes of thirty or so, but the match still never feels like it’s slowing down and has no struggle with pacing in general. All of that in spite of that this starts hot and sees the first half almost entirely comprised of table spots, chairs to the face, powerbombs, and piledrivers BEFORE it turns into something more “traditional”, with your mask ripping and blood and exhaustion selling double down spots. Even late in the match in their exhaustion, because they’re both certain types of people, neither can resist big moments of celebration long before this is over and both eat the most shit possible for their hubris. It’s a beautiful thing.
It’s a beautiful match.
L.A. Park and El Mesias have the sort of match that you’re not supposed to watch before 10 pm or after 3 am, best enjoyed with a big gross sandwich and while at least a little bit inebriated. It’s my favorite ECW match of the decade. It’s the sort of match they invented caps lock for.
Pure spectacle.
54. CLAUDIO CASTAGNOLI VS. EL GENERICO, PWG BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES 2011 (8/20/2011)
My not entirely rational favorite between the two.
I like this a hair more than KRR2. I’m on an island there. I get it, I’m not mad at anyone vehemently disagreeing with me.
To me, this is so much more skillful than a main event epic, and that’s not exactly something that’s easy to do. This is a sub fifteen minute sprint, but one that never loses a concrete structure or a sense of what’s going on. Some may argue for the knee work of the January match giving an additional hurdle for El Generico, but to me, I like this more without it. I like these two the most when it’s simplified. Big and small, power against flight, the perfect underdog match up. In the story, it comes off now like Claudio doesn’t even bother with the leg, making him that much more of a mountain, giving the best babyface in the world that much steeper a climb. Is this higher than KRR2 because of the finish? Because of the result? It’s not a no. This would be a top one hundred match of the decade no matter what, most likely. It’s one of the best pairings of all time, and them working some cross between a pay-per-view opener and the oft-mentioned WCW Superfight Epic is impressive as hell.
It’s the tightest match they ever had, while sacrificing absolutely none of the speed, ferocity, desperation, bombast, everything that was great about every other match they’ve ever had. It’s one of the most efficient matches in the history of independent wrestling in the United States.
And yes, it is made that much better by the finish, in which Generico gets on top of a mountain that not only had he failed to last time, but always failed to get over, and that seemed to grow taller and taller with every minute that this lasted. The result is a genuine sense of victory and achievement in a situation, an indie super show tournament semi-final, where that sort of a thing virtually never happens.
More under the radar, one of the most impressive feats in two careers full of hugely impressive feats.
53. RODERICK STRONG VS. TREVOR LEE, PWG FROM OUT OF NOWHERE (2/27/2015)
Under the radar and in secret, one of the best classical U.S. independent style title epics of the entire decade.
A perfect story about an underdog challenger on a hot streak against a more veteran heel champion. Those of you with a sense for history and a keen eye will immediately see how unbelievably cool it is that Roderick Strong gets to be on the other end of a match like this after largely rising to prominence a decade earlier as the upstart challenging Bryan Danielson in Ring of Honor.
Forget that novelty though, because Roderick Strong is just as great (if not better) in this match than Bryan was in any of those matches.
There are no missteps here. Roderick Strong makes a declarative statement that he is the world’s best wrestler in this match. Every shot is nasty and perfect. Every cut off is unique, with Roderick making small changes to normal spots to give them just a little bit more legitimacy, but also to make himself into a more despicable figure. He makes Trevor work for everything, and at no moment does this feel as though things come easily for either man. One of the best moments in the match comes when Roderick shoves Trevor Lee away when he tries to pick him up after coming back, rolling to the corner for distance, and then getting up into Trevor’s attack instead of taking an irish whip. A small touch that both solves one of those old wrestling problems, but also serves as a constant reminder of how hard he is to beat.
Trevor Lee isn’t quite as great, but gives off a career babyface performance to this point in response. Sympathy, energy, a harder edge than usual, all leading to one of the greatest nearfalls in independent history when Strong finally survives the Trevor Lee inside cradle that caused such upheaval all throughout the previous year. Roderick shuts him down immediately after that, allowing the match to end as close as possible to the highest point it will ever reach.
It’s a true master class, both from Roderick Strong himself, and also in how well PWG had built this up over the previous six or seven months. A perfect case study once again in the simple power of building up two diametrically opposed forces upon parallel lines, before sending them hurling towards each other. A genuine that feels like it gets there without announcing itself before time, filled with two great performances and one of the best anywhere in wrestling in some time, aided by simple and great booking, creating a match that leaves both men better off by the end, capped off with an all-time great nearfall right before the end.
PWG could be so frustrating and indie wrestling as a whole, no matter what decade, can be real trying, but a match like this makes it all worthwhile.
52. BIG VAN WALTER VS. SAMI CALLIHAN, WXW 16 CARAT GOLD 2011 NIGHT THREE (3/13/2011)
Sting vs. Vader on trucker speed, specifically the King of Cable final.
The closest European wrestling ever came to Fire Ant vs. Vin Gerard, naturally having to shop out half the job to someone from the Midwest, being unable to produce anyone even half likable themselves (like the Finlay match, it feels like a hard sell if you only ever came to the guy post-WWE, but trust me).
It’s the first of a few times this decade that WXW got it totally and completely right. A tournament final that exists both as a traditional grit-and-heart underdog against a mostly unbeaten monster and also as a payoff to a two plus year storyline. A gutsy dirtbag gets revenge on a bully. Danielson vs. Morishima for people who dropped out of community college, moved to another state, and spent months doing meth with the biker who lived downstairs before going to a better community college down the street. The charm here is in the absolute simplicity of it. This is not a match concerned with being Great, it’s an incredibly confident match. It’s entirely about the story, and the story is that Walter is a bully and ultimately a coward, and when Sami presses him and punches him and gets him down, that cowardice is laid bare in front of the world. That’s it. That’s the match. It’s a thirteen minute match with these two very distinct halves, and it’s as perfect as this match up can ever be.
This is just about the gold standard for a match like this.
Sami and WALTER put forth the work by which, Brock Lesnar matches being the exception, all other matches like it this decade should be held against, and by which most would be found extremely wanting. Every Sami Callihan underdog match before and after this has wanted to be what this match was. It’s the ultimate realization of everything he was about. The platonic ideal of the Sami Sprint, not simply being fast and violent, but having real stakes and a world of heart to it. Every WALTER match against an underdog since this match has failed to live up to what he did here. In both cases, that’s no insult to two of the best types of wrestling this decade, so much as it is the ultimate complement to this match.
The first one is always the best, and every other major WALTER defeat in the 2010s lived in the shadow of this match.
51. TAKASHI SUGIURA VS. YOSHIHIRO TAKAYAMA, NOAH SUMMER NAVIGATION 2010 (7/10/2010)
Stop crying and fight your father.
Every single strike or offensive movement in this match seems like it would kill a normal human. Something like 90% of the shots they’re throwing out are truly gruesome, and Takayama wins what feels like every single exchange up to a point, in increasingly disgusting fashion. There’s also something real (or more importantly, something that feels real) behind Sugiura’s shots. He’s always shouting, his eyes are always so expressive, and he has a way of making it feel like he’s fighting for his life in there. Takayama makes it all feel futile when he laughs in Sugiura’s face, and throws a headbutt to knock him back down. In a truly beautiful accident, this show of invulnerability in the face of someone who is truly pushing him results in Takayama’s weakness being exposed in front of the world, when Sugiura sees blood, and realizes Takayama is just a man.
Very few things in wrestling all decade felt as good as the final minute of this match, as Sugiura finally topples the man who’d been both a mentor and a constant bully to him, all while shouting in desperation and a million other emotions you can’t quite pin down as he unloads one of the grossest punch flurries all decade. The best thing professional wrestling can do is a thing like this, when characters you believe in accomplish great things. For its flaws, there are very few matches ever like this that manage to capture both unbelievable violence and the feeling of pure victory that comes at the end of this.
Even if it doesn’t quite hit you in the heart the same way it did for me, the amount of pure violence on display makes this real hard to turn away from.
Festivus in July.
50. TRIPLE H VS. DANIEL BRYAN, WWE WRESTLEMANIA XXX (4/6/2014)
The miracle of the decade, so much so that I never actually believe it’s as great as I remember, and then it occasionally loops back to being something I overrate because the idea of it is simply so impressive.
A coup d’etat in real time, with almost everyone in the world on the winning side.
It’s home to the virtuoso political performance of a lifetime from Bryan, pressuring Triple H into becoming the best version of himself that’s existed through reputation alone. The King of Kings Road, Hunter doing his best Nigel McGuinness, working a 2000s Ring of Honor title match, and honestly totally nailing it. It’s stunning and one of the greatest miracles in wrestling history.
One of the most impressive things in the very impressive career of Daniel Bryan is the way he not only completely understood what the Triple H character is (meathead who’s just smart enough and morally vacant to be really dangerous but not as smart or good as he thinks), but found a way to take the match in that direction without giving into any of the usual Triple H nonsense. It’s more than just Hunter cheating and being a heel, it’s the work of genius of having all the transition spots to the arm come in unclean ways, like an announce table bump instead of any hold or move inside the ring. In a sense, it’s the perfect definition of Triple H’s career, only ever able to hang with a guy like Bryan in a match like this given both a head start (the lingering arm injury going back to December) and all the shortcuts he could ask for. It’s the most honest a Triple H match has ever been, and an all-time miracle that Bryan snuck this one past everyone, potentially even himself. WrestleMania is not the time for subtlety, and neither this nor the main event bother in the slightest, to the benefit of both.
It’s masterful in every other way by Bryan too. The energetic babyface work, the arm selling, weaving the two together for one of the great performances in company history. They weaponize the past perfectly, play off months and months of story work, and do the right thing in the exact right way in another career rarity for Triple H. No tired tap out like he gave Benoit and Cena, no distraction finish, not a single way out. Bryan’s better than him, Bryan’s tougher than him, and when all the bullshit fails, he gets him clean as a sheet in the middle with the knee. Perfect.
A genuine epic level struggle, but one that manages that without going anywhere close to too far, and one that achieves that status while always being real and grounded. A masterpiece of a match that in retrospect, only Daniel Bryan could ever have gotten off of the ground, Not simply because he brought the best out of Triple H, but because only he could create a scenario wild enough for a match like this to happen, but also for a match like this to be able to be this restrained in the first place.
The all time expression of the unstated and often unintentional politics of being the best wrestler of all time.
49. REY MYSTERIO VS. JOHN CENA, WWE RAW (7/25/2011)
The forgotten WWE super fight of the decade, and maybe of the century so far.
Not for unfair reasons. Most people reading this know about it being booked on ninety minutes’ notice, the odd decision for ultra-babyface John Cena to challenge Mysterio for the title after Rey had just won it at the start of the show, and the CM Punk return immediately after the match that turned it into an afterthought.
Thing is though, it is still John Cena and Rey Mysterio wrestling a title match, uninterrupted and unimpeded, a rare thing from the WWE to simply get the hell out of the way like this, and two of the best of all-time make the most of it.
Cena and Mysterio make this feel like one of those old WCW main event I love so much. Fifteen minutes or less, huge momentum swings, a clear but basic concept, full of moments and pieces of offense that feel like these constant swings for the fences. Never matches that feel like sprints, despite the length, but matches with no time wasted, and above all, fought by these titanic feeling figures. It’s a credit to how legitimate Rey Mysterio can make himself feel and how Cena doesn’t treat him like an underdog at all. Everyone loves both of these men, but aside from heroism, they could not be more different. The match never loses sight of that, or how weird a match up this is. Coming off the loss of his career, Cena is more aggressive than usual and his patience with another babyface isn’t here at all. He’s shoving Rey around, trucking him with a few clotheslines, and generally isn’t having it. John Cena at times can come off like an old NWA Champion or an Ace from the past, and to extend that metaphor, Cena here feels a little like the way Jumbo Tsuruta used to feel whenever he suffered a big loss and visibly suffered from a need to remind people who he was.
Beyond that divide, the best part of the match is how rough it is. Rey takes a number of horrific bumps that seem half planned at best, and it elevates the match. The sorts of great little accidents that emphasize how beaten up Rey is, and how badly Cena wants and needs this. For his part, Cena also makes a wonderful choice in the last quarter or so, after Rey has him in his own STF and after Rey’s spent time kicking at his leg (as he does), Cena decides he’s going to sell the knee for the last few minutes. Rey never goes for it, it’s not a thing that has any bearing on the rest of this, but it’s a decision he makes that again just so happens to elevate the match. This is not a match with some exceptional story or that seems very planned out, but if minor things like that are affecting a guy like Cena, this comes off as that much more of a war.
The title returns to where it was always going to go, but in the process, Rey Mysterio more than takes his pound of flesh, leaving looking every bit on the level of John Cena. A large part of that is on Rey himself, able to carry himself a certain way at all times, but a little more than that, one has to leave this maybe even more impressed by John Cena, who for the second time in eight days, not only has one of the best matches of the decade, but does so by smuggling far more interesting pro wrestling into what is usually a deeply hostile environment for it.
John Cena and Rey Mysterio find themselves on an island here, abandoned by booking, but you would never know it by the way they wrestle.
A masterclass in making the most of everything.
48. BLACK TERRY VS. WOTAN, CHILANGA MASK (8/21/2016)
To say that Terry and Wotan spend fifteen minutes beating the shit out of each other does not feel quite right, nor entirely accurate. The Mona Lisa is just some picture of a girl, Reggie Bush USC video is just a clip of some guy running, Dwyane Wade over Anderson Varejao is just someone making a basket, things like that. It’s not incorrect, but it feels far too flippant.
Every shot is not only hard, but thrown with a sort of feeling and force that makes it feel wildly different from other matches I could or already have described like that. It’s not just that they chop really hard, it’s that everything in this match is so god damned hard. The chops, the punches, the backhands, some of the grossest sounds on headbutts that you’ll find anywhere in wrestling all decade. There are so many delights that this match has to offer, so many different flavors of lizard brain response moments. I shrieked in terror and in horror and in pure joy five or six different times when watching this, each with their own distinct sound. In the same way as no sound escaping my body when watching this was entirely the same, each shot here is different, both in execution and utility.
Like the best matches in this genre, it feels less like an organized wrestling contest and more like a fight that happened to break out somewhere where a wrestling ring and a crowd had already gathered. It occasionally veers into the confines of the ring, and while some of the best stuff in the match happens there (such as Wotan holding a chair against the top of Terry’s head on all fours and punting it as hard as humanly possible), it seems almost accidental.
When the match finds its natural home outside in the dirt and grime, it leads to one of the best punch exchange spots of the decade, and finally, both men just spill into the crowd. Rolling around in the dirt and blood, the pretense that this is an organized athletic competition in which one party wins and one loses is entirely abandoned. Covered equally in dirt and blood, a thousand different cuts on the body joining the massive head wounds from earlier in the match, resulting in one of the more unforgettable scenes of the year, Wotan and Black Terry roll around through the people and chairs until they’re on those sharp rocks, shoving each other around on those and continuing to swing on each other with the greatest abandon possible before Terry finds a bottle and breaks it on Wotan’s head, allowing the distance for both men to crawl away and for the thing to finally end.
A blood feud appearing out of thin air, creating one of the most stunning displays of violent alchemy in recent history.
47. CHRIS HERO VS. ZACK SABRE JR., WWN MERCURY RISING 2016 (4/2/2016)
Another match in which one of the all-time greats thrillingly dispatches with a pretender to the throne, along with being my favorite match of Chris Hero’s vaunted 2016 run and my favorite Zack Sabre Jr. match period.
Both have had better individual performances, but I think even beyond a certain undefinable and unquantifiable MAGIC in the air here, they come together to not only have a mechanically brilliant match (nothng new here), but also their one match together that, to me, feels the most ideologically compelling and morally correct out of every other match that they’ve ever had together.
Relative to what Chris Hero shows up wearing, Zack Sabre Jr. ought to have shown up in a Rockets jersey, because this match is all about Chris Hero eating up, deconstructing, and making the show of a lifetime out of OBLITERATING this would-be next top guy.
Chris Hero spends the match picking him apart from root to stem. Zack tries everything that usually works for him, and not a lick of it works. He goes to the left arm, and while Hero makes sure to always sell the effects, it never once stops him, because he throws elbows with the right. Zack briefly catches onto that fact and goes for the right, only to be stuffed in an even more violent fashion, even his classic finishes don’t work. Hero blocks the Double Armbar entirely in a first, and Zack’s multiple attempts at the European Clutch fall short. Zack winds up repeating himself and eats shit. In his desperation, he even winds up baited into trying to throw with Chris Hero, and eats shit in a way that Zack really hasn’t ever eaten shit as a top level act before.
There’s a sort of player in all sports, where the common refrain is that you only love him if he’s on your team. I’m a Pistons fan, so we’re gonna talk about Bill Laimbeer here. An absolute rotten motherfucker. Filthy. But he was on my team, and he was my dad’s favorite basketball player ever, so I love that man. I got a Bill Laimbeer jersey as a birthday present in 2020, and it’s one of the best presents I’ve ever gotten.
Such is the case with Chris Hero in this match.
He is a rotten motherfucker, filthy to the core, but because he is doing it to Zack Sabre Jr., the avatar of British wrestling, he is on my team, and I fucking LOVE it.
Zack is no expert at any sort of real emotional sort of wrestling, but he does have a certain flair for selling desperation in his own way. Zack is one of the great losers of his generation not because he’s likeable or because he does it in these fascinating ways, but because he reacts SO poorly to it. He gets pettier and he gets meaner to try and counteract it, and it constantly leads to some of the most fun wrestling in the world. Here, it’s a little different than usual, because he constantly changes. When nothing else quite works, the pettiness reveals itself, but when it just leads to him being more violently shut down every time, it reveals something almost god damned ADMIRABLE beneath the surface.
Almost.
For just the briefest moment though, when Zack Sabre Jr. seems to know he’s cooked and throws up the double bird at his tormentor, there’s some slight part of me that nods and smiles at it, the kid finally growing some backbone as a babyface. Even if it’s just for a moment, making me feel that way is maybe the most impressive thing any wrestling match will do in 2016. Hero makes a show of it at the end with multiple Rolling Elbow variations, before a diving northern Rolling Elbow gets him the win, in the most emphatic and dominant way possible.
The only real flaw here is that, to match his outfit, the match never allowed me to do a “Hero Third” bit, and that it went around half an hour. These are small things though, a slight lowering of the ceiling on a match that had one of the highest ones of any match all year, and that found a way to ram into it at full speed anyways.
A victory lap for everything I love and believe in about professional wrestling.
46. CM PUNK VS. THE UNDERTAKER, WWE WRESTLEMANIA 29 (4/7/2013)
Maybe the most impressive single match performance all decade.
CM Punk turns up to a WrestleMania that he probably should be main eventing, even as a third wheel in a three way, and delivers one of the great “fuck you” performances in wrestling history.
The Undertaker brings The Streak to this, and CM Punk brings everything else. He’s a fountain of charisma, a manic bumper, an expert psychologist, and a political mastermind all at the very same time. He has to be for this to work, he has to be for this to have a chance at working, and there was zero chance he was going to come to this show and not completely steal it. Everything he does works, it’s not the last match in 2013 where CM Punk turns in an all-time great performance, but it is the last we see of the version of CM Punk from June 2011 through April 2013 that simply could not fail. Every idea he has, no matter how audacious, simply works. He gets away with it. He gets away with taking the big table bump away from the two bigger matches on the show with heavier political favorites. He gets away with kicking out of a fucking Tombstone Piledriver, and he gets away with not giving The Undertaker a Go to Sleep kickout in return, most audaciously of all. There’s a Midas Touch to all of this, the idea in your head that absolutely nobody else at this point in time and realistically in this entre era could have done what Punk did here with an opponent like 2013’s version of The Undertaker.
CM Punk doesn’t win, he was never going to win, and we all knew that. There was nothing he could have done to counteract that, so instead, he made it as simple and fun and cool and impressive as possible, and took as much for himself as he or anyone else ever possibly could.
The goal of this match, by the end, feels less like getting your Streak Match, and more like making sure every single person watching this with any sort of eye for it left knowing that CM Punk was the best wrestler in the world at this point, even if it winds up being his last match occupying that space for a long time. In a lot of ways, second only to some of that AEW bullshit or the Cena piledriver, it’s the ultimate testament to just how great he was and the specific ways in which he was great.
It’s not even the best CM Punk match of the year. It’s not even the second best CM Punk match of the year.
But it’s against the fucking Undertaker in 2013, and it’s one of the fifty best matches of an entire decade and if that isn’t a miracle, I would really like for you to show me what it is that you consider a miracle.
45. KAZUCHIKA OKADA VS. KENNY OMEGA, NJPW DOMINION 6.11 (6/11/2017)
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love The Bombs.
It is a stunningly ambitious match, and yet given how much it does right and how much could have gone wrong, it is so hard not to admire, especially when they pretty much pulled it off. There are problems of course, it does not need to go an hour in the same way that very few matches ever need to go an hour, and all mechanical flaws come out of that, but the real mystery of the thing is that giving them more time and more room and allowing More in general is also the reason this is even better than before somehow. It is a true paradox, and half a decade later, I still do not entirely understand how this is such a great match. It is not only a success, but it is a success to such a shocking degree — accomplishing truly impossible sounding goals like genuinely babyfacing Kenny Omega and telling a perfect story in a match this long — that I honestly believe there is something supernatural about it.
The most significant reason for that success (besides a commune with the devil and/or his emissaries on this Earth), is that as opposed to their first match, there are shifts made here to allow these two to do what they naturally do best. Which is to say that all Omega has to worry about is pure offense, an unmatched fireworks delivery system at the peak of all of his powers, while Kazuchika Okada once again excels when allowed to revert back to form. He may not be the ghoul he’ll be against Satoshi Kojima seven weeks later, but free from the shackles of having to play the hero, he finds the magic again. The mechanics always worked, and now aided by fixing everything else, these two are able to create something that, loathe as I am to admit it, is a genuinely phenomenal achievement.
2017 may possess no greater “more than the sum of its parts” match than this, and the decade may not either. It is a million billion trillion times better than the sum of its parts. This is not just better than the first one, but it is WILDLY better than the first one. The solution, it turns out, was not stifling them or simplifying things, but instead, giving them even more room to work and time with which to cook, and fixing the central design flaw of the original to begin with. An improvement in every way that a match can improve, resulting in a match that, for once, makes an actual decent case for once that sometimes, more really is more.
It is a big dumb monument to excess, a generational moonshot swing, and in spite of everything I usually believe about wrestling and everything I usually feel about matches like this or that this has gone on to inspire, I love it a whole lot.
44. SHINSUKE NAKAMURA VS. KOTA IBUSHI, NJPW WRESTLE KINGDOM IX (1/4/2015)
I use this turn of phrase a lot, “an Encounter”, but for newer readers, it might be beneficial to know exactly what that means.
The term came from a friend of mine in another chat, back when MSN was a thing people used, nearly like twenty years ago. I am old. Anyways. It originally began as “The Encounter” when first applied to Shuji Kondo vs. Kaz Hayashi from AJPW in August 2006. It was his way to sell other people on this wildly bombastic, creative, energetic, and captivating display of total lunacy. He was right, I absolutely love that match. It was then later applied to the KENTA vs. Naomichi Marufuji match from Budokan Hall in October 2006, with “The Encounter/an Encounter” turned into an umbrella term.
A term for a specific sort of wrestling, usually in a bigger venue, but sometimes where people just wrestle real big. PWG and ROH matches have earned that distinction, even the famous CHIKARA four way from 2009. Kota Ibushi and Kenny Omega are masters of Encounter style wrestling, although their Peter Pan match in 2012 was too long and wasteful at times to be an Encounter, to further define the term. It’s not wrestling that has to be dumb, so much as it is wrestling that has to feel big, and not all that weighed down by context or histrionics (Bucks vs. Lovers or an NXT main event past a certain point, for example, could not be one). Ideally, it’s a match you can show to a more casual fan without having to explain more than “[x] wants the belt” or who the good guy is and who the bad guy is. A lack of waste is a major element, although certainly some is allowed provided the end product feel significantly big time. The most recent time my friend dubbed something an Encounter was the Kenny Omega vs. Bryan Danielson match from the first AEW Dynamite Grand Slam, and he hadn’t dropped it in years before then, likely for one of the major Naito/Omega matches.
My point is that is is a very specific term of endearment for a very specific kind of match.
This is not only an Encounter, but it is the best one of the decade.
It’s a match that’s often been called a big budget remake of their 2013 G1 Climax meeting, but that’s not entirely true. It’s a sequel more than a remake, a better one at that, and big budget doesn’t even begin to describe his much more gargantuan of a struggle this feels like in comparison. The matches are similar in tone and approach (each being about chucking gigantic bombs and then elevating Ibushi to a new level in defeat), but I think people do not only a disservice to the match by calling it a remake, but also to themselves. Because to me, the differences stand out so much. In fact, it’s that progression that makes this so much more than just a display of some of the coolest wrestling of all time.
Primarily, it’s that progression from Ibushi as a younger wrestler still being just a little intimidated by facing one of his idols to now being a totally out-of-control vagarant skinning freak who has nothing even approaching fear. The latter immediately makes more sense and feels realer (Ibushi has always been a dead-eyed maniac who only comes alive when doing violence), while also giving Nakamura a real challenge. An obsessive marvel, too stupid to know what he should or shouldn’t do to another human being even as a professional fighter, and the most dangerous wrestler on the show as a result. Whether Nakamura or wants to do it or not, Ibushi drags him into his kind of a match, and Nakamura beating an opponent clearly beneath him feels like a major obstacle overcome by the end of the match.
Of course, it is also simply a display of some of the very coolest wrestling of all time, and that only helps. Everyone knows about the big German Suplex, but every strike is nasty, every big throw as gross as possible, and every moment late in the match not only in the exact perfect place, but given maximum narrative heft as well. It is as highly celebrated as it is for a reason. The highly acclaimed and regarded match is genuinely terrific, two of the better Big Match Guys of the time and place have one of the best big matches of said time and place, and Nakamura once again has one of the best matches of the year four days into it. Both guys are so mercurial that it’s hard to ever bet on them, but the outcome is hardly one to be taken aback by. No alarms and no surprises here.
A perfect sort of a big venue match, even if it’s only Nakamura’s second best Tokyo Dome match of the decade.
43. BIFF BUSICK VS. TIMOTHY THATCHER, BEYOND GREATEST RIVALS ROUND ROBIN (9/26/2015)
A near perfect scientific epic, with a more unique approach than usual for this match up. It has the slightest edge over their final EVOLVE match, both because there’s more of this, and because it’s different.
I don’t believe that with wrestlers this talented, there is a wrong approach, so long as they get to wrestle a match that feels full. However, Biff Busick vs. Timothy Thatcher is often only conducted with one narrative focus in mind, when this match shows that it can be so much more than that. Nothing’s wrong with the way EVOLVE or PWG or WXW or WWE seems to always make this match about Timothy Thatcher, in one way or another, but it’s the same to some extent. Debuting NXT heel Timothy Thatcher in 2020 is not heroic WXW Champion Timothy Thatcher in 2019, and EVOLVE’s stoic young star Timothy Thatcher is not the PWG version who emerged as a more shapeless version of himself, out of place and only there to have a Good Match, instead of being allowed to get deeper into the character work that always does so much for him.
The difference between this and all of their other work is that, for once, this is not a match about Timothy Thatcher.
For once, Biff Busick vs. Timothy Thatcher is about Biff Busick’s struggle, and that makes all the difference in the world.
It’s every bit as messy and desperate as always between these two, but with a dignity and grace that also feels just a little different. They rarely get to aim for epic, and while this is for nothing at all, it feels like a title match in all the ways that matter. That’s not to say it isn’t still a grimy and dirty classic, but it is to say that we get to experience the descent into that from a place of respectability, and it’s that fall that is always so much more interesting to me. It’s slow and agonizing in the best possible way, dragging the process out so that every peak and valley stands out, while never once getting boring.
Thatcher attacks the wrist and hand instead of his arm, in another change that appeals very specifically to me, before they go into one of the best finishes they’ve ever had together, as Thatcher’s hyperfocus costs him. He needs to both insult Biff but also only finishes one way, so when he tries to tie the Saka Otoshi into his armbar, the set up is just unnatural enough that Busick can counter the only unnatural and stilted motion Timothy Thatcher has ever made, before bully choking the life out of him until Thatcher finally gives up, ending their rivalry as it began.
The crown jewel of Biff Busick’s farewell but his entire independent run, and not far off for Thatcher either.
42. JON MOXLEY VS. JIMMY JACOBS, DGUSA BUSHIDO: CODE OF THE WARRIOR (10/29/2010)
Beyond just hitting an emotional chord with me because of who and what this was based around, this does so many things that I absolutely love.
It’s a bloodbath, it’s incredibly efficient at under fifteen minutes, there’s stabbing, and it’s a story both about an underdog and about a veteran turning back the clock. It’s also specifically just so smart about everything it does. Moxley always comes off tougher and stronger, even at the end, losing more because he was always more focused on violence and punishment than actually trying to win. Jimmy found a way and pressed his openings in very specific ways, but they did everything correctly to make this feel like a situation where everything broke perfectly to result in this outcome, including the all-time great finish, where Jimmy stabs Moxley in the groin with a railroad spike until he says the magic words.
Moxley and Jimmy deliver a perfect chunk of violence, everyone looks better coming out of this, and most importantly, it exists as the perfect cathartic ending for this chapter of one of wrestling’s greatest stories.
One of the best blowoffs and best matches of this type of the decade, and again with one of these more personal favorites, I absolutely accept being on an island there. I will build a raft, come back, and talk about these matches even more.
41. KAZUCHIKA OKADA VS. HIROSHI TANAHASHI, NJPW WRESTLE KINGDOM X (1/4/2016)
Time’s arrow neither reverses nor stands still. It merely marches forward.
The most definitive passing of the torch in wrestling not only all decade, but probably all century to the point. Okada gets his coronation, rights the wrongs of the year prior, and all of these things that me and people like me had been trying to avoid for the last four years.
It is what it is and it was what it was always going to be.
Would that the arrow moved the other way, but it doesn’t, it never has, and it’s never going to.
It’s a classical sort of main event struggle, the thing that Tanahashi always has done so well and that a thousand other would-be successors aren’t anywhere near as good at. Teases and payoffs, both long and short term, full of cool ideas, clear progression, nice little sells, and a few real wild bumps. A full assed Tokyo Dome Epic. As usual, what works so well and what gets them so far is the story told along with all of those wonderful movements and the marks of craftsmanship, and the way in which they go about telling it. Kazuchika Okada begins this match as the champion, but he does not begin this match as The Man. He’s confident, but in an equal sort of a way. He avoids traps, but he’s still a little bit of a shithead about some things and suffers for it. Not being trapped by Tanahashi so much any longer, avoiding set ups, but not quite there. At some point in the middle of this match, that shift happens. Nobody realizes it immediately, not even either man in the match (in the most heartbreaking fashion, Tanahashi is the last person in the world to truly get it), nor anyone at home. The most striking thing in all of this is that there is no one obvious moment where you can go “yes, this is the change”. It’s a process. It’s a slow one, but when the ending stages of it come, it is definitive and it is obvious and hits like a god damned sledgehammer.
What’s done is done, the present is here, and you cannot fight against it.
Tanahashi didn’t do anything wrong. There’s no obvious mistake he makes. Okada is ready and has some stuff set up, and he’s able to gut it out at the end, but it’s the first time Tanahashi loses to Okada where you can’t really point out any reason why it happens.
It just does. That’s where the real transition is. It’s not in strategy or wrestling a perfect match. It’s in the fact that, suddenly, it’s Hiroshi Tanahashi who has to wrestle the perfect match to succeed, and that somewhere along the way, that quiet easy confidence transferred itself to Kazuchika Okada. They began the match as equals, and along the way, Kazuchika Okada became The Man, and Tanahashi became something more like a living legend.
Once again, the cruel randomness of the sport is never in flukes, but in how much changes, and how quickly.
For the rest of the match, the only person unaware of this change is Hiroshi Tanahashi, and God bless our Ace, because he tries so hard in spite of it. Chances he shouldn’t be taking, desperate roll ups, even finally getting to the knee in the back half of the match. It’s never enough, nothing ever seems even close to it, and as the realization sets in for every other single person watching this, it’s like something out of a horror movie, everyone knowing what’s happening but powerless to stop it and powerless to warn him against it. He’s able to kick out of the Rainmaker again, but famously, Okada doesn’t break wrist control when Tanahashi tries to block the Rainmaker with his trademark slap as he did a year earlier, and a second Rainmaker finally gives Okada his Tokyo Dome win over Tanahashi.
This is the end of an era more so than most other singular matches in wrestling history (really only like Starrcade 1983’s main event and like Austin/Michaels and a few others even come close), and unfortunately, the end of one of my favorite eras.
If the middle of the decade, specifically 2015-16 can exist as a concept, if it can be bottled into one match that represents both the importance, the definitiveness, and the casual cruelty at times of the transition from era to era, this is as good a pick as any.
40. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. KAZUCHIKA OKADA, NJPW DESTRUCTION IN KOBE (9/23/2018)
The answer, or rebuttal, to the above simply has to follow.
For the fourth time on this particular list, the charm here is less in the margins and the minute details, but the big shifts and changes, and how great Tanahashi and Okada are at expressing those in roles that again feel just slightly updated enough to feel fresh. Okada, outright desperate for the first time in years, and Tanahashi with an even greater sense of desperation, to match his best knee selling performance in a year full of those.
Above all, what this match does so right is that, for the first time maybe ever between them, it’s a match where both guys come at the match with imperfect approaches and mess up. Okada is too aggressive and makes the mistake of not changing anything from the last match, mistaking a previous time limit draw for Tanahashi being saved. Tanahashi is a little too excited by the potential to pull off an insane comeback and in trying a little too much, is betrayed by his failing body. Okada wrestles arguably a little better match in how he reacts to the mistakes of Tanahashi, but while Tanahashi’s errors are smaller ones that add up, it’s Okada who makes the bigger ones, culminating in an ending that, like the half-hour draw before it, feels like as much of a statement about pro wrestling strategy as it does a moral judgment.
Okada wrestles assured that it will all break in his favor, while Tanahashi forces it and smashes his body up against the wall until something breaks in his favor, because he wants it too much and tries too hard for them not to. Tanahashi not only has the heart and the will that Okada seems to lack yet again, but also comes prepared with a change in offense and a new High Fly Flow variant to set up the original as the finish, whereas Okada never bothered preparing anything new, because he never thought he had to. It’s a beautiful thing, the end product of years and years of work, failures to set up successes, losses to set up draws to set up one of the best feeling victories not just of the year but of the entire decade, and doing so in a way that not only makes sense, but that makes that feeling even more joyful and that result more satisfying that it would have seemed on paper.
Wrestling, when done correctly like this long-term post-Ace Hiroshi Tanahashi story from January 5th, 2016 through January 4th, 2019 (which is to say with very little nonsense, with characters you believe in, matches that whip ass, and the time and care taken to get as much out of every element of the process from start to finish over a several year span), can be cooler than sports because of matches and moments like this and the others like it.
Real sports are full of times when Our Heroes hit the wall, and cannot do the things they used to do anymore. They lost their lift up or their burst forward, and beyond winning, cannot do the things we’re used to seeing. As one of the greats and most frequently quoted pieces of work on this blog says, the cruel randomness of the sport is never in flukes, but in how much changes, and how quickly. It’s no fun, but you watch enough, and you get used to it as an inevitability, and a fact of life. Time’s arrow neither stands still nor reverses, it only marches forward. Nobody catches it, few ever even get close enough to it to o anything about it, but for a moment at the end, Hiroshi Tanahashi is able to keep pace with it like nobody else can, and first starts to close his hands around it.
That’s pro wrestling to me.
If not always stylistically, as I tend to prefer things a little more tight and efficient even if the believable dramatics of this cover all of those gaps, this is the sort of thing, narratively and emotionally speaking, that pro wrestling ought to aspire towards. The ability to see things you cannot see but badly want to see in real sports, the end result of being able to manipulate these contests not only in the moment but across a span of years and years and sometimes decades in order to create something like this or the second best match of the year, the most stunning, dramatic, and emotionally satisfying versions of events possible.
The magic we wish we saw elsewhere exists in the ring, and no more so than in these series of Tanahashi matches in 2018-19.
39. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. KAZUCHIKA OKADA, NJPW INVASION ATTACK (4/7/2013)
This one is still just the best of the bunch though.
New Japan’s 1990 Great American Bash, with what Okada lacks in natural babyface charm being more than made up for by not coming off a gigantic knee injury.
Tanahashi and Okada just have one of those matches, the one that catches them both at the right time and in the right way, with everything out of their control breaking exactly right to enhance everything within their control. It’s both so great that it feels tedious to talk about and write about and so great that virtually every word written about it it outside of the obscenely hyperbolic is true. There’s some minor flubs and I don’t care for the idea of a sympathetic Kazuchika Okada all that much, hence the inherent problems with this rivalry and why these matches are maybe lower on the decade list than some expected, but they really do a spectacular job with this one.
It’s one of the all-time great Tanahashi performances, it’s virtually a lock for being the best Okada babyface performances ever, and it all just works out perfectly. What this on lacks in the emotional punch of later meetings is made up for by it coming in their physical primes, and it being a climax of its own, just as much a beneficiary of the patterns and ideas offered up in the matches before it. I don’t feel incredibly strongly about it, it’s not the Tanahashi vs. Okada match that I’m ever going to spend time going to bat for, but watching them again and again, I don’t have a strong enough argument against it as the best one.
The consensus is right about this being the best one, although it is wrong about this being the best work either man had all decade.
38. SHINSUKE NAKAMURA VS. TOMOHIRO ISHII, NJPW G1 CLIMAX 24 DAY SEVEN (8/1/2014)
The most underrated New Japan match of the decade.
Sometimes a match clicks for you personally in a way that it doesn’t for anyone else. It’s one of the joys of fandom, finding a personal connection with something other people don’t. This is one of those matches for me, genuinely one of my favorites ever, even if it’s only the fifth best match of the year.
Nakamura yet again has the greatest New Japan match in a given year in a sub twenty minute epic against a lower ranked opponent, now aided by the power of a Tomohiro Ishii G1/K-Hall combo. An unbeatable combination within an unbeatable combination.
This time, there’s no real hatred or violent spirit, like the sorts of matches that carried these two forward in 2013. It’s something just a little more relatable once again, functionally a pro wrestling labor dispute as CHAOS’ enforcer insists on his just due from the stable’s leader, who tries to never give anybody their due. Ishii reveres Nakamura, but all the same, he is not afraid of him and he will beat his ass. It’s easy and beautiful and most of all, the sort of real shit that anybody who’s ever had a real job or even just like a cool big brother can understand. Ishii drags that appreciation and recognition out of Nakamura every time he shuts him down, taking more than just his pound of flesh along the way. It’s a fascinating take on the usual story, because Ishii really just wants it out of this one guy, and Nakamura is finally forced to give it up to have any chance of winning.
Big Tom and Shinsuke Nakamura tell a beautiful modern fairy tale, in which labor beats the shit out of management hard enough and for long enough that at the end of the process, it feels like gains have been made. Flair vs. Arn for the modern fans, with a worse result, but a far better finish.
Another classic Ishii effort, and one of those infuriating Nakamura performances that shows the sort of wrestler he can be, but that he so often never even bothers to aim for.
Had Ishii won, this is likely up even higher, with another match along these same lines.
37. KENNY OMEGA VS. HIROSHI TANAHASHI, NJPW WRESTLE KINGDOM 13 (1/4/2019)
Endings matter.
This is the culmination of all those great stories from the previous year’s Tanahashi vs. Okada matches, along with Tanahashi vs. Ibushi, as the Ace not only catches the arrow, but hurls it backwards for a moment.
Stylistically, Kenny obviously fits more naturally with guy like Okada and Ibushi, but it’s a shame these two were never quite on the same page enough to have more than their two matches together, because in this match, they feel like an even better fit than any of those pairings, at least in a larger sense. Ideological firebrands with an inclination towards the Big Match, with a real nose for spectacle, and all that can mean, especially with such a clear ideological struggle at the heart. Omega and Tanahashi feel completely on the same page in terms of the larger picture, despite the conflict over the smaller details and the moment to moment picture, and it makes for, sneakily, the last all-timer from New Japan in their 2010s peak.
At no point from start to finish is this not a remarkably rude and unbelievably mean-spirited affair. Most of that’s coming from Omega with his gross offense from start to finish, but there’s no absence of belligerence from Hiroshi Tanahashi either. As soon as Omega starts trying to preen and posture early on, Tanahashi slaps the shit out of him. It’s not like Tanahashi doesn’t throw a slap in every match, but it’s usually a late match strike used to either slow someone or stun someone, a tactic to keep somebody back, or daring them to fight him on a more physical level. Here, it’s dismissive and rude. Likewise, Tanahashi also has a way of employing certain things to what feels like a more insulting effect than usual. When one stands explicitly for tradition, things like the Cobra Stretch and Dragon Screws have more of an impact than usual. Specifically, when Tanahashi uses the Styles Clash at a key point here, it feels like a real specific insult to Omega, and one that people siding with Tanahashi are going to whole heartedly agree with.
The meanness also pours out of Omega, who has, genuinely, his career performance. His striking is better than ever, there seems to be some extra snap on his already snappy offense that borders on cruelty sometimes, and in spite of this never becoming a full on Tanahashi Leg Match, Omega also spends a big chunk of this putting forth the best limb selling performance of his life too, going above and beyond what the match asks of him. Mechanically, he is perfect. As a character, he’s never been more contemptible in a serious main event sort of a way. If he was like this all the time, I would never have an unkind word to say. Nothing is more annoying than someone disgusting and annoying becoming actually great at something, and in that case, this may well be Omega’s career performance, turning himself not only into an offensive dynamo, but into a mountain of a challenge for Tanahashi that not only feels genuine, but one that when overcome, feels like a significant achievement.
It’s a perfect end to Omega’s time in New Japan, ultimately finally defeated by the forces of good, as a great evil finally banished from the land.
Omega becomes the best version of himself that he ever could be, in a story sense and also in a mechanical one, but just simply isn’t at that level that the all-time greats are. He reaches a ceiling that explains why, as a character, he had to leave. It’s the sort of match with so much on the line in terms of wrestling philosophy and the ideology of what the company can be in both directions and so much shit talked going into it that while not official, the loser should have to go away for a while.
Tanahashi wins his final IWGP Heavyweight Title not only with a match that finally seems to win the ideological war between the two poles in New Japan for the last three years, but also does something both far funnier and far more interesting than just that. In the process of showing just where in the ring the magic still lives, in the process of expelling this force and affirming that his own style and ideology is the best, Hiroshi Tanahashi of all people somehow winds up having one of the great Inokiist classics of the last ten years.
Go Ace.
36. TWIN TOWERS VS. STRONG BJ, BJW @ KORAKUEN HALL (5/28/2015)
The best version of this style of tag all decade.
A half hour epic, which stunningly — both given how long half an hour is and the style they wrestle — never even comes close to feeling its length. The pacing is perfect, slowly building without ever really announcing that this is going half an hour as so many modern Japanese half hour draws tend to do. Four of the five best of the generation at this style (again, professionally RIP to the god Yoshihito Sasaki) manage to stretch it out as perfectly as it can be stretched. No strike fails to land with an audible thud nor fails to be sold in the exact correct way that the moment in the match demands. No turn of events in the match feels mistimed. Beyond that all of it whips ass, every moment of it feels CORRECT, which is so wildly impressive.
As always, it’s never just about how hard they hit or the horrific angles from which they’re thrown onto the heads and necks. All of that’s helpful, but it’s everything else that makes a match like this so special. Okabayashi’s impassioned attack on Shuji Ishikawa after coming up short four months earlier. Ishikawa himself badly wants back at Sekimoto after his own first taste of defeat in a long time two months prior. Sekimoto and Kohei Sato are both all-world killing machines who love to hurl their brains and limbs at each other and anything that is unfortunate enough to wander into their field of vision, but the match hinges and inevitably succeeds because of the Okabayashi vs. Ishikawa match up in the back third, and it is otherworldly, both in terms of violence and spirit.
Everyone hits unbelievably hard. They space it and escalate it in such a way that just about every major move feels like a potential match ender. They’ve laid a coherent and intriguing enough foundation that I, the discerning viewer, was hooting and hollering on my third or fourth go around. It’s a beautiful beautiful thing they create. One of the great dick measuring contests in recent memory and fittingly, the measuring stick for matches in this style from here on out, along with a particularly great rematch that landed earlier on this very list.
A stylistic classic, really only behind a few others even higher up this list as the dudes rock match of the decade.
35. HARASHIMA VS. KUDO, DDT AUDIENCE 2015 (5/31/2015)
Excluding Dick Togo vs. Antonio Honda, something so wildly different that it almost feels transported in from another time or place, this is the all-time DDT classic.
A deeply brutal match, but also an especially fascinating one.
They’re longtime foes so nothing is new, especially after their 2014 gem, but it’s in this match that HARASHIMA offers up the year’s best knockout and/or concussion selling following a cut-off knee to the dome, in addition to the year’s best body attack. HARASHIMA is able to deliver the all-time great body punch transition, but even when in control, HARASHIMA never feels entirely like himself. Always needing to pause before or after anything he does, HARASHIMA is never quite himself and conveys this with a subtlety largely absent from almost anyone else trying to portray the same concept.
HARASHIMA’s selling is great enough that late in the match, KUDO is able to garner truly believable nearfalls off of simple kicks to the head that would never end a match of this caliber otherwise. He’s great enough in this match to turn off the part of the brain that always pops up in wrestling matches to say things like “they haven’t gone into finisher trading yet” or “that move never ends a match”. In these small moments, anything is possible. More than most wrestlers ever, HARASHIMA perfectly captures that feeling of someone just getting hit a certain way in a game or a fight and not being the best version of themselves for the rest of it. It’s impressive, but it’s also the sort of thing that really interests me in pro wrestling, the way they can simulate these very real sorts of ideas common in other athletic endeavors.
Truly and genuinely, there was something magical or ethereal in the air in Korakuen Hall in the last week of May 2015. The universe with a hand upon the scale. This is the second top ten match of the year to happen in the same building in a four day span, each a stylistic classic and emblematic of the exact style of wrestling of their respective companies.
Sometimes, there is no explanation for why one version of match is better than the others. It’s more art than science, and sometimes, there is just magic present at a specific moment. Combine it with an all-time great HARASHIMA performance, and it’s just undeniable.
34. KEVIN STEEN VS. EL GENERICO, PWG STEEN WOLF (10/22/2011)
Second best.
We’re just talking about matches here, but if you include everything after the bell leading up to the return of Super Dragon to help fight off The Young Bucks, PWG may have never had a finer hour.
Big Kev and El Generico do some really horrific and grotesque things to each other in this match. That’s not new for these two, but it’s so much more efficient and meaner, while still having that same scope. It’s proficient and skillful in a way that their other gimmick matches simply are not, despite all of their charms. The Fight Without Honor ten months before this isn’t a match I despise or anything, but everything that it got correct is streamlined here. There is no fat. At no moment do they pause to make sure you understand a story beat, because this isn’t a match that bothers with these big emotional moments.
It doesn’t need to, and that’s the charm of it, and of PWG in general at this point. You’re not a fucking idiot, you don’t need these things spoon-fed to you.
The match is also appallingly mean spirited. All of the matches these two have are great at conveying some sense of bad feelings, but this is the pettiest. There are all these delightful little moments in the first two-thirds of this where either could very easily climb the ladder and try to win, only for them to choose not to. Sometimes it’s Kev hatefully shoving a standing ladder onto Generico on the mat. Sometimes it’s not waiting to even stand up before shoving the ladder over while the other is trying to climb. It’s violent and horrific and mean in a way that a ladder match really hasn’t been in a very long time.
Beyond just pure violence and recklessness, there’s also a heart to this people never quite remember, as it is always Steen who sets up these insane contraptions and tries to make it worse, only to constantly be punished for it in the end, resulting in that magical moment when Generico yanks the vent cover down along with the title. Kevin Steen finally pays for his crimes in a way that feels entirely fair, leading to what comes after, which might just be the greatest angle of the decade too.
On top of being an incredible match, this is a must-watch on a historical and anthropological level too. If one match (and post match) can ever totally explain and wholly sum up an entire era of independent wrestling, this is the one.
33. CM PUNK VS. DANIEL BRYAN, WWE OVER THE LIMIT 2012 (5/20/2012)
The near ultimate victory lap for 2000s independent wrestling, even with a bullshit WWE sheen over the top of it.
I don’t know how to talk about this without addressing the obvious sentiment. It was and is incredibly rewarding to go from watching these guys in the Frontier Fieldhouse in 2005 to doing this, even if it wasn’t the main event. It’s a feeling that’s hard to capture in quite the same day in an environment where independent wrestlers don’t quite have to toil and grind it out like these two did. An environment that, no matter what anyone might attribute to anyone else, is entirely because of these two. So, the entire match has this undercurrent to it. For whatever they do or don’t do, it’s very hard to wipe a smile off of my face when I watch it or see a picture of it. It’s really cool!
Luckily, the match is tremendous too. At the time, someone on PWO or DVDVR or Wrestling KO or any number of forums I signed up for and rarely ever posted on called this match “the last great 2000s ROH Title match”. It’s the perfect description of this, and I would be remiss to not mention that and ascribe the credit where it belongs. It’s so true. Feeling out process on the mat that lasts just long enough, dueling limbwork, big finisher run at the end. It has all the trademarks, but it also has the sense of timing and heart and strong character work that ninety percent of the people trying to step into those gigantic shoes always seem to miss.
It’s a twenty plus minute scientific match, but also one with real grit and grime to it at moments. It’s not a perfect match, but it is a perfect expression of the sort of wrestling that these guys believed in, and how best to fit it into a WWE ring. In terms of what they do with the match on a larger narrative level, Punk and Bryan also take some cues from the best to ever do it, a scientific heel who takes cheap shots and gets aggressive runs across a similarly tough but scientific babyface, who is the first guy he’s come across who knows how to take his advantages away from him. You might have heard of something like that before, it’s basis of one of the greatest rivalries in the history of wrestling, featuring someone Bryan drew comparisons to when he was ROH Champion and someone CM Punk learned a lot from in the same era.
The match succeeds in all the same ways, even with all of the WWE concessions it feels like they have to make before the end, including the ending itself.
As usual, WWE fumbles everything after the immediate moment and they never get the blow off they deserve. There’s no Clash VI, there’s no Landover fancam, and while the Money in the Bank street fight is about as good as the overrated WrestleWar ’89 match, it doesn’t possess half the sense of grandeur. Once again though, it’s the WWE. It’s the WWE and even getting this in the WWE in the way we got this one specific match is still a little unbelievable to me.
If you only get one of them, getting the Chi Town Rumble version of Punk and Bryan is more than enough.
Flair and Steamboat aside, it also might be my favorite Bret Hart match of the 2010s.
32. ANTONIO CESARO VS. WILLIAM REGAL, WWE NXT (12/25/2013)
It is popular these days to insult William Regal.
Typically, I stay out of it, because I get the impulse. An obvious WWE stooge in his old age, being a little toadie for a guy who constantly undercut him on TV, it’s embarrassing stuff. The bit is taken too far by the less educated cutting down his in-ring work, there aren’t nearly as many all-time classics as there ought to be for an all-time talent who wrestled as long as he did, but in the last few years of his in-ring career this decade, he had the sort of gems that very briefly showed what he was capable of.
First, this one.
It is William Regal’s last match, and even if not quite as great as the Moxley series in FCW, it’s maybe a more fitting end for him. Regal and Moxley had an immediate undeniable spark, but when you look at Regal’s style, his career, all of what he is and what he’s meant, there’s more fitting final opponent for him than Antonio Cesaro.
The match carries that specific weight throughout, with the old villain displaying a secret heroism that only reared its head for the first time in the aforementioned Moxley series, going into a match that he knows he is most likely going to lose, because it’s a fight that can no longer be avoided. The end is here, this specific match up is always going to be the end, and there is no point in running from it. Villain or not, you can still go out with some pride. Look at it, accept it, and walk into it with your head held high.
Regal fights like hell against the dying of the light, and it does not matter at all. His old tricks do nothing. He is not as strong or fast or as technically proficient as Antonio Cesaro. On this night at the end of his career, Regal is presented with the man who feels like the logical endpoint for the style Regal spent his career exposing the American public to and for the cold, calculating, and dispassionate ideology that Regal spent most of his career succeeding through. It’s the end William Regal has spent twenty plus years creating for himself, first passively, and then by personally recruiting Cesaro to join the WWE. He destroys Regal’s knee in the way Regal used to destroy arms. It’s violent. It’s incredibly brutal. It never feels mean though, not in a personal way. It’s Regal echoed again. Regal manages another old trick and attacks the arm, but it never matters. Cesaro is disabled by it, but he’s more diverse and athletic than Regal ever was. Regal was cutting edge once, and now Cesaro is. It happens to everyone eventually. Regal gets floored by a dropkick he never sees coming, his head is crushed by a double stomp, and Cesaro puts a resounding and decisive conclusion on it with the Gotch-style Neutralizer.
They get it exactly right. If you hate the man, it probably feels great. If you still like him a little bit, trying to remember the wrestler he was, there’s just enough tragedy underneath the brutality to give it a little extra force too.
But this was never about the result. It was about the process.
It’s the end Regal deserved, the conclusion his character and his style and his ideology on screen always warranted. As a fifty hour podcast with a similar focus stated in a similar discussion on this match, it’s maybe the best non-accidental retirement match that there’s ever been.
31. CHRIS HERO VS. AKIRA TOZAWA, PWG BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES 2010 NIGHT TWO (9/5/2010)
Lightning in a bottle.
The reason I said earlier that matches like Hero/Andrews, Hero/Ishii, and the Mania Weekend version of Hero/Zack were the best versions of the Hero Match in 2016 is because this match is the best version of the Hero formula period.
Hero and Tozawa make a perfect couple. The best bully in wrestling and a ball of energy underdog with some of the most likeable offense in the world, who also happens to connect with this specific audience in a way that nobody can ever manufacture. When he first dropped all that weight about a year before this, people made Barry Windham or Steve Corino jokes, but in this match, Hero finds his 2 Cold Scorpio or Yoshihiro Tajiri, respectfully.
They are meant to wrestle each other and over fifteen minutes that packs the punch of twenty five and flies by like under five, the match sees the best versions of each. A Chris Hero who works as a mean gatekeeper that gradually gets nastier and nastier, angry that he has to keep going bigger offensively, but still keeps the match simple enough not to undercut anything, each moment individually and the point as a whole coming across with perfect confidence. An Akira Tozawa who moves up from pure underdog work to genuine ass kicking, transforming himself into an actual threat, and who, on a U.S. independent scene that falsely claims at least two of those every weekend, puts forth a genuine star-making performance.
Chris Hero gets his win, but the entire production is so effective that none of that — who won or lost, how they won or lost, what happened with the rest of the tournament (look it up at your own peril) — matters.
Tozawa becomes a superstar in Reseda, Chris Hero cements himself as the best wrestler in the world during this exact moment, and in the process of a match making both undeniable, we also get one of those perfect wrestling moments. Reseda Magic at its finest.
All killer, no filler.
30. JOHN CENA VS. BROCK LESNAR, WWE SUMMERSLAM 2014 (8/17/2014)
A work of true genius, which like Atlantis vs. La Sombra, kept climbing and climbing as I put this list together.
Not even bothering to live up to the their first match this decade, a match so great that I don’t think it is at all a spoiler to tell you it was top five of the decade and it sure isn’t number five, they not only go in a different direction from that match, but in a different direction from virtually every other major WWE Title match in recent memory.
You know the story. Cena gets a minute and a half of offense. Lesnar destroys him and wins the title back. Sixteen German Suplexes. The past, present, and future runs through John Cena, emphasis on “through”. Brock Lesnar eats John Cena alive, devouring the Old Ace routine whole and spitting him back out into the world as a Living Legend, ejected from the title picture. It’s also Lesnar finally casting off his growing pains in the return to WWE, almost losing once again because of his own arrogance, only now recovering and taking it all back from Cena. Shaking off a classic out-of-thin-air Cena last second rally before the win makes the point that much clearer.
Cena himself is otherworldly great in this match. It’s his second greatest babyface performance ever, only behind the literal best match of the decade three years and a month earlier. There’s a recognition of loss face after Brock’s one major kickout that rivals and surpasses any lauded facial sell from Misawa or whoever you’d like to name. The different types of knock out selling Cena shows throughout the prolonged beatdown are all incredible too. It’s the rare match that makes me actually wonder if Eddie Kingston is the best knock out seller in the world or not. It’s Brock’s win, but this is Cena’s match.
And it’s so crushing. Forceful and loud and as hell and totally undeniable, a complete slaughter of the last old god remaining, boldly announcing the new order for the whole world to see. It’s over and Brock Lesnar killed it. Zero wiggle room. Even less hope. It’s desperately rooting for someone to get up, who you never had to root for to get up before, because it was automatic. Not entirely because you like him, even if you do, but because he’s the only thing left even halfway worth believing in. The only one left who even has a chance of stopping this. Fitting for the era of the WWE Lesnar presides over, it’s heartbreaking and final and just a total bummer, in the best possible way.
A coup d’etat in real time, with almost everyone in the world on the losing side.
Few things all decade landed with this kind of force, and fewer still were as great as this was underneath all of that too.
29. RODERICK STRONG VS. MIKE BAILEY, PWG MYSTERY VORTEX III (6/26/2015)
The career bully performance by Roderick Strong is matched perfectly by independent wrestling’s best underdog, similarly turning in one for his all time highlight reel.
It’s the perfect blend of that reliable old trope of a young breakout star taking a challenge against the veteran heel, the truest of classic pro wrestling stories, and a newer style. Barry Windham vs. 2 Cold Scorpio or Ric Flair vs. Brian Pillman or Shane Douglas vs. Mikey Whipwreck, but in the middle of Reseda, and executed perfectly for a PWG audience while still retaining everything that makes this story so special.
Roderick Strong has never been ruder, pettier, or more purposefully violent than he is in this match. It’s not just the chops or backbreakers, it’s the reckless throws into the post, and everything he does in between all the major offense. It’s a perfect performance from Strong, both because it’s equally thrilling and effective, but also because it brings the same out of Bailey. Instead of just being a likeable white meat babyface Going Through It, he kicks the shit out of Strong in response and turns the match into something resembling a realer sort of an altercation. It makes the match so much better and as much as Strong’s performance, is what’s responsible for this being on that next level. It’s not just that he’s an endearing figure, it’s also that he can get up and kick this guy’s ass too. The best wrestling like this has someone you want to see succeed opposite someone who you want to see fail, not just one or the other.
What they have here is a true masterpiece.
A match that’s both spiritually and stylistically perfect. Equal parts classic wrestling storytelling and a jaw dropping display of modern violence and all of the coolest stuff in the entire world. To call it Speedball’s career match feels like something of a no brainer, but it’s somewhere in Strong’s top five or ten as well. It works in all of the ways that wrestling is supposed to work, and goes above and beyond in every possible respect.
The crown jewel of the best individual year anybody had all decade for Roderick Strong, and the best PWG World Title match of the decade on top of that.
28. EL GENERICO VS. KEVIN STEEN, PWG BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES 2011 (8/20/2011)
Like Generico/Castagnoli earlier in the show, it’s the most streamlined and ruthlessly efficient version of a beloved match up, and that does a whole lot for me. Once you’ve seen the grandeur once, it loses its impact. Matches these two have had based solely on a few dramatic moments don’t hold up nearly as well as this one does, because this strips away everything except what’s immediately necessary for a Steen and Generico match to work.
It’s a weird thing to write that a match up is better in PWG because they cut out the nonsense and get to the heart of the matter, but that’s really the case here. They leave behind the props and hysterics and cut it down to the bones, resulting in the most spartan kind of epic these two could ever have. They’re too worn down and beaten up to do anything but run at each other as fast as possible and huck those bombs out. Without the aid of shortcuts, the assistance of a long runtime, or anything silly going on around the match, we’re left with just these two in a small building. They’re confined to themselves, only able to focus on a handful of big bombs and more importantly, the relationship between the two of them, all leading to Generico snapping in both the most violent and believable fashion of any of their many meetings.
There’s a lack of space to the entire thing and a desperation to it. It’s hard to put a finger on why, but that feeling lives in the air, and two talented wrestlers grab onto it, work with it, and it greatly enhances everything that they do. The result of this ultra-rare energy for Reseda results in the Steen vs. Generico match that I find most interesting, and also given all the usual shortcuts left at the door, the one I find most impressive.
Of all of their matches, this the match that most succinctly and accurately sums up both who they are, who they are to the fans, and most importantly, who they are to each other. It is the rivalry summed up completely and totally.
Functionally, this is the only Steen vs. Generico match.
Next to Cooperative Calligraphy, the best bottle episode of the decade.
Tell your disappointment to suck it.
27. DICK TOGO VS. ANTONIO HONDA, DDT SWEET DREAMS (1/30/2011)
Honda and Togo have one of the best DDT matches ever, although to me that always comes with an asterisk on it, because a real good chunk of this match feels less like a DDT match and more like something that traveled in from another time or place or galaxy, and just so happened to land inside a DDT ring.
The things people always focus on here are the blood and the punching, and fair enough, but underneath Dick Togo playing around with his favorite kind of wrestling, there’s a classic kind of DDT approach too, with stellar arm work on both sides of the match. It’s not just the big gif exchanges you can find in a longer review of the match or Honda pulling the strap down, there’s a real foundation laid that makes those moments in the back half mean so much more, land with so much more weight, and feel so much more triumphant. To reel it off quick, there’s some stuff you can cut, the arm selling isn’t the greatest ever, it’s hard to ever actually buy Honda winning, and it feels kind of like an act at points just because you know it’s sort of walking in the footsteps of the sorts of matches both these guys love, but it’s such a huge victory for everyone involved.
Most immediately on paper, this is about Antonio Honda stepping up big in a major spot and looking like he actually belongs in the ring with a wrestler like this in a match like this, and he does, but a little more quietly, it’s a big victory for Dick Togo, on every level. This is the sort of match he’s been losing for like fifteen years, but he finally got out of his own way enough to hang on here. More mechanically speaking, It’s not a perfect match, exactly, but it’s at least a match that has something to say. Togo’s own performance sets it apart from just being another underdog match, but a match about finally overcoming his own self destructive bad habits. On more of a behind the scenes level, it’s not just an elevation of Honda, but it’s the sort of match Dick Togo’s been trying to have with people for years, only now finding his perfect dance partner for it.
Above all, this is a match that understands the process of a title match like this, and shows that, actually yeah, you can give everything to everybody, and achieve so much on character levels too, so long as you take care with every step along the way.
Take care of that, make sure every piece matters, and you really can have everything.
26. BROCK LESNAR VS. AJ STYLES, WWE SURVIVOR SERIES (11/19/2017)
Real real casually, this is kind of a masterpiece.
It is a match that gets to the root of not only who both wrestlers in these incarnations, but arguably the ideal versions of these wrestlers. It’s as simple as a match can be, a bare bones exploration of a dominant monster against a hyperathletic got-that-dawg-in-em overachiever with little more narrative in play than simply throwing these two wrestlers at each other for the first time. It just so happens that when that monster is Brock Lesnar and that overachiever is AJ Styles, meeting for the first time fifteen years after both were the two big breakout stars in wrestling in 2002, you don’t need a whole lot more than giving them the stage and getting the hell out of the way.
The match is also astonishingly well put together, on top of the thrill of it all.
During the first half of this match, AJ Styles gets virtually no offense in.
Brock Lesnar cuts him off starting tentatively and smartly and begins hurling him around. He clobbers him in a bunch of fun ways in between, tosses him around before even going into any of his suplexes, and for the first time in a REALLY long time (and the first this decade, I think), Brock Lesnar has one of the most athletic wrestlers in the entire world on the other end of it. Michael Cole pulls out the Brock Lesnar vs. John Cena comparison here, and while that is incredibly helpful later on at making AJ’s comeback feel special and like a genuinely huge achievement, it also has a way of drawing attention to how they handle a similar situation. While he lacks Cena’s all-time level babyface gift, Styles can modify his bumping for each one in a way Cena wasn’t really able to, and the effect is surprisingly similar in its effect. Sometimes he’ll bounce off and into the ropes, other times right off the neck and onto his face. One time, my favorite of all of his reactions, Styles tries to stand up off of the third or fourth German Suplex, only to collapse again. It is maybe the year’s best single pure babyface performance, and in more of a down year than AJ had had since 2013, the exact kind of show of force and talent needed to display the wrestler that’s still in there.
Most of all though, what impresses me so much about the last half of this match is the way that “no God damned way” slowly transforms into “well, MAYBE”, the latter of which is the most powerful and impressive reaction in all of professional wrestling. This match still only ever has one outcome, but for just a few minutes here at the very end when AJ begins to unload (and it is a testament to both AJ’s match booking in the previous two years and the intensity with which he woks with that he’s able to make some of this offense like the forearm and a 450 Splash feel like it can beat 2017 Brock Lesnar), they were able to make everybody in the entire world forget that, and there are few stronger complements I can give to professional wrestlers or a professional wrestling match than that. It is one thing to activate a kind of lizard-brained response, but it is is another entirely to make a viewer ignore everything they know about wrestling and the WWE and that this match is telling them, and simply believe. The expected happens, Brock wins again, but it’s those moments of pure belief that stand the test of time.
The joy is in the process, and few were richer or more enjoyable than this.
A true achievement, not only delivering the sort of understated epic that I love to see, but doing it with basically nothing between them outside of its status as a pure dream match. It’s two all-timers coming in pretty cold and creating something real special simply by having the most logical match together possible, and through putting so much force and effort into the match beyond that.
Among the best not only of the year or decade, but in the careers of two different all-time greats.
25. KAZUCHIKA OKADA VS. KATSUYORI SHIBATA, NJPW SAKURA GENESIS (4/9/2017)
In so much as any match has flaws (there have only been a few truly perfect wrestling matches ever — your 12/6/96, Sami Zayn vs. Johnny Knoxville, etc.), this has them. They are primarily minor, and booking based such as Okada winning at all and such as Okada still being deeply deeply innately unlikeable as a top babyface and this feeling like the first match in a classic New Japan trilogy only for us to never actually get those later matches. It is not actually a match that ever suggests Okada is as tough as Shibata, so much as that he is tough enough to hang around and wait out a mistake finally happening, but I can also understand how that might be frustrating. These are the sorts of things that mean this is “only” one of the best matches of the decade and not, like, the best match I’ve ever seen or something.
Still, it is something of a marvel.
Any superlative you would like to throw at it will probably suffice. An absolute mother fucker, a true God Damner, a generational Encounter, it is all essentially correct.
Largely, that is because Katsuyori Shibata puts on the performance of a lifetime in this match. That is not to say it is his best performance ever, but it is such an interesting, diverse, and complete performance, that tragedy or not, I am honestly okay with it being his last ever full-time one, or last ever one in this style. In this match, Shibata is genuine, passionate, exciting, violent, crisp, unbelievably rude, and even more sympathetic in response. He delivers the meanest and most demoralizing beatdown anyone has ever given to Okada before or since, but he’s also the emotional motor behind the match, insisting on these broad statements about what wrestling is supposed to be, and being the one nailing all the little facial sells and things like that. He is the central character on both ends of the match, going for basically every single thing a performance possibly can be, and somehow, the match is actually better for it. Okada is not bad here, he is perfectly fine as the control group of the match, he is a perfect symbol for Shibata to hurl all of this at, and he holds up every piece of his end of the thing, but his role in this match is largely just to bare witness to one last performance from one of the greats.
This is Shibata’s match through and through, a gigantic statement of intent and belief in front of God and the entire world, as well as the perfect match for this exact moment in time in the world, and a half decade since has only made it clearer and more powerful.
Katsuyori Shibata would rather lose his way than win someone else’s, and I think that’s beautiful.
24. ROMAN REIGNS VS. AJ STYLES, WWE EXTREME RULES 2016 (5/22/2016)
That rhythm and feeling of the first match is still there. They begin hot, they waste very little time save for the one thing outside of their control, and virtually everything that happens between Reigns and Styles feels like either an attempt to immediately end the struggle, or something that’s only a step or two removed from that point. It’s another synthesis, but this time of that and a classic kind of Federation brawl. Retaining that general feeling and energy, but bigger and more grandiose. Throw in some blood and chairs to the face, work the interference a little more dramatically, and this is some real Attitude Era shit.
AJ Styles is out of this world great. The things people remember about this, I think, are the big AJ spots. His absolute God Damner of a back drop bump through the announce table. His Phenomenal Forearm off of the pre-show set when they fight into the crowd. Maybe even the grotesque powerbomb he takes onto the English announce table, fortunately allowing him a bounce before the table breaks, adding a brutality to the spot as well. There’s also the anger he brings whenever he gets to lay into Roman, of course, but years of TNA brawls have made him uniquely qualified to bridge this gap in a way that I don’t know that anybody else in wrestling could have. The walk-and-brawl is a bit that a hundred other wrestler would have done worse than AJ or gotten wrong in some way, giving up the plot and exposing the seams. AJ is so great at it though that it all feels fairly genuine, an extension of the fight they were having.
Roman Reigns is not as flashy as Styles in this match, but he’s just as great. Around the middle of the match, AJ cuts off a Superman Punch with a front chop block in the air. He never really goes to the leg again, using it just in that moment. However, Roman Reigns spends the rest of the match hobbling on the leg whenever possible. Beyond that, he does great little things like having trouble getting up after landing on his arm outside, having to push up using the other one instead. You don’t think of a match this packed with Stuff as being any kind of a selling showcase, but outside of the later Daniel Bryan matches or maybe the first Lesnar match, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better Roman Reigns selling performance.
In the end, Roman gets that Spear out of the air and wins. A result nobody really doubted, but like the month before, it’s done in a match that once again does a whole lot for everybody involved, on top of the incredible match. AJ Styles joins a real small group of guys like Bryan and Lesnar to realize what Roman’s gifts are and to craft a match around them that allows Roman to get the most out of his selling and his explosivity, not harming themselves in any way, and benefitting the guy more in one twenty-ish minute stretch than other big names could with years and years allegedly spent with the same goal in mind.
An all-time God Damner, among the great triumphs of the entire decade.
23. CM PUNK VS. JOHN CENA, WWE NIGHT OF CHAMPIONS 2012 (9/16/2012)
Their secret classic, on account of either the massive shadow it had to live in or a finish nobody properly appreciated, if not both.
What people usually pick up on here is the CM Punk Yankee pinstripe trunks, the combination of telling Boston to eat shit while also referencing their initial exchange a year earlier and saying he’s the man now.
The great part about that is that, on top of being another classic example of Punk knowing how to communicate ideas before anything has ever happened, that’s basically also the match, CM Punk at the peak of his powers and John Cena having to dig deeper and deeper to find anything that works against a guy who, just maybe, has him entirely figured out. Cena isnt just in there for another round against his greatest ever opponent, while both are in their artistic primes, he constantly makes choices that make this so interesting. Not just the finish everyone knows about, but breaking out a suicide dive, of all things. PWG Jawn a few years later gets the credit, mostly deserved, but of the matches where Cena purposely makes a point of doing tons of new stuff, this is the best.
On the other end, CM Punk puts on another career best level performance, and one of the great antagonistic performances in WWE history. Not any of that intimidated heel or coward/opportunist heel stuff WWE history is littered with, but a genuinely confident heel performance far more at home in Crockett than classic WWF, ring genius with only a little cheating, mixed with a constant stream of shit talk. It’s something far more genuine and interesting than the WWE had seen in a top heel champion spot since a young Lesnar, the sort of genuine challenge one-on-one that Cena hadn’t had in years, and never had in matches this great.
The finish is not the greatest they have in them, but honestly, I still like it a lot.
Maligned as it was by a lot of people with boring taste, I find it hard to be mad about serving story instead of serving the match first when the story and match are both already this great. Especially so when said story results in an even better match within the next six months. What they choose to do, and what that choice has to say, is something I find a thousand times more interesting than either man winning clean, or something as simple as new manager Paul Heyman being involved.
Cena overreaches, playing with things he has never tried before, attempting magicks he does not understand like Mickey animating a broomstick, and getting a double pin for it after a German Suplex off the ropes. It’s cool, unexpected, and in service to a larger singular character story arc of Cena trying to adjust and to the years long one between these two, importantly showing just how shaken up Cena was by not being able to solve this problem yet.
An incredible story about improvement, stagnation, and above all, the value of self-knowledge and confidence.
22. EDDIE KINGSTON VS. MIKE QUACKENBUSH, CHIKARA HIGH NOON (11/13/2011)
The biggest match in CHIKARA history, and right up there with the all around best.
By a stroke of a pen by Claudio Castagnoli months before, leaving the independents, this is even better than it likely could have been. Kingston vs. Claudio is the end of a great feud, but Kingston vs. Quackenbush is something even greater, and I barely even mean that he was his trainer once upon a time.
It’s the ultimate validation to instead have it come not only against said trainer, but against this guy, this monolith of what CHIKARA is, this monument to How Things Are Supposed To Be Done. Bryan is gone, Hero is gone(ish), all these people are gone, and Mike Quackenbush is all that’s left of the now-old unemotional technical genius archetype that used to be the trademark of all the old kings. It’s always been the contrast to the wild emotionality of Eddie Kingston. Every outburst, turn, bender, and step over the line Eddie’s done in and/or around CHIKARA has stood out in contrast to the calm consistency of guys like Quackenbush, Castagnoli, and Hero atop the promotion in the past. If this is Eddie Kingston’s official and formal ascent to that position, it’s also Quackenbush formally being put out to pasture himself, and especially in retrospect, having both come at once feels so good.
That idea especially stands out as such because of how literally they take that, and how literally they take the styles clash. Each man has a definitive style they want to wrestle and while they are both completely capable of meeting in the middle, the most interesting approach is to make the subtext the actual text. Kingston has no interest in the Quack match, but when Eddie re-injures his bad leg on a fluke in another classic Eddie Kingston misfortune, he gets drawn in anyways, and has to fight out of a spot where he’s always had trouble fighting out from.
On the other end, the match is spent trying to plug a dam, and once the dam breaks, he’s fucked, and he knows it. When it breaks open finally, the match is over within a minute. It’s incredibly cool to see how totally correct that little estimation is, the complete right read on a situation that makes Eddie’s victory all the more thrilling, especially when it’s a few major decisions — which is to say things he clearly thinks through, as opposed to operating on pure instinct — that finally lead Eddie Kingston to the big one.
The match is also among the most efficient epics in the history of U.S. independent wrestling. It’s pared down and austere as hell just like the rest of the tournament, but it’s all great — every goddamned second — so it doesn’t matter. There is a point to to everything that they do, everything in the match matters, and there is stunningly little fit on it. Every piece of this matters and has value. It matters, it’s perfectly constructed, and beyond that, it feels good as hell, delivering the all-time emotional high point in a promotion built around well-earned emotional high points.
Like so many other matches this high up the list, it is both great and important, with few matches succeeding in either area any more than this.
21. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. AJ STYLES, NJPW G1 CLIMAX 25 DAY SEVENTEEN (8/14/2015)
This is a pairing that, while occasionally producing great wrestling, often seemed to put their matches together which much more difficulty than made sense. Something never entirely clicked, but then they had this match, and it all just kind of came together. That’s not to put all of the credit on some ethereal G1 Magic, because AJ meeting Tanahashi on his level with leg work and the lack of interference for once also did a lot for them. A clearer story is told than ever before with dueling leg attacks, clearly illustrating differences between them and how they affect the match in moments both large and small.
Mostly though, it is kind of just this best case scenario.
Compared to every other match they’ve had together, and much of their best wok with other wrestlers, something about this feels effortless.
It all just seems to come together.
The most striking thing about it, years later, is how unbelievably confident and sure-footed the match feels at all times. Every single choice that they make feels correct, there’s virtually nothing out of place or nothing without value. They fly as close to the sun as possible without their wings burning to wax, with a mechanical excellence, pitch perfect environment, and unparalleled confidence that makes up for anything quite so minor.
For both men, it feels like the kind of match that they’ve both spent years trying to have. It’s a perfect meeting of the style of both, getting the combinations just right for once. Beyond that, the match is something closer than ever to the ideal version of a thing, this melding of classical old ideas with a newer style of wrestling, the match that Hiroshi Tanahashi and AJ Styles should always have been capable of. The bones of something timeless with a more modern offense and a faster pace around it, while not losing the better qualities of either.
The best version of both a Hiroshi Tanahashi match and an AJ Styles match at the same time, both incorporating the best elements of the other, while distinctly feeling like both at once.
20. AMIGO TAG VS. JIMMY SUSUMU/JIMMY KAGETORA, DG GATE OF PASSION 2015 DAY FOUR (4/9/2015)
This is a match that gets talked up a lot as a storytelling masterpiece, but it’s not quite that. There’s a clear underdog, a natural story, and it’s the kind of thing that would work 30 years from now, preserved on some theoretical Ditch style archive with two sentences to sum it up. “Ultra successful Jimmyz team tries to unseat Monster Express, aiming at the obvious weaknesses of perennial undercard underdog Shachihoko BOY. Can Masato Yoshino save his little buddy? The answer might not surprise you, but what happens next just might.” That’s it. All it has to be. It’s not all that dissimilar to the Misawa tags in the mid 90s, just with a worse wrestler in the Kobashi and Akiyama role, and maybe a better one in the Misawa role.
The real great matches don’t require supplemental homework to get them, and this is a really great match.
Truthfully, this is God’s own Twin Gate match.
Everything that could ever go right goes right, and nothing that could possibly go wrong goes wrong. Another story driven Dragon Gate epic, but also one that fills a not insignificant amount of space with limb work, only for the selling of each part of a double limb work match to be actually appropriate and to genuinely help the match out. Masato Yoshino has a career performance as a babyface hot tag, managing to perfectly walk a line with that and feeling like a big brother Ace figure but also hanging back enough to let the little guy have his moment. He does it perfectly, putting this among the most impressive performances of his career. Shachi winds up trapped alone at the end, and it’s another stroke of genius on display. Cut off from Yoshino, Susumu pours it on him. Instead of a big DG finishing run and some big move, they get it exactly right. Shachihoko stunningly survives two many lariats from Susumu, only to counter a third and dive into the single most desperate and frantic looking cradle pin I’ve ever seen in my life, just barely getting it done.
Fittingly, a match full of small miracles ends with a finish and a result that feels like a gigantic one.
In a lesser year, it would be the greatest feel good win of the year.
I’m not sure it still isn’t.
One of the great underdog matches of all time, as long time supporting cast member Shachihoko BOY finally makes good. It’s a role player or just a non-superstar having the game of his life in the most important game he can possibly play. It doesn’t always make a lot of sense and nobody can ever predict it, but sometimes this stuff can just break loose out of the universe into real life, and nobody ever wants it to end. It’s the stuff of legend. Steve Kerr snuffing out the Utah Jazz at the buzzer in ’97 and playing his part in denying a pedophile (or a monkey abuser) a ring.
Big Shot Shachihoko.
Fate of the universe, or the Martians have the death beam pointed at Earth, I WANT SHACHIHOKO BOY.
19. SASHA BANKS VS. BAYLEY, WWE NXT TAKEOVER BROOKLYN (8/22/2015)
The high point of NXT.
To be fair, it is one of the clunkier matches in between the great moments to ever get this high on one of my lists. Usually, I care deeply about that sort of a thing, but this match gets the big things so incredibly correct that I genuinely just do not care. Selling is not PERFECT, there are some moments where they lose something just a little bit, neither is very good at the little striking they occasionally attempt, all of that. 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.
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.
I wrote 1000+ words about this match already, and it’s one of my favorite pieces I wrote from covering 2015, and I think you should read that instead, despite borrowing here and there from that review. I really really really love this match, I think it’s the best and/or the most impressive thing NXT ever did (yes, even more than Zayn/Neville, as this is largely done from the ground up), and virtually every beat is correct. While imperfect on a micro level mechanically, there are very few WWE matches ever better on a macro kind of a level.
It is how this whole thing is supposed to work, a gigantic struggle and a dramatic conclusion to a long spanning story, not just between the principles of the encounter, but between each of them individually.
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.
In the end, everybody gets everything they wanted, earned, and deserved.
The best feeling professional wrestling match of a great feeling wrestling year and, really, one of the best feeling matches to ever happen.
18. DAISUKE IKEDA VS. TAKESHI ONO, FUTEN (9/26/2010)
As you may have caught from a few other matches that happened that year above Hero vs. Tozawa, as great as that was, the truth is that in not going through the full process before 2010 A YEAR IN LISTS, I got match of the year wrong.
This is the one that should have received that honor.
Every second of this rocks.
There have been matches since, six times longer or more, with less great moments per capita than this.
It is a remarkable achievement.
Daisuke Ikeda is constantly under the gun from the truly horrific sounding punches of Takeshi Ono, and until the last five seconds of the match, spends the duration of this match being beaten about the face with that very gun, as frequently as possible, and it is unbelievably good. Many matches have tried to do something like this, someone beaten to shit by a better striker only to magically grab something at the end. It’s classical pro wrestling, but few matches ever have done it better or more violently or cooler than this match does.
Ono spends 95% of this match punching Ikeda as hard as he can in the face from what feels like a hundred different angles, absolutely stuffing him when he tries to do any sort of pro wrestling shit to him, before Ikeda finally finally grabs some kind of reverse Fujiwara Armbar out of a top mount to suddenly attain a victory and send a message out into the world that if you are tough and cool enough, you too can survive one of the baddest men alive punching you in the the head as hard as possible for four minutes if you just so happen to have that dawg in you.
There has never been a better match under five minutes.
In truth, there have not been many better matches period.
17. WILLIAM REGAL VS. DEAN AMBROSE, FCW TV (11/6/2011)
In a year that saw the Fit Finlay mauling of Sami Callihan, a little more secretly I think, this is actually the greatest beating of the year.
The idea I often go to on this site is that great wrestling doesn’t lie to you. It stands to reason that, taken past that, the best wrestling goes a step further. This is some of the best wrestling of the decade, because these two cannot help but feel like the two realest, especially when thrown against each other.
In 1993 and 1994, a young Lord Steven Regal had a series of matches as the WCW World Television Champion against Arn Anderson. At the time, Arn was recognized as the greatest World Television Champion of all time, but having entered the veteran stage of his career, was starting to be surpassed by a new villain in Lord Regal. Their most famous match is a half hour draw at WCW SuperBrawl IV, in which Arn took Regal to task but lacked the necessary meanness to fully teach his lesson, allowing Regal to make a reputation off of lasting a full half hour against him. Seventeen years later, Lord Regal has slowed down and focused on commentary, and there is a new young shithead determined to make a similar name for himself. I kept thinking about that Regal/Arn match when I watched this.
The young Regal thought Arn Anderson was a past his prime guy who had finally met his match, mechanically speaking. In 2011, Dean Ambrose thinks he knows everything and that Regal is an old man who can’t hurt him, who can’t even hit him hard enough to do real damage, and who he’s surpassed as a true villain. William Regal spends fifteen minutes or so showing him, as harshly as possible, just how much he still doesn’t know, but never fails to get truly violent, avoiding the mistakes made against him on his initial rise to mainstream prominence, and not allowing Ambrose to benefit in the same ways that he did so long ago.
Its a perfect wrestling story, enhanced through one of the nastiest performances you’re likely to come across all decade.
To call the work on Ambrose’s arm nasty feels improper. Almost insulting. Grotesque also doesn’t quite feel right. Torturous, perhaps, but it’s an earned torture that always feels satisfying. That’s a credit to Dean for always being such a scumbag that it never slips into sympathy, and it’s a credit to Regal just as much for never becoming too villainous, even in a match based around villainy. Regal moves up from destroying the hand to the elbow to the shoulder, all in very very disgusting and violent ways. Some of which are old and rare tricks, like trapping the arm in between the steps and post, and some of which I’ve never seen before in another match, like putting Dean’s entire arm through the middle turnbuckle. Regal’s spent a career doing things like this, and I don’t have much of a problem calling it the best work of his career to this point.
If calling this Regal’s career performance is a strong maybe, calling this the career performance of Dean Ambrose is not something I have any questions or doubts about. Not even a little. Being a True Pervert, what’s always going to stand out for me the most is a great selling performance, and this is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Dean can come back and punish Regal, but his left arm is limp the entire time. He runs the ropes with one arm, he does everything with one arm. The man even bumps with his arm limp. It’s remarkable. It’s as good a selling performance for the arm as any Kawada performance selling the knee ever was, and that is the highest compliment I can give. It is big and dramatic and realistic, without ever feeling self indulgent or at all like a put on. There are a million things wrestlers do when selling that briefly give it away that don’t really bother me, but Ambrose does none of those things. His arm is bad, it is always bad, and it is always very very bad. Dean is still in the thing, he’s tough enough to always be able to grab Regal and beat the shit out of him (always in the most despicable kind of street urchin ways), but always too hurt to ever finish the fight, before Regal shifts the match into an unholy pummeling in the closing moments.
The only flaws in the match come about because of how much is left out there, but as the very next match on this list shows, that’s not a mistake so much as it is a completely justified confidence.
16. WILLIAM REGAL VS. DEAN AMBROSE, FCW TV (7/15/2012)
Look at the masthead one more time.
Whole lot of it.
Beyond that, EAR BLOOD.
A perfect sequel to the match right above it, and an even better match than what feels like their more celebrated initial encounter, hence the spot right below it.
Dean Ambrose can’t quite match his (to that point, but shit, maybe all time) career best level performance in the first match, largely because the match doesn’t require him to do so. He’s not getting murdered and taught a lesson here, so he’s not asked to deliver an all-time great selling performance. In the absence of that, William Regal steps up and delivers not only the best performance of his career, but one of the greatest selling performances of all time. Knock out selling is good, concussion selling can be great, but equilibrium selling damage is inspired.
Just as inspired is the way that the big payoff comes after the bell itself.
This might not be the match of the decade or anything, but I’m not sure there are too many better moments in wrestling than Regal finally managing to get up, applauding Ambrose for learning his lessons, and encouraging his own demise. The physically brutal and spiritually violent ending he both deserved and had been courting for years, and one that I’m so happy they never even attempted to shy away from.
A perfect end to one of the most interesting, most inspired, and least cowardly stories in wrestling history.
15. THE SHIELD VS. THE WYATT FAMILY, WWE ELIMINATION CHAMBER (2/23/2014)
Every single thing about it just works, and works to near perfection. A career performance for the majority of the match, and it’s not an insult at all. I genuinely don’t have an unkind word to say about the performance of Seth Rollins here, and he’s one of my least favorite wrestlers ever. Goddamned ERICK ROWAN is awesome in this match. Beyond the more mediocre wrestlers in this, Dean Ambrose has his best ever main roster WWE performance as this manic little ball of energy that’s equally helpful and harmful to his team, looking like Jon Moxley for the first time since FCW, and Luke Harper sets the world on fire with the best individual performance on a show featuring the two singular best matches of the entire year.
In the best ways, it barely feels like a WWE match sometimes. At least not one from 2014. In a lot of ways, it’s the best Dragon Gate match of the decade. All this necessary context, these built up little in-match scenarios, stable warfare coming to a head.
In other ways, it is SUCH a WWE match.
The pristine construction, the big setpieces, all the character work that enhances everything. At its best, applying the sort of ethos of the company honestly, this is the sort of thing they’re capable of at their best. Setting the stage, unleashing great wrestlers, and using every tool in the toolbox to help the not-so-great ones. Unbelievable shows of athleticism from larger than life characters, set up by an interesting story, thrown together in a match that feels Important.
This is what it looks like when everything runs like it’s supposed to, even if it’s not the best version of that on the show it’s on.
14. DAISUKE SEKIMOTO VS. YOSHIHITO SASAKI, BJW STRONG CLIMB FINALS (3/26/2012)
The second best match of its ilk all decade.
As usual, it works as well as it does because there’s a nugget of something real behind it. Or something that feels real, which in pro wrestling is close enough and maybe even better.
Sekimoto is the flagbearer, everyone knows him from his journeys to All Japan and DDT and WXW and CHIKARA and everywhere else Big Japan wants to do business with. He’s the one they want, sometimes even more than Big Japan itself. Yoshihito Sasaki shows up sometimes and works these events or helps out with interpromotional tags, but his appeal has always been more to fans who dig a little deeper and find things like his Necro Butcher match in 2010 or his famous bloodletting against Matsunaga to end the cult favorite STOP THE MATSUNAGA program in ZERO-1, where he was initially trained. He’s the best, but he’s always been a firm #2, even being replaced as Sekimoto’s partner as soon as trueborn Yuji Okabayashi was good enough to be the one taken to other companies at DICE-K’s side. Sasaki’s always been as good as Sekimoto, if not better, but he’s never gotten the same chances.
Even when they have the same opportunity here, the chance to the be the inaugural champion of a division first built around the two of them, Sekimoto had a much easier match in the undercard semi-finals than Sasaki did. Everything comes so much easier to him and our man Sasaki has to fight so much harder for everything. It’s then that we learn the best lesson of all, that the best way to solve your problems is to hurl your brain against them until something explodes. The underdog working class hero finally gets his due and the recognition he’s been so long overdue. Everyone’s a sucker for one type of story, and this is mine.
The high water point of the movement and best Strong BJ singles match of all time.
13. EL HIJO DEL SANTO/VILLANO IV VS. EL HIJO DEL SOLITARIO/ANGEL BLANCO JR., TODO X EL TODO (2/25/2012)
The best lucha match of the decade, with the only flaw being that it exists as a set up for a rematch nobody has ever seemed to find.
Fortunately, there was no better set-up match all decade than this.
It goes a million miles and hour, but it’s mean as hell too. It’s incredibly hostile. Furious doesn’t feel like a strong enough word to describe the way these teams treated each other. One of the meanest matches of the entire decade. Mask ripping, bloodletting, unprotected chair shots to the head, blood stained white masks, dives that are both sensational and desperate, and it’s aided on by a durably energetic crowd. It really has almost everything going for it, even including enough time for the three fall structure to feel like a paradise rather than a prison.
The ultimate credit to them is that this is far from a short match, and yet this never gets tiresome at any point. All different sorts of punching sequences and exchanges always keep it fresh, on top of breaking up the pairings perfectly. Everything is spaced out for maximum impact, while never suffering from any significant downtime. Everyone in this wrestles with a ton of passion, and it gets nastier and nastier and nastier and better every time, even getting me a little heated in real life at home when the rudos steal it.
Classic formula, executed better here that at any other point in the decade.
The sort of match that gets underneath your fingernails.
12. RANDY ORTON VS. JOHN CENA VS. DANIEL BRYAN VS. CESARO VS. SHEAMUS VS. CHRISTIAN, WWE ELIMINATION CHAMBER (2/23/2014)
The perfection of a formula and the best Chamber match ever.
The major difference between this and the other match on the show is that this one is airtight. Nothing in this has to be established, there’s no “well, you could have done without [x]” to it. Bell to bell, it’s all incredible. It’s the one major match in 2014 that didn’t either fall in my esteem or stay the same, but that I found better and better each time I rewatched it.
There’s not a single weak point in the talent line up. They have the time to work, everyone is healthy and motivated, each wrestler brings something different to this, and everyone is helped out by the booking instead of hindered. So many nasty and cool and interesting and creative things happen in this match. Each of the three or four times I’ve seen it, there’s been a new thing that really got me. When I originally reviewed it, it was the little booking touches of a.) Cena adding onto the chamber floor FU with an STF as well, doubling up on what he used to beat Punk to win the Chamber in 2011 and b.) the genius of giving Bryan the clean RKO kickout at the end to have everyone come totally unglued before the final run. Beyond that, the chamber is used better than ever in minor ways and without the usual WWE mindset about building EVERYTHING up. You get your dive off one of the pods, but early on, Cesaro and Sheamus and Bryan are always using it in little brutal ways. Every little chunk of this match whips ass. Cesaro and Sheamus in general spend the match clobbering people, Christian is a wonderful sneaky heel with the desperation to the act that makes it differ just enough from Randy Orton to stand out, Bryan’s continued arm selling throughout, the continued slow elevation of Cesaro continues, different feuds organically branch off, and they bring it home with the hottest storyline all decade. Bryan comes closer than ever, gets robbed, and the whole thing is brought to a boiling point.
It’s a miracle.
I don’t know how else to talk about this. It’s WWE in the 2010s and twelve month peak or not, this is genuinely an unbelievable feat. Had I not seen it, I don’t think I would believe how much goes right here. More importantly, how much could have gone wrong and not only how it didn’t, but how the creative decisions of this company, one of the dumbest and loudest promotions ever, not only prevented that, but did so in a way that managed not to shout every single detail at you in the process.
All time level talents going wild, with the slightest hand of booking on the shoulder, but in a way that genuinely helps build things for the future without detracting from the match at hand. Sight unseen, you might think I mean IN YOUR HOUSE: FINAL FOUR from seventeen years earlier, but I’m talking about 2010s WWE somehow. It’s one of the crown jewels of the 2013-2014 golden age, and a companion piece to the match earlier in the show, as everything moves in unison to create the best possible version of a thing.
In a year without an all time blowaway great match, it’s a match like this that wins out. In a year without some great drama, I have no problem calling a near perfect dumb action movie the best film of the year. In a year without one perfect “normal” wrestling match on that level, I have no problem calling a pure sort of spectacle like this the match of the year.
Start to finish, from booking to construction to minute to minute action, granular detail or big picture, few matches this decade got as much right as this did.
11. BROCK LESNAR VS. ROMAN REIGNS, WWE WRESTLEMANIA 31 (3/29/2015)
The ideal match is equally violent, mechanically perfect, efficient, and emotional. Both of the two best matches of the year are efficient and emotional, but there’s a difference between the two. When offered a choice between mechanically imperfect but otherwise flawless emotional payoff and a more heartbreaking but mechanically airtight and violent epics, I think you know by now what I’m going to go with. For the uninitiated, this whole list tends to be what we call a teachable moment.
Every time, I will choose violence.
Brock Lesnar has the greatest single main event performance in WrestleMania history.
What’s even more impressive than the usual Brock performance is what he has to work with and what he’s able to do. While a good wrestler, Roman Reigns isn’t anywhere near as good as he’ll become and still very close to an unfortunate happening that would have probably sunk the career of anyone that company wasn’t this insistent on making happen. Beyond the infamous “SUPLEX CITY, BITCH”, it’s just so mean. The suplexes feel both hateful and dismissive. Lesnar is once again a guy with these incredible facials who never quite gets the credit for them that he deserves. Anger at the cut gives way to being almost pissed that the guy who did that isn’t putting up more of a fight. Roman tries to goad Brock by laughing at him and encouraging him, and it’s a weird thing that doesn’t quite have the effect that they likely imagined, real “I’m actually laughing” stuff. It’s the reaction of Brock to that that brings the match up another level though, getting more and more violent and meaner and meaner on offense.
That’s not to say Roman isn’t also tremendous here. He’s not Brock Lesnar (the story of his career pre-2020, alongside “He’s Not Daniel Bryan”), but once Lesnar bleeds and he realizes like any PREDATOR fan that this means he can be killed, he turns it up like Arnie in the jungle.
His attack is desperate and panicked and frantic as hell and it’s perfect. It’s the best babyface work of his entire career, these few minutes between Lesnar splitting himself open like a faucet and all hell breaking loose. The two different F5 kickouts in the match are a little much, but when Roman gets Lesnar stumbling around and out on his feet and looking on the verge of victory after sustaining two big Roman Reigns spears and barely fighting off a third, none of that matters.
In this immediate moment right before the end, Roman Reigns has completely won over every single person on Earth.
There are few more impressive things in wrestling all year or all decade than the turnaround they’re able to elicit here. Even if they almost immediately ruin it, it’s so impressive. Doubly so because it comes about through nothing more then good and honest god damned professional wrestling. A bully and a young challenger who’s basically a blank slate whose connection with the crowd is built from the ground up (or arguably beneath the ground given the response before the match). It’s more of an uphill struggle than the WWE’s had in this department for nearly a decade, only accomplished through a Herculean effort from the wrestlers involved and absolutely nothing else.
Almost, anyways.
They fucked it up right at the end with the Heist of the Century, but in that moment, it’s not so bad itself. Time and time again, I say it and the company itself shows it. The WWE is about moments, and there were few better.
One of the great chunks of pro wrestling all decade, and in one of the best years of wrestling all century, the finest top to bottom work there was.
10. KAZUCHIKA OKADA VS. TOMOHIRO ISHII, NJPW G1 CLIMAX 26 DAY THIRTEEN (8/6/2016)
Two of the most reliable concepts in wrestling all decade were (a) Kazuchika Okada eating shit & (b) Tomohiro Ishii succeeding.
It should come as no surprise that the lone single match that manages to combine those two feelings stands apart from virtually everything else in a year like this, and from most other wrestling all decade.
There are what feels like a hundred things that it feels like someone ought to know going in. The previous years in the G1 of inter-CHAOS meetings, with Okada first getting owned by Nakamura in 2012 and then asserting himself in the 2014 final, Ishii’s struggles for respect against his leader Nakamura in 2014 and 2015, Ishii clearly never 100% fucking with Okada, Okada retiring one of Ishii’s mentors in Tenryu in 2015, and most of all, Okada being the new CHAOS leader and bringing in in His Guys, and Tomohiro Ishii being in one of the worst spots that a working man can be in, in an established role but under new management.
All of these things work together, along with all of the beautiful mechanics, nasty shots, and overwhelmingly uplifting moments of Ishii refusing to take a single ounce of shit to create one of my favorite matches of the decade.
The best part, once again, is the moment not at which Our Hero makes this decision, but it’s the moment at which the other party realizes it. The eyes go a little wider each time he’s really hit, each time he survives something major, and especially at each time Ishii goes to a new length with something like a Tenryu-esque leaping enzuiguri or a running dropkick of his own that he almost never uses. Moment by moment, the fear of God is put deeper and deeper into Kazuchika Okada, and each time, it is too late to stop what feels like a cosmic punishment for his behavior.
It’s one of the great G1 upsets ever, because it’s more than just the result. Nothing in wrestling is like when the Ace eats shit in the G1, but there’s so much more than just that. Ishii finally beating a CHAOS leader and not only re-earning that respect, but forcing it into him in a wholly undeniable way. Revenge for Tenryu on top of that, paired with arguably, a classic Ishii upset at a time at which that seemed like a fad having passed. Any of these things alone can or could have have resulted in a deeply satisfying match and moment, but when you put them all together, that feeling is so much more powerful.
This match could only be this great at this exact point.
Big Tom and Little Kazu caught it perfectly.
Everything that could ever possibly go right for not only this pairing, but for these two individually, did. Flawless execution in front of a white hot crowd. The best possible roles they can ask for. Moving as if the hand of God was on their shoulder, steering them through. Beyond the mechanical, they had the greatest set up that they could possibly ask for. Run this a year earlier or a year later, and it’s still great, but it’s not as special as it is in 2016. It’s a special match, and gives me that special sort of feeling that few other wrestling matches do.
One of the most satisfying matches of the decade.
9. RANDY ORTON VS. DANIEL BRYAN, WWE RAW (12/16/2013)
It’s not quite a miracle, but it feels close.
This is a half hour match on television, with a career level great Randy Orton performance and one up there for Bryan, unimpeded by bullshit, with a coherent fuck finish that doesn’t feel like an abrupt end to the thing, in a very un-WWE style of match. You can usually get one of those, maybe a few when they get especially lazy from time to time and just hand twenty to thirty minutes over to a match, but rarely do they line up like this, all at the same time.
As it is, it’s also Daniel Bryan’s take on something like Ric Flair vs. Ron Garvin from December 1985.
He’s a crowbar and he tortures the champion. Orton gets as vicious as he’s ever been in return, leading to a match as brutal and physically violent as any modern WWE match marketed that way. Bryan puts in one of his all-time great selling performances on the arm to begin a long string of great arm selling matches, instead of the neck or a leg. Orton has the best performance of his life not only attacking it, but gradually having a mental breakdown at not being as good as Bryan, explored in so many different ways, going from trying the holds to being the one busted open slightly by a headbutt he himself through to just biting Bryan to get out of holds by the end.
Things are done in both such a deliberate and unique order that it draws more attention to every big thing that they do. Everything has more value and weight to it. The personalities come out more. It’s not all that fancy either, save a Bryan dive or knee off the apron. It’s mean and severe and this match that feels incredibly spartan, but in which they realistically let out everything but their very biggest moves. In the end, Orton’s exhausted every avenue and comes to the realization himself finally that he simply is not as good as Daniel Bryan is.
With the victory inevitable, he gives the match a finish that takes it from great and puts it in the realm of being one of the best ever, which is to deny Bryan even the satisfaction of a non-title win, and connecting with one of the cruelest and most violent low blows in the history of wrestling.
It’s a timeless sort of a match, one that would fit just as well in 1986 JCP for the most part as it would in 2006 ROH, where in either case, it would likely be the best straight up wrestling match either promotion ran all year.
The exclamation point on maybe the career year for both men.
8. KATSUYORI SHIBATA VS. TOMOHIRO ISHII, NJPW G1 CLIMAX 23 DAY FOUR (8/4/2013)
Dudes ROCK.
This match is perhaps the best example all decade of two of my favorite ideas in wrestling that, as seen here, often combine into one.
In this match, Tomohiro Ishii showed up to work today and decided that he was not going to lose this match. If he was going to lose though, he was going to make it as painful, as miserable, and as dirty as he could, dragging Katsuyori Shibata down into the muck with him. If Shibata left with a victory, Ishii would leave with a pound of his flesh as payment for it. It is one of my favorite concepts in all of athletics — pre-determined or not — the idea that one side may clearly be more skilled, but that the other is intent on making a point, and will make things very uncomfortable along the way. Nobody gets out cleanly. Bad Boys shit, and the like.
To put it a little more succinctly, in this match, Tomohiro Ishii Goes to Work.
What everyone loves about this is obviously fantastic. Every shot has a certain meanness and ferocity to it. It’s a bitter shouting match conducted with hands and elbows and feet. The modulation of the strikes is perfect, not a single one of them means the same thing or has the exact same impact. The selling is also perfect. There’s never been quite another match like this in recent memory, where even the selling felt hateful. The miracle of this is that something so virulent and spiteful managed to also be this uplifting in the end, and in the part far less talked about when discussing its virtues, it is also a genuinely uplifting underdog victory, one of the rare times when that all-powerful but maybe turns all the way into the impossible becoming possible.
More than anything, what works about this — despite what many of the dumbest wrestler in the world went on to take from this match and this style — isn’t hitting super hard or one count kick out spots or big strike exchanges. It’s the heart and gravitas put into it on both ends, the meanness in what Shibata does when in control, and the fist-pumping shouting-in-your-home-at-4-am-watching-on-UStream comebacks of Tomohiro Ishii, culminating in one of the decade’s best feeling singular moments. When the shock and awe of the loud bangs and bright flashes is gone, that’s the thing left over that endures and is the reason that this stands above all its would be successors.
Nobody should ever be allowed to wrestle like this without first watching this and then being able to explain why these things worked.
Years and years of rematches, attempts to match with each man against other wrestlers, and especially would-be successors have done nothing to dull the impact of this thing. Matches like this are boring to me now, but this specific match never can be.
The motherfucker of the decade.
7. JOHN CENA VS. CM PUNK, WWE RAW (2/25/2013)
This is only the second best John Cena vs. CM Punk match.
At the same time, I have to think that almost no other pairing in wrestling history’s second best match together is as great as this. Maybe Hashimoto and Tenryu. Maybe a few others. But it isn’t common. It’s quite the rare thing, for the clear second best match between frequent opponents to also be one of the best matches of the decade and one of the greatest of all time.
The crime of this match, as everybody knows, is where it happened, on free television, six months before WrestleMania, instead of headlining the biggest show of the year. Nothing that happens in the match itself is incorrect though.
Most obviously, the match is host to yet another all-time great CM Punk “fuck you” performance, one that because of the opposition may not be as impressive or demonstrative or angry as the Undertaker one a month and change later, but comes from the same place. It’s not like CM Punk is done, he still maybe even has two matches in 2013 that are better than this in the Undertaker and Brock Lesnar matches, but so much of this reads like the last will and testament, like this is his ultimate statement on what this could and should have been, and what the melding of WWE Style and the 2000s independent wrestling style that he and Bryan ushered in over the last year and a half ultimately can be. Gigantic, significant, bombastic, but so well thought out at the same time, and never ever silly or stupid or artificial. It’s what all of the best stuff in wrestling is. It feels important, it respects both your time and long-term attention, and never even comes close to insulting you. It’s what the biggest wrestling company in the world should constantly be capable of delivering. It’s a blueprint embarrassingly abandoned.
What Cena brings to this is largely carrying the larger narrative weight. Finally getting past CM Punk after being unable to beat him for the last two years. Not being shaken like he was six months earlier, learning when to take the bigger risks, keeping his head even when Punk continually gets him like nobody else does. It isn’t quite as loud as what Punk brings to the match, but the emotional core of the thing relies on John Cena. Not only as a likeable professional wrestler, but on a moment to moment level, being able to convey each separate beat, as well as the larger thing, the slow shaking off of whatever’s in his head, and realizing he can actually do this. It’s quieter, for sure, but up there with the very best work in his career.
There’s also the Piledriver.
Beyond everything about that one night in Chicago, it’s the defining moment of CM Punk’s career. I don’t think this is the match that best explains CM Punk, but it is the moment that might best explain CM Punk. Even if that arc of history always points to John Cena getting his win back, CM Punk throws something unforgettable in there, taking something away from it too. No matter what, you leave talking about how great of a match this was, and you leave talking about the Piledriver.
Of course, Cena wins in the end. Something something the arc of history. He finally does something CM Punk isn’t ready for with a sloppy but just barely effective Hurricanrana, opening Punk up just enough for another FU and he’s finally able to beat Punk. At a certain point, you can’t fight these things. CM Punk had a hell of a run, but it’s time to pay the fiddler. It doesn’t mean he can’t produce something this great in the process, but it does mean this sort of thing is inevitable, which is really all that holds this back. It’s hard to be too mad though when they built it up this long and when CM Punk built up such a compelling narrative that paid off masterfully in Cena finally catching him after all this time. The real shame is in it being their last meeting, in this being as big of a blowoff as one of the greatest WWE pairings of all time ever got to perform on. But it is what it is, right?
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
These two made it a better one than most.
6. SHINSUKE NAKAMURA VS. KAZUSHI SAKURABA, NJPW WRESTLE KINGDOM VII (1/4/2013)
Spiritually perfect.
This is one of those matches where it’s not very long at all, somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes, but where every single thing they does feels important and vital to the rest of the match. A real titanic struggle, with as much of a WCW super fight in it as there is something with a more obvious influnce like Hashimoto vs. Nobuhiko Takada or Naoya Ogawa.
It’s a pair of career performances on display too, on top of all the pieces of the presentation that make this work so well. Nakamura sells fear and hesitation for the first time in a long time, like he’s a Gracie or something. He does one of his gaudy little poses once early on, before then kind of realizing the situation he’s in, immediately stopping and backing away, to never ever do it again. It isn’t just that Sakuraba strips him of that confidence so much as that the mere idea of Kazushi Sakuraba causes Nakamura to think twice about himself. Sakuraba lives up to every bit of it, creating holds out of nothing like a true alchemist and always feeling dangerous. He’s so confident, but everything he does immediately works. All of Nakamura’s big set ups fall short and typically result in a wild slap or kick combination, punishment for trying something so gaudy and showy against an actual legitimate fighter. Sakuraba also has these impossibly fast slap and kick sequences. Nakamura tries to keep up because he’s got some long legs and pretty fast hands, but Sakuraba is constantly able to get in close enough that Nakamura can barely even touch him. For once, someone’s arms are too long to box with God.
Sakuraba’s impact is all matter of fact and impersonal in the most intimidating possible way. There’s a moment where he lands the old cut-off knee when Nakamura tries to charge in for a takedown, now acting in desperation, and Sakura responds by very matter of factly pointing down to Nakamura on the mat. Just like, this is what happens, don’t do that again.
Nakamura can never beat Sakuraba at his own game, but instead has to adapt himself so that he can do things faster and more efficiently to leave with his title. Sakuraba not only provides a hell of a challenge in possible Nakamura’s career match, but leaves having created a better version of him, the one who can counter these frantic holds into only his biggest and best pieces of offense, even adapting the Boma Ye into a ground version that looks like the hardest knee drop ever thrown, before gunning for the win with a desperation not seen all decade from him in any other match all decade.
It’s why this is his best one all decade.
A towering sort of a match, not the ultra-promoted main event statement of ideology on display in the only New Japan match all decade better than it, but a tribute to the old ways that feels just as great. It’s thrilling in every way a match like this can be thrilling, whipping a ton of ass on a mechanical level, feeling like a gigantic deal, and offering up one of the decade’s most perfect stories to accompany all that.
Pro wrestling is the strongest.
5. THE YOUNG BUCKS VS. APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION (KEVIN STEEN & SUPER DRAGON), PWG FEAR (12/10/2011)
In my personal experience, the most rewatchable match of all time.
Nothing ever feels as good as it did the first time, but this holds up as well as any match ever has for me, and it’s something I go back to time and time again.
It feels good as hell.
We can talk forever about mechanics or who sold what the best or great stories and payoffs, but the best wrestling just feels really good, and there are so few matches that have felt as good as this does. It felt great at the time, it felt great the last time I watched it a few years ago, it felt great watching it again to make sure it belnged hre. I don’t watch a lot of wrestling without writing about it or cataloging it in one way or another. It’s a brain sickness of some kind, whatever, but this is the rare match that I watch at least once a year. Sometimes I’ll be a little buzzed or just flat out drunk, and I will throw this on because it always feels good to watch. It’s a time capsule back to a more hopeful time, in a lot of ways, but it’s also just an incredibly satisfying professional wrestling match.
The main thing that works here, more so than any other match like it this decade, many of which made this list for the same reason, is that The Young Bucks die here.
Years of luck finally run out, as they face this otherworldly thing that they cannot sneak or fluke their way past. They are left alone, to their own devices, and true to form, show absolutely no heroism in fighting. A lesser heel act would toughen up and try to show something. This match (and the Young Bucks as an act at their best) excel for never once even glancing in the direction of such a concept. They earn the offense that they get here, but to whatever extent a match like this would or could legitimize them, it never does. They are preening arrogant little shits, they deserve everything they get and more, and they’re dragged kicking and screaming into this ordeal.
The violence is obscene and glorious, but there’s some oddly primal feeling about it that helps. It’s beyond a chaotic vibe or a lot of cool things happening. Kevin Steen at his best felt like a force of nature, and even here at his best, Super Dragon leaves him in the wind. Super Dragon leaves everyone in the wind in that respect apart from maybe five to ten people ever. He is the concept of violence. It’s not quite supernatural, but he’s this otherworldly force that cannot be explained or understood, but has to be experienced firsthand.
Briefly they get it, taking the cheap way out, until everything falls apart, and the most annoying people in the world are hurt even worse and in the most satisfying ways.
There’s a simplicity to this that you don’t get in a lot of Young Bucks matches. There’s not a back and forth run to it, it’s not fancy or pretty. They get the punishment they’ve deserved for years now, and it’s incredibly violent, it’s a little dismissive in the best possible way, and it feels as good as anything has felt all year in wrestling besides the one thing in July. It’s not quite the best match in PWG history or anything, but it’s up there with the last half hour or so of STEEN WOLF as an all around high point for the promotion, and thus, for the era as a whole.
This match is beautiful. It’s what wrestling should be, this incredibly engaging spectacle that offers you something a little more than pure violence too. It’s universal, I think, and then also deeply personal in its own way because of how often I go back to it. Beyond that, it holds up because of that simplicity. It’s good not only triumphing over evil, but just routing it and putting it on display in the purest way.
It’s not the purely happy moments, it’s the moments that are happy because of who’s on the other end.
All of Your Enemies suffering for their offenses in the most demeaning and satisfying ways. Mussolini being hung upside down in the town square. The Kick Six. James Harden going 0 for 27. The time in my freshman year of college that my racist roommate, who asked why MLK Day was important, got punched in the face by our third roommate for dropping a hard r. The Philly Special. Sid vs. Shawn at the ’96 Survivor Series, but with more chair shots.
This match is a victory lap for twenty minutes.
That’s why I watch it over and over and over again, and that’s why it lands this high.
4. CM PUNK VS. BROCK LESNAR, WWE SUMMERSLAM 2013 (8/18/2013)
The entire thing is almost perfect.
All that holds it back are the things WWE can never quite be. It needs blood. It needs every possible shortcut. It needs to be more and it needs to be allowed more and ideally, Lesnar needs to either be overcome or just wholly murder CM Punk.
And yet, it is still one of the best professional wrestling matches of its time, of its promotion, and of the decade.
Like usual with these big CM Punk matches, he never quite has the clearance to get fully insane, but he once again does more with the simple touches (chair, steps) than anyone else in his generation was capable of. It works for the obvious reasons. CM Punk is just as good of an underdog working class babyface as he is a manic domineering heel, and against one of the great bullies in wrestling history in Lesnar, at his best as a protagonist. The only reason this isn’t the best CM Punk babyface performance ever or the greatest Brock Lesnar bully heel performance ever is because, each of those traits are on display in two of the only three matches all decade better than this.
Beyond the obvious, it’s yet another wonderful example of CM Punk refusing to play the game in what is, functionally, his last major match.
One of the best things about CM Punk is the way he’s able to take these big corporate ideas, deliver what the paymasters want, but still attach his own agenda to everything. He’s there like anyone else collecting the check, of course, buy the ticket and take the ride, but what makes Punk so special is that he’s one of the only people in his generation to realize how much control he can still exercise over the ride itself.
The plan here is to make Brock Lesnar feel like a killer again after he wasted three matches with Triple H and put John Cena over to start this run, while also directing Punk to a fall feud with Heyman. Instead, CM Punk winds up in a match and once again changes what it is and what you come away from it believing. CM Punk can only do so much, still only armed with the master’s tools, but creates a match in which he’s the only one in this Brock Lesnar second run in a match longer than like a minute to look like he might be better than Brock Lesnar, outside of maybe John Cena. The people in Punk’s position after this who have lost to Brock tended to either do it clean or get cut off before the Punk gets to here, in which Brock is beaten. The wait hold on now, maybe of Lesnar/Styles, Lesnar/Bryan, Lesnar/Balor, etc., is a point that Punk blows past in this match. The people who beat Brock almost always need the help of something or someone from outside. It’s a masterful political performance by both men, as neither gives up their finish for a cheap nearfall, both of Heyman’s guys find a way to look like equals in totally different ways (the strongest and best fighter vs. the only one both gutsy, smart, and skilled enough to potentially beat him straight up), but primarily, it’s Punk’s show. He’s a politician in the old way, in the way that top guys knew how to always protect themselves, before it became so obvious and artless.
Like The Undertaker match and like the John Cena match, CM Punk does his thing and makes sure you leave talking and thinking about him. About his performance, his selling, the obscene bumps, his comebacks, his wonderful Steamboat Rule adherence, and the way the match makes him look every bit Brock’s equal in the end. Brock’s lost matches in the WWE in which that never happened. People are lucky, they catch him right or like Cena in 2012, they catch him sleeping and wrap it up with a perfect sequence. It’s never like this, it’s never a slow deconstruction. Still, Brock wins and Punk loses. Nothing all that revolutionary happens. The time is gone in which CM Punk could do the impossible and change the world, opting now to try and show everyone else how they can do that once he’s gone. It’s one of the only times a moral victory has felt halfway real.
The crime of this is that it’s the only match they’ll ever have together instead of being able to follow this up with the one where Punk’s able to piece it all together and do it clean, but like the final Cena match six months earlier, nobody’s ever been able to make a “should have been more” complaint feel less relevant than CM Punk.
If he cannot win, if he cannot change anything, and if he is once again playing a game rigged against him, he at least takes his pound of flesh on the way out the door in one of the best matches ever against one of the best wrestlers ever in a wholly unforgettable spectacle at the end of the summer.
Same as it ever was.
3. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. MINORU SUZUKI, NJPW KING OF PRO WRESTLING 2012 (10/8/2012)
The three best matches of the decade are not simply great matches. They are, but they’re more than that. Not just full of cool moves, nasty landings, or even a normal level of emotional catharsis that a great large scale epic can get you.
Each of the three is a battle for the soul of the promotion where it happens.
First, a match in which that battle has essentially already been decided, but in making a gigantic ideological statement and putting it in the hands of two of the best wrestlers in the world, New Japan produces their best match of the decade.
Going into this, Suzuki began making comments about Tanahashi’s toughness and the way Tanahashi acts and carries himself, bringing up traditional strong style and all of this. It’s classic stuff, baiting the old time fans once again by going back to “Tanahashi isn’t tough!” or “Tanahashi isn’t REAL strong style” like it’s 2006 or 2007 again. Nothing new really, but with Tanahashi now at the peak of his powers, having already proven so much of this over the last five years, there’s also kind of an anger to him here that makes a far more powerful rebuttal than simply winning. That’s made all the better by Tanahashi not only wrestling a far older and more submission-oriented style than usual, but eschewing it all at the very end and winning in his way.
The match itself offers a total repudiation of every single past criticism about not being tough or not being strong style. The answer isn’t shouting that yes, you are, just watch. It’s that it doesn’t matter, because anyone still saying that doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is never going to be happy. Half an hour of saying that he can, followed by saying, with finality, that it doesn’t matter anyways.
Beyond the philosophical struggle at the heart of this, the all-time admirable response to all of that after all this time, and the wonderful wonderful character performance by Hiroshi Tanahashi, it’s also just a fantastic professional wrestling match.
A completely perfect double limbwork match, truly one of the very best ever. The work is mean and interesting, the selling on both ends is incredible, and it’s another one of these situations in NJPW, especially with Tanahashi, where they have a few trial runs before the one iteration of a match up where they absolutely kill it. Beyond the limbwork and mat stuff, they’re also just killing each other in the stand up exchanges. Suzuki has a career performance throwing bows in a career full of throwing some sick bows out into the world, and Tanahashi turns in one of his own, playing Suzuki’s game better and more faithfully than he can, and proving his point with absolutely zero concessions. It works on every level.
People hark on the “only one pinfall” thing on this a lot as a selling point of how original it is, but the best thing about this match is how easy it is not to even notice it, because this is a match whose drama never requires nearfalls.
By the end, it’s Hiroshi Tanahashi’s ultimate and final victory needed in an argument that’s been conducted in bad faith for years now, winning his way following nearly half an hour of slowly chipping away at Suzuki in the spirit of the old way. A concrete statement for the new era about who The Man is once and for all. It’s Tanahashi tearing down the Antonio Inoki picture in the New Japan Dojo put into a match and made as triumphant and fulfilling as possible.
The king is dead. Long live the king.
Look backwards and turn into salt.
It’s not overt, Suzuki can’t quite invade the place where he was born, but this is spiritual Inoki-ism at its finest.
2. JOHN CENA VS. BROCK LESNAR, WWE EXTREME RULES 2012 (4/29/2012)
The greatest display of literal Inoki-ism in the history of professional wrestling.
First of all, to get it out of the way
To anyone who still has a problem with the result, please stop being a fucking baby.
Should this maybe have not been Brock’s first match back? Yeah, alright. I can get behind that argument, even if I totally get wanting to throw this out there because Brock is mercurial as hell. But this is how this always ends anyways.
This is how it’s supposed to end. The invader loses to the Ace.
Expecting anything else out of this story or the WWE as a whole is full of shit either figuratively or literally. What, did you want his first loss to be against Triple H at Mania 29? Did you want him to put over fucking Sheamus? Because this is the WWE, he’s not going to do Brock/Eddie again with Punk or Bryan. Certainly not with the same kind of outcome. Accept what you’re watching for face value and don’t wish for the impossible, and you’ll be so much happier for it. For the millionth time, buy the ticket, take the ride. You should known by now what you’re signing up for. Cena’s the best you’ll get, because he’s the best Ace figure the WWE’s ever had. This is great. They could hardly have done any better than this.
For the second year in a row, an all time great John Cena babyface performance in the capitol of the Midwest results in one of the two best matches of the decade.
It helps that the matches are tied to each other, even if they’re only loosely tied together with a few strands of fanwank. A year ago, it was a cinematic level transformation from standard bearer and company man to someone recognizing that he would rather do the right thing than win one professional wrestling match. Nine months later, the man he punched out when making that decision has brought back the biggest shitkicker in the history of the company immediately after gaining full power, with the obvious goal of getting rid of Cena and punishing him for the initial offense now that the big loss to The Rock and inability to regain the WWE Title has damaged Cena’s reputation, only for said shitkicker to immediately become uncontrollable. So, John Cena returns to the scene of his great transformation against his first great rival who he was never able to beat before he left, not only defending his own spot but the idea of pro wrestling as a whole.
Or, if you want to put it another way, again, pro wrestling is the strongest.
This is the dream.
A Different Style fight with the sort of long term storytelling and character work that the fed offers at its highest points, John Cena delivering his second greatest feat of heroism all decade by staring everything down and walking straight into trouble, ready to fight and lose.
Cena and Lesnar are not the types to just settle for pure drama though. Perfect narrative aside, it’s also an incredibly tight and violent fifteen or so, and that’s all it ever has to be. It’s a different match than you’d get from almost anyone else, and because of that, this doesn’t feel like bullshit. Not for a second. It’s not as mechanically perfect as the third best match of the decade or the Bryan/Sheamus match on the same how, but sometimes you don’t need the mechanics to be flawless when the violence is this perfect and simple. Brock Lesnar is a monster. John Cena is hopelessly outmatched, but stays in the fight until it suddenly breaks his way. Brock bleeds, and with the knowledge that he can be killed now, Cena pounces and immediately takes it.
What matters most is just staying in the fight.
Cena wins the way he always did in his prime. Just be there and never stop being there. Always be keep going.
I have used the phrase “spiritually correct professional wrestling” before to try and communicate the idea of a professional wrestling match that gives me zero pause. It is, in my mind, 1000% correct. Everything makes sense, it is clear, it is efficient, and it is thrilling. To me, it is one of the best things that I can say about a professional wrestling match, that it is spiritually correct.
This is the most spiritually correct wrestling match of all time.
1. JOHN CENA VS. CM PUNK, WWE MONEY IN THE BANK 2011 (7/17/2011)
I mean, I told you.
If not in the original review, than a million times over the years, talking about it being the best match I’ve ever seen with my own eyes in person or how much it meant to me or constantly comparing great matches and moments to it. That is to say nothing of all of the wrestling to try and follow it or adapt it in some way — be it angles like it, promos like what led up to it, matches that take cues from it in any number of ways, even John Cena vs. Indie Star matches or PWG Jawn as a concept — and being wholly unable to even come close. It is the true north for wrestling this decade, and impressively, the most important match of the decade is also the best.
The third of three meetings for the soul of a promotion is the one that tells the biggest lie, but beyond just that this is pro wrestling and the entire point is to sell a lie, it is also the one that tells the best lie, and that does the most with that lie.
First, yes, this is an emotional pick. It’s an emotional match. I watch so much wrestling without emotional attachment, and it’s not this sort of thing I do to be objective or anything, but because nothing ever grabs me in quite that way. Nothing has ever grabbed onto me in the ways that this match grabbed onto me. Watching this live was the best wrestling experience of my life. Equal parts college football rivalry game and political protest. It felt like what I imagine participating in a coup d’etat would feel like. I cannot imagine how I would feel about this if I first watched it through a screen on a TV or a computer. That’s not why I think it is as great as it is, it isn’t why I think it just might be the greatest wrestling match of all time, but I have to acknowledge that it is part of it, and I can never divorce that experience from the match itself.
However, the match itself has so much to offer besides just the elation of the moment.
As a match, I like it even better on film, I think.
Punk and Cena begin with a larger than life title match feeling to the match, but before long, they shift it into a far far more interesting underdog story. John Cena is John Cena. There are lines he won’t step over, but he’s domineering here in a new way that emphasizes Punk’s grit and heart, left totally without any plans and having to fight by himself, and he fucking DOES IT. Very subtly, the match shifted and it’s now creating a proper WWE Babyface out of CM Punk, but in a more sympathetic way than usual.
He fails, and he’s left to rely on toughness alone, and he goes and actually does it. They’re smart enough about it that the match never shouts at you about what it’s doing, but by the last few minutes, CM Punk is on John Cena’s level. Maybe an equal, maybe not, but there’s room now to have that discussion where there wasn’t a day ago. They go into their big run, but Punk comes at it from a place of total desperation. Nothing he does seems to work and he’s always the one trying to scrappily fight out of an FU or barely kicking out of one. And yet, he keeps doing it.
Eventually, John’s mask slips and it’s the most rewarding thing in the world. More than any move’s execution or promo cutting someone shitty down to size, this is the best work of John Cena’s career. The way he masks his surprise before hyping himself up, only to still not be able to do it on a second FU, before then laughing in disbelief — it may be the best facial work that any Ace figure has ever done anywhere. Combine it with a perfect elevation of Punk over the course of the match, and there’s a real argument to be had over who the best wrestler in this match actually is. CM Punk is a force of nature, of course, but this is as much John’s night as it is Punk. While Punk humanizes himself to become a genuine top babyface over the course of the match, the finish of the match allows John Cena to completely define who he is in a way that they’ve struggled before and since this match to get as completely right as they do here.
The most important part of that comes at the very end, when John Cena completely defines himself with one punch.
Confronted with a moment where CM Punk is about to be screwed over like his hero, already having benefited from a distraction, John Cena does what Shawn Michaels lacked the courage to do, and stops it, costing himself the title in the process by giving up a questionable win and then walking into Punk’s GTS to lose the title. Right and wrong exist, and it isn’t worth winning one match if he has to compromise his character to do it. So often, they’ll do this crummy thing where a face gets dirty and does something wrong, in the service of some greater good just to thwart a heel. It’s not always bad. Shades of grey, and all of that. John Cena is better than that though. In this time of great crisis, where other people have completely folded, John Cena stood his ground at great personal and professional cost. Doing the right thing mattered more than winning, and specifically because he didn’t then also win, as would often happen in the WWE, there’s a real weight to that decision that makes it stand out like it does.
Match and moment effectively become the same thing, two all-time greats have perhaps (for Punk, arguable, for Cena, a little less so) their career performances on the very same night, where both elevate themselves to that status at the same time, and the result is I think the greatest all-around presentation of a match in North American wrestling history.
It’s powerful and weighty and real in a way that very few WWE or WWF matches can be. It is everything that company ought to be capable of all the time, given their budget and reach. This is what wrestling should be at its absolute best. It’s a match to aspire towards, transcending that and becoming a watershed moment as well. It becomes a moment because of how much it has to say, and because of how well it manages to say all of these different things.
The best wrestling matches are about more than wrestling. They use pro wrestling to communicate something else, the means through which something higher is communicated, to teach some kind of a lesson or tell some kind of a story.
John Cena vs. CM Punk is an an underdog story. It’s about outsiders and the value of hard work. It’s about a scumbag making good in his hometown. It’s about a scoundrel drawing a line, because you have to draw a line somewhere, and saying what is and isn’t acceptable. It’s about a dynasty being humbled for its overconfidence. It’s about the evil of corporations, the power of the little man, and a sort of deeply American individualism. It’s a clash of ideologies, where one side is won over by the end, and has to make a choice between himself and the greater good. It’s about right and wrong, and upholding the division between the two no matter what.
This match is about pretty much everything, and Match of the Decade maybe doesn’t feel quite strong enough.
This is the longest thing I have ever published. If you read it all, thank you. If you skimmed this far, thank you still (but lesser of course). PART THREE (WRESTLERS) will come at some point.
HANDWERK 