Daniel Bryan vs. AJ Styles vs. Samoa Joe vs. Randy Orton vs. Kofi Kingston vs. Jeff Hardy, WWE Elimination Chamber (2/17/2019)

This was an Elimination Chamber match for Bryan’s WWE World Heavyweight Title.

Before anything else, it’s such an impressive thing that this match achieves.

For those maybe less initiated, the 2014 Elimination Chamber was not only this blog’s pick for the best match of that year, but I think it’s the best match of its kind in the twenty plus year history of Elimination Chamber matches. The fact that a match like this, that’s at least a strong contender for second place on that best-Chamber-of-the-decade list, gets there by centering itself half around the same focal point shared by that match five years earlier cast in the complete opposite role, is the sort of thing that really really stands out.

That guy, of course, is Daniel Bryan.

Bryan starts the match against Samoa Joe and lasts all the way through until the end. He’s not as great here as he was then, he’s not as great as a WWE heel as he was as a WWE babyface, nor does he have the supporting cast he did then (Orton is also here, but worse now than then, and Cena/Christian/Cesaro/Sheamus beats out the 2019 combo of AJ/Joe/Kofi/Jeff Hardy), but things work out. The perfect chemistry with Joe remains even with them both cast as villains, he and AJ again rock together especially in more action-based section like they have here, and especially in the final run against Kofi Kingston, the heel act pulls itself together as well as it ever could through a combination of specifically off-putting movements in between all of the usually mean and precise offense. I don’t know if I’d call it one of the absolute best performances in his career, but (a) it would be in a lot of other careers, & (b) it’s still a remarkable thing, acting as the fulcrum upon which one of the best matches of the year turns.

It is also really really far from being some one man show too, to be fair.

Starting the match alongside the champion, Samoa Joe also has the chance to have one of the better opening stretches in the history of these matches while hunting down an evasive Bryan, along with great run against Styles and Kingston before he’s eliminated some fifteen minutes in. The same goes for AJ Styles, not in the central role he was in another great Chamber match, but contributing in a lot of the same way, through the strength of offense and being the guy here who best explores what the space can let him do on offense.

Hardy, Kingston, and Orton are not quite as instrumental to the match’s success on a mechanical level as the others, but the match’s other strength — beyond letting three of the best ever fairly loose in a big main event — is how well it sets them, and the match at large, up to succeed in ways it very easily could have avoided. All three wind up contributing a lot to the match because of how they’re used, and while Kingston is not the wrestler that Bryan or Joe is, it’s his ultra-likeable personality work along with what the match does with that that really brings it all home.

For Kofi Kingston, all he really has to do is be himself.

The booking of this match and his gauntlet success on television the previous week (given the Bryan-but-manufactured Gauntlet Match Iron Man rub) means a wave of something has started, this few month period where Kingston became an avatar for a million different things. I never got it on a talent level, the pure mechanics of him, but Kofi’s greatest strength is how likeable he is, and at all moments here, he retains that. His babyface comebacks are terrific, he hits most of his stuff clean, and in the most complimentary way possible, it’s the first time ever as a singles wrestler that Kofi manages to really rise up and meet the moment. With a guy like Bryan on the other end and this match getting as much of the core concept right as he does, it sometimes feels like all Kingston has to do is find the X’s on the stage in white tape and get there at the right times, but Kofi not only finds and steps on those bad boys, but he leaps down on them with real force and emphasis, becoming the second most important guy here in terms of why this match succeeds to the extent it does.

As for Randy Orton (still an all-timer, but starting to get a little Past It at this point) and Jeff Hardy, it means shorter runs here, basically giving the match all they have to contribute. In Hardy’s case, it means playing the hits and putting what’s left out there for a few cool spots, like the Poetry in Motion to the outside floor part of the Chamber, or his Swanton off the pod to AJ Styles’ back as he lies across the top rope, leading to his own elimination. For Orton, it’s less physical — although he also plays the hits and possesses the same snap as ever — and more so a lot of his utility here as a narrative piece. A little bit setting up a Mania match with AJ by sneaking up on him to eliminate him, a little bit showing the old history with Bryan as a way to kind of communicate that Bryan’s now become a better version of what he fought against, but mostly, his history with Kofi Kingston, existing not only as a former foe to topple, but a symbol of the idea that Kingston is finally getting past things he spent the last decade unable to, leading to the final showdown with Bryan.

For as much as the performances help a match like this, it’s the construction and, shockingly for WWE at this point, the bigger picture narrative work that ties this entire thing together.

Not only the ideas already talked about, but how well the match sets up the final confrontation. Bryan as the predator who takes advantage all match — of Jeff Hardy for the elimination earlier, but constantly in smaller ways to get on offense — and tries to flee up the cage wall or on top of pods, setting up the final ten minutes when Kofi gets him one on one. Kofi Kingston enters the match third, and every part of the match from then on follows this pattern of keeping Bryan away from him, while one or the other either removes someone from the path (Kofi taking out Orton), or shows how devious one of the guys Kofi has to get through is (Orton taking out AJ to set up Kofi getting him next, Bryan taking advantage of Jeff Hardy’s big risk), making what he does that much more impressive.

It’s all that foundational work put in that makes the last third of the match, the Bryan vs. Kofi part, hit in the way it does.

Something like Bryan’s initial try at vulturing the match failing might not feel like a huge success had the match not used the prior eliminations to show how successful that strategy was against far more accomplished wrestlers than Kofi. Likewise, when Bryan kicks out of the same kind of sequence, a quick try at something cheap countered into the Trouble in Paradise, that eliminated Orton, it also transforms him into an even larger mountain for Kingston to climb, near the end of a match that finally showed that he might actually be able to make it to the top. The match also weaponizes some of the history of the match, setting up the big pod spot where Kofi is thrown HARD into the plexiglass in a way that’s stopped a few underdog wins before, only to then kick out of the follow up running knee back in the ring. These are small and basic things that maybe ought not to seem so novel or whose impact and importance ought to seem more obvious, but given how rarely they’re put to this great/effective of use, they have a way of standing out. Especially when they work out this well.

Kofi gets Bryan there at the end, but taking one risk too many, misses a splash off of the top of one of the chamber pods, allowing Bryan the room for a second running knee for the win. It feels a little strange, all the echo of Bryan’s own rise to the top, only for Kofi to lose the match clean in a way Bryan didn’t, but I think relative to the story — Kofi getting this all suddenly and having to fight back to the one on one title match at WrestleMania —  it works out really well.

I don’t love it in the same way or with the same intensity that I loved the version of this from five years earlier, but I love it for all the same reasons. It’s one of the rare times when a company this frustrating gets it entirely right, and you get a rare glimpse at what it looks like when this gigantic and expensive machine works the way it’s supposed to. All-timers given the platform to succeed, combined with putting those with less spectacular skillsets in position to make the most of what they can do, allowing the combination of careful handiwork and pure talent to combine to make something that not only whips ass, but succeeds in an even larger sense, perfectly creating demand for a title match on the biggest show of the year in a month and a half that didn’t exist at all a week earlier.

For just about every reason possible, one of the more impressive things achieved in wrestling all year.

***1/3

Daniel Bryan vs. Samoa Joe vs. Mustafa Ali, WWE House Show – Vancouver (2/2/2019)

This was for Bryan’s WWE World Heavyweight Title.

It’s a worthwhile watch for two reasons.

Firstly, the environment help a whole lot, as it is always really fun and sometimes enlightening to see WWE guys in an environment like this. Less enlightening when all three spent time in front of smaller crowds and more freeing environment, but always a welcome sight from guys so often shoved inside a real rigid box.

Bryan is especially skilled in finding that balance in a spot like this in between having a great match but also fucking around a whole lot in real fun ways. Something like staying in his pose on the turnbuckles for another two or three minutes and insisting they play his music again, while he holds the position with his arms out the entire time, escalating to Ali eventually corpsing and Joe going from ignoring it in-character to getting pissed off, combined with a classic stalling routine, adds so much to the proceedings. Joe, another old pro with some familiarity goofing off in matches of lesser importance, also feels a lot freer in a match like this in a way that makes the match feel more like a living breathing thing.

Secondly, yeah, it’s also just a pretty great match.

When two of the best wrestlers of all time, still capable of great work together get their hands on a guy like Ali, it’s pretty easy, even with lower ambitions. He’s not putting on one of his big bump freak showings, but he fits in perfectly against both Joe and Bryan, doing slightly different versions of the same thing, flying more against Joe and beating Bryan’s ass when he gets the chance. And then also, yes, Joe vs. Bryan is also outstanding. It is absolutely them playing the hits — more accurately running through a shorter medley of them in the space of one track — but it’s a great set of hits.

They rotate back and forth for a while, play around, and hurl offense out there. It’s fun, totally unserious riffing, barely great, but achieving what it does because it’s so easygoing with all that it does right. Ideal house show bullshit.

Bryan beats Joe with the Busaiku Knee after an Erick Rowan distraction.

Is this essential?

No. Of course not. There are probably at least ten better matches where Bryan and Joe fight each other and there’s a better Bryan vs. Mustafa Ali three way match a little over a month later. If you really want to see some fun minutes of Joe vs. Ali, a pairing we never got to see a whole lot of, this is here for you, I suppose. But whatever, man.

They don’t all have be all-time hits and sometimes I just want to throw something on and have a nice time with some of the boys. If you want a fun way to kill like fifteen minutes with some fun popcorn ass pro wrestling, this one’s here for you.

***

AJ Styles vs. Daniel Bryan, WWE Smackdown Live (11/13/2018)

This was for Styles’ WWE World Heavyweight Title.

Bryan and AJ are back to only having the customary twelve or so minutes to work with on free television rather than the fifteen plus they somehow got away with at the end of October, as this was actually planned more this time, but they make up for it with some greater narrative focus and charm, as this is the match where Bryan finally switches it up after the company fumbled his babyface return as catastrophically as they did, and turns heel.

As opposed to their match two weeks prior, in which I think it was approached as a match first and where the narrative elements served to enhance it, this feels like a narrative first effort which is enhanced by the fact that it happens to be executed by two of the greatest wrestlers of all time.

Regarding the match itself, the mechanical nature of it, it is Bryan and AJ and they get right what they always do. AJ’s knee work is not only very good, but also all different, and while you cannot say that about Bryan’s more limited arm work, repeating things works in a narrative sense for him, so even that’s great. AJ’s selling is again not very good, but Bryan once again limits his work on the arm in a very precise way to where it feels like the match is never hurt by AJ being AJ. Offensively, everything works, the match is constructed and paced incredibly well, all of that boring stuff that is alway there with these two and any half-decent opponent. The work is tight and mean, and Both men also bring that wonderful feeling of hostility to the proceedings once again, not increasing from the start like on October 30th, but now in a way to where it feels like it was always there, in a great change.

There are other fun small changes and reversals here from their last match.

For example, AJ is the one to start hot this week, but rather than how Bryan simply had bad luck and hurt himself through overzealousness in that match, Bryan has to actually cut him off. AJ goes to the knee work early, just like Bryan did the arm, but it lasts a lot longer. Bryan goes to the arm to stop the knee work and to try and open Styles up for bigger offense, rather than focusing entirely on it (there are non-character reasons for this too, as discussed above, but it also reads this way), but Styles can get back to his point of attack in a way that Bryan was unable to in their last match, and that he’s unable to even here. AJ doesn’t feel like a better wrestler than Daniel Bryan necessarily, they’re always presented as near total equals, but Bryan again feels like he’s inside of his own head in a way that AJ Styles simply isn’t, and it continues to cost him until something finally shifts.

Really, that’s the best part of this.

Instead of how WWE often approaches these things — a turn coming in an angle independent from a wrestling match, or one moment near the end, if not as the finish itself — the match spends its time laying out a case for Bryan’s turn in the first place. Despite it going entirely different, something is still not quite working for Bryan against AJ. Where he had bad luck last time, here, his plan outright fails. Things continue to break in the way of the champion while nothing works quite right for Bryan, and the moment something even kind of does, he takes advantage in a way he never would have thought of for the last six years.

You don’t need Bryan to make faces for thirty seconds before he does it, or to grapple with something before doing it, because the entire match (along with their last one) already made every reason for it clear. Desperate to get back where he was, lacking the total and complete confidence he once had after four years off and a string of less than ideal luck, Bryan doesn’t hesitate at all when given even half a second to think about the choice.

Bryan ducks under a Phenomenal Forearm, and AJ just barely stops short of the ref, but still knocks him away in the process. Bryan runs to punt Styles in the groin in the second and a half that the referee is blind to anything that might happen, and follows with the Busaiku Knee to finally regain the title after four and a half years.

A wonderful example, yet again, of what this can be.

The match may not be up to the level of the last one or all that it can be, but it’s such a great chunk of wrestling TV, offering a much needed shift, and doing so in a way that not only makes sense in a character way, but that makes sense within the confines of a pro wrestling match. It is not quite, like, the sort of match that justifies the idea of WWE in a way that the October 30th match did, but it works along similar lines. This is what the machine is capable of in a smaller sense. A match with real stakes and feeling behind it, character shifts with the work put in to have real value and mean something, and a great enough match on top of it.

If their last match was one of my favorite 2000s ROH matches of the year, then this, something spiritually similar but also slightly different, narrative quality with great professional wrestling surrounding it through a kind of casual force of the talent involved, feels like my favorite early 90s WCW match of 2018.

The least of their three matches this year so far, but what it lacks as a wrestling match, it possesses an abundance of in terms of its utility as great wrestling television.

Pro wrestling ass pro wrestling.

***

AJ Styles vs. Daniel Bryan, WWE Smackdown Live (10/30/2018)

This was for Styles’ WWE World Heavyweight Titles.

Just about everybody knows this by now, but were you not aware, this was originally supposed to be on the Crown Jewel blood money show a few days later, except that Bryan wound up not going, and so it was quickly put on free television, and a fourth AJ/Joe match wound up happening in Saudi Arabia instead.

Of all the times to have a crisis of conscience about the Saudi Arabia trip, Bryan Danielson chose the best possible one. Or at least, for us as viewers, the most beneficial possible moment. Any earlier and they do something else instead, maybe never even book it to begin with. Any later, and we maybe just get some angle to delay the match, or it’s no crisis of confidence at all. On a pay-per-view, this is probably like fifteen minutes and messed around with in some WWE way, on the middle of the card in front of a larger and quieter audience. On free television, the natural WWE instinct to fill up as much time as possible strikes instead, and two of the best wrestlers of all time instead get some twenty plus minutes, and the more important number, a rare sixteen or so aired.

Predictably, the results are great, with the two old pros having simultaneously both an old sort of classic 2000s independent style match, but also one that like a Bryan/Punk years back in a similar setting, also shows off just how much they’ve improved.

Firstly, those old hits.

This is not quite a classic ROH Title style double limb match like the match previously mentioned, but it feels close enough to count.

Bryan aims for the arm and Styles the leg. It’s not unlike their match after WrestleMania earlier in the year, but this time, less of a sampler and more the start of a full meal, as they get deeper into it and the match gets to actually reach a conclusion now.

What works here always worked. They’re both capable of getting real mean and like every other AJ/Bryan match, tempers flare pretty quick and there’s a pettiness and hostility here that they never get the proper credit for against each other. Every strike is great, they string together some really wonderful sequences, and in particular, Bryan’s selling is fantastic. He’s able to still do his offense and run in spurts while still selling a leg in ways few other wrestlers can pull off, always showing a toll being paid, and changing other set spots in small ways (throwing kicks with the other leg) or having to fight a little harder or having less success with some things (AJ initially catching the rana off the top because Bryan takes longer to climb) to still show you that this is affecting the match in a lot of different ways, despite still giving you the fireworks that a big title match deserves.

The difference here is that while Styles is successful in his attack, Bryan never really is. There are a few different reasons for that, another strength of the match, but it’s something I found real interesting and incredibly satisfying. The tease out of what you expect this to be based on what it had been six and a half months earlier and what you often get with these ex-independent legends in big WWE singles matches, only to turn that over and not only do something else, but use those expectations to tell the sort of story that makes this a little more interesting than just being a regular great match.

It’s also to their benefit — and shows their improvement from the past — as while AJ Styles has gotten much better since their 2000s meetings at selling body parts, it is still pretty much the thing he’s worst at, and the match is better off like this. Feigning towards this kind of a match but not actually asking Styles to do any of that, and instead using the idea of this kind of a match to tell a totally different story.

For whatever reason, Daniel Bryan,  the on screen figure, is just sort of off here.

You can put it down to being his first WWE Title match since being stripped of the title in 2014. You can credit it to the impromptu nature of the match, or having mostly spent his return against WWE style guys who have no idea how to handle this kind of a match and primarily having his way with them, or to something less character related but still believable, like the near-hometown Atlanta crowd being far more pro-Styles than pro-Bryan, resulting in maybe the first time a crowd is cheering more for the other guy than Bryan since maybe 2012. There are a lot of good and sensible reasons, and it’s a rare case where WWE being fundamentally lazy works out in a match’s benefit, as any of them or all of them in concert can be true. Care so little that nothing not screamed in your face is ever spelled out, and all possibilities are correct.

The fun thing about it though is that, rather than something nebulous and softer spoken, or maybe just easier like Bryan outright working as the match’s antagonist, whatever’s going on with Bryan manifests itself immediately and, as he is a greater wrestler than most, his mistakes are not just smaller ones, but gigantic ones too, and they all come in the first few moments.

Firstly, Bryan almost immediately goes to try and get to the arm, without anything even close to a standard Bryan feeling out process. When it doesn’t work, because AJ is still too fresh, Bryan tries to force the match somewhere before it’s there organically. Going for a Tope Suicida in the opening moments, Bryan comes down on his left leg and injures it in his overzealousness. From there, the match slips away from him minute by minute. He gets his offense, but AJ always has the leg as an anchor to pull on whenever Bryan so much as looks at his arm. On top of that, Bryan’s overzealousness borders on desperation and he becomes easier to read and counter as the match continues. He never lands the knee, can’t keep the LeBell Lock on because of the knee, and AJ just has it.

On top of everything Bryan does wrong, AJ does every single thing right, ending not only with a great counter, but what feels like a nuclear option as he transitions the old modified Styles Clash out of a Triangle Choke right into the Calf Killer on the hurt leg. Styles cranks up real real hard, and to complete maybe his lowest point, Bryan even taps out.

This is the good shit.

Bryan and Styles manage to combine two of my favorite things a wrestling match can be — both this masterful narrative about strategy and mistakes that’s the start of a somewhat longer term character thing, but also do it within the confines of one of the most enjoyable types of matches that wrestling has to offer — and the result is outstanding. This is 2018 and nobody is shocked that Bryan Danielson and AJ Styles had a great match together, but the surprises that make this interesting in addition to the expected mechanical genius come in between the lines and on the margins.

Every so often, typically by accident these days as this match shows, you get a match that maybe doesn’t justify the WWE, but shows how this machine is supposed to work when everything is right. Two of the greatest in the world and of the century doing what they always do, but now with the advantage of larger narrative elements at play than simply having a great match and the production and precision of it all. It is what this is supposed to be, the entire reason a wrestling promotion this large and imposing ought to exist.

The occasions, where the machine works like it’s supposed to, don’t come around that often anymore, even relative to how rare they seemed even half a decade earlier, but leave it to AJ Styles, Daniel Bryan, and a handy little bit of timing to accidentally fire that old thing up again, if only for twenty minutes before someone figures out it’s on, and comes rushing to pull the plug yet again.

Pro wrestling ass pro wrestling, and one of the best 2000s ROH World Title matches of the 2010s.

***1/2

AJ Styles vs. Samoa Joe, WWE Super Showdown (10/6/2018)

This was a no disqualification and no count out match for Styles WWE World Heavyweight Title.

Once again, Joe and AJ deliver the goods.

While not actually their last match together for the title in 2018, it is technically the end to their wonderful few month title program. Would that it were anywhere near the level of blowoff that a feud and a pairing this great warranted. It’s still a match of a certain quality, and I think significantly more so than the larger disappointment three weeks prior, but it is nowhere near what they are capable of, and what a series that began with one of the best matches of the year, full-stop, deserved.

The main problem here is that this happens in the WWE and it is subject to the whims of the dumbest and most upsetting company that there is. Specifically, it happens in the middle of the show, and as the all-time bad seniors tour main event is a higher priority than anything else on the show, they receive the majority of the accoutrements in a useless attempt to make it halfway decent, rather than enhancing an already great match at the end of an already far greater story. The match lasts some twenty five minutes, and if you cut it down to a specific twenty two or so of those minutes, you could create a version of this match that nobody would ever know had a single stipulation attached to it. At best, it’s a waste of a perfectly good stipulation, and at worst, it’s promotional malpractice.

Either way, it’s hard to remove that from the match, the feeling of how easily this could have been even better in the hands of virtually any other half-competent promotion.

Because even despite that, this is so great.

What they lack in shortcuts, the weapons and setpieces a match billed like this for the title ought to be allowed, they make up for in every other way possible.

On an individual performance level, Samoa Joe and AJ Styles are who they are. The former, a decade and change removed from his peak (the greatest individual peak I think I’ve ever seen) but still capable of mustering up the all-world ability when the moment’s right, and the latter, still a top ten wrestler of the year in the midst of a quietly great year up that would be there somewhere near his best if not for the slower start, who not only do all the things they’ve excelled at for years, but do so as part of one of the longer lasting and more prodigious great combinations of the century, to date.

The most important thing about this match is that, while similar to their match at the Hell in a Cell show three weeks prior, the biggest difference is the one that matters the most. Unlike that match, this is one that sees them rediscover at least a fraction of the anger and intensity that made their first title match so great. Largely, that comes out of AJ Styles, as the babyface whose job it is to be fiery and aggressive in these setting, showing this anger and hostility in a few different ways at the beginning and end of the match, but Samoa Joe is also once again real great at bring a calmer sort of menace to the proceedings in everything that he does. It is not spitting mad, this unbelievably intense and focused effort on the level of SummerSlam where these bad feelings practically pour out of the screen, but there’s a tension and a feeling here all the same.

Joe and AJ don’t get the sort of runway they’ve really earned, but in a narrative sense and on a nuts and bolts level, the match gives them a lot to do as well.

Beyond the obvious layout here that always works (and that they, again, are very good at changing up or embellishing just enough to not feel old), the match gives them a fun new place to go in the second half. Following a real nasty Electric Chair through the sole table the match is allowed to use, one taken nearly sideways by Joe onto the left leg, the match becomes entirely about Samoa Joe’s hurt leg.

Usually, it’s not a thing that I love. The heel getting hurt, being sympathetic, all of that. It’s dumb and water brained, like unless someone’s turning face or you’re going somewhere with it longer term, there’s just not a lot of point to it, an unnecessary muddying of real clear waters.

In this match though, it absolutely works.

Joe has been such a rotten mother fucker throughout the entire feud that it is impossible to feel sympathy for him. The way it’s played in the match, both in how the layout works and how both AJ and Joe react to it, helps that even more. Both men walk a tightrope here that is especially impressive, and not at all easy to get to the other end of. AJ is mean and aggressive towards the knee, with a few moments of targeted offense, and these big reactions when he first goes after it, gleeful but without ever feeling like an antagonist. It’s a rare gift. The same goes for Joe here, who puts on another in a string of great knee selling performances when called upon to do so. It limits him from pulling off the Choke effectively, and hobbles his movement in general, all played by Joe himself in a very realistic feeling way. He is hurt and injured, but above all, he never once goes for sympathy. At all times, it feels like a fate that he has earned, the receipt finally coming due for everything he did to get to this point, and that’s the most important thing of all.

The finish is, for the most part, real great too.

Following his injury and AJ’s attack on the leg, Joe is unable to use his legs in the Choke like he normally would, and it takes him a third try to finally get Styles down on the ground in it. Joe gives up the hold when AJ rolls backwards like he did back time, but Styles then steps ahead and rolls into the Calf Killer for the win.

Conceptually, I like it a lot on a physical level though, and in terms of how they did it. The use of previous matches as well as the content of the previous few minutes to set it up is the sort of wrestling I love to see. It’s unclear if AJ set it up that way or if it just happened to work out perfectly but in most other circumstances, it would be a great babyface finish. I don’t love Joe tapping out like that though, because my idea of Samoa Joe is not the sort of wrestler who gives up. It’s a nice wrestling idea, the heel now being put in real peril and giving up because he lacks the heart of the babyface champion after all this time spent riling him up, but it doesn’t feel right for these two. It’s classic WWE, inflicting this whole other thing, not necessarily worse in theory but incorrect for what they’re working with, onto a pairing that had already perfected their routine together. 

Still, you know, it’s a little too great for me to get really mad about.

A great match under less than ideal circumstances. If not the best match possible nor even the best Samoa Joe vs. AJ Styles match of 2018, the second best AJ/Joe match of the year is still better than almost everything else. The mark of the real all-time level greatness of both Styles and Joe lies here, in the fact that a match that one could justifiably call disappointing still winds up being this great.

Not great enough to be some sleeper Match of the Year list pick, but for most of you, probably far greater than you recall.

***1/3

AJ Styles vs. Samoa Joe, WWE Hell in a Cell (9/16/2018)

This was for Styles’ WWE World Heavyweight Title.

First things first, it is not the match that they had at SummerSlam. It does not have the advantages that that match had.

It has already happened before recently, for one thing. Styles and Joe are great enough to not blow all of their stuff in one match, but so much of the charm of the SummerSlam match was the energy in the air at seeing this again after so long and the charm of seeing AJ Styles and Samoa Joe fight over the WWE World Title. As a match, it also lacks the direction of the SummerSlam match, sort of drifting from bit to bit, and never getting as heavily into any of the ideas brought up as their last one did. The other thing is that apart from a more directionless sort of match, it is also in no way even close to being as heated and angry and urgent as their SummerSlam match, in a way that is hard to explain on a real level. Sometimes it is there and sometimes it isn’t and sometimes, this being WWE, they simply have to save some shit and the story gets messed up and they instead have a very normal match less than a month after the sort of hot angle and finish that should have resulted in a twelve minute brawl ending in another DQ. It’s hard to know. For whatever reason, the magic and the feeling was simply was not present here in the same way.

This is especially harmful when it comes to the finish of the match, Styles rolling back in The Choke and on top to barely get a three count. On paper, the idea is another easy classic, Styles just barely escaping with a theoretical fluke pin, to continue the feud. However, as it comes after a much calmer match, one without any of the same energy or feeling as the first, there’s no desperation to speak of, and so a desperate finish also falls just a little bit flat.

All in all, a weird collection of ideas and actions, with each one rarely ever feeling like it exists on the same page as the others.

Certainly, it does not help that the crowd in San Antonio is absolutely dead here, having already sat through a twenty five minute Rollins/Ambrose vs. Ziggler/McIntyre tag team match right before it, and all the other things that make televised WWE live shows such a drag. That’s no excuse, Joe and AJ are great enough to overcome that, but dead silence has a way of bringing certain issues that this has to light.

Still, man, this rocks.

When I say something like “this AJ Styles vs. Samoa Joe match wasn’t as good as their SummerSlam 2018 match”, that’s barely a mark against it at all.

It just means that it wasn’t as great as one of the best matches of the year.

For what this match lacks in the big things — the themes, the anger, the big main event feeling, the sort of immaculate construction that these two have shown themselves capable of against each other time and time again, the Pro Wrestling Ass Pro Wrestling feeling of the entire package — it makes up for in the little things, and the mechanics of it all. Really, at the end of the day, it is still AJ Styles and Samoa Joe wrestling for nineteen minutes.

Joe and AJ fill this thing up, constantly, with a bunch of cool shit, big and small. Great little sells of all sorts of things, fun set ups that see these two somehow continue to find new ways to go at each other nearly fifteen years after their first match together, and a lot of real real crunchy strikes to feast on too.

The match is also home to one of the best little bumps of the year too.

a more forgotten match among their many together (not for unfair reasons), but hidden in it is a lovely return to his Pounce bump circa 2004 from AJ Styles against Samoa Joe

(WWE Hell in a Cell, 9/16/2018) pic.twitter.com/ixHbhJVTJO

— killer spelled backwards (@ElHijoDelSimon) June 21, 2023

The whole thing is almost frustratingly casual given what they’ve shown their ceiling together in 2018, even in the WWE, might be, but the most frustrating thing about it might just be that even when taking it this casual and taking such a step back from how great their last match really was, how easy it still is for them to house show their asses all the way to get another great match.

Styles rolls back on the Choke to get the pin and escape with the title.

It’s inessential kind of B level AJ Styles vs. Samoa Joe, but even house show Joe vs. AJ is better than like 80-90% of other pro wrestling on the planet in 2018.

***

 

AJ Styles vs. Samoa Joe, WWE SummerSlam (8/19/2018)

This was for Styles’ WWE World Heavyweight Title.

“OH WENDYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY”

During the build up to this match, WWE pulled some real WWE nonsense, and rather than playing on the long and storied history between the two, Samoa Joe instead began taunting AJ about spending more time on the road than with his family, including his famous line read of a very normal line, while trying to claim AJ‘s wife now hated him and wanted Styles to lose the title to him. 

One might even say Samoa Joe CROSSED THE LINE.

It’s classic bullshit, but between how Samoa Joe plays it and how AJ Styles reacts to it, both looking as mad as he ought to be but also always portraying this other thing alongside the anger, like he knows Joe well enough to know this is just some bullshit to distract him, it somehow works.

With regards to the match itself, for the second year in a row, Samoa Joe has the best match on the second biggest WWE show of the year, and it is not especially close.

On one level, as a fan (and especially as one who spent formative years illegally downloading matches of these two on shady services, particularly their first meeting at WAR OF THE WIRE, which served as a kind of gateway into ROH on a more hardcore level), it feels unbelievably good. Not just that AJ Styles and Samoa Joe get to wrestle for the WWE World Heavyweight Title on a major event, whether or not it’s the main event proper, but that it is a match like this. 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. It is also a genuine thrill to see them break out some old bits that they don’t always get to do in the WWE, but in an order that still makes them unexpected. It’s not a new feeling exactly, the Punk/Bryan title match is probably the apex of this sort of thing, but it does feel really really good.

That being said, fuck that, I believe you could have none of those experiences and still absolutely love this.

Samoa Joe and AJ Styles do have a match about feelings, but they’re all bad ones. This is a match wrestled with emphasis and passion, but every single feeling on display in this match is purely negative and as hostile as possible.

It 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.

Joe and AJ, somehow, find the best of both worlds, but find it in their own unique way, unlike how any other great non-WWE pairing found it in a similar setting.

Most impressive about this match is how it manages to feel like a genuinely epic struggle while also clearly being the first match in a program.

Samoa Joe survives the Styles Clash, and AJ avoids the Choke, but so much more is left on the table, and it‘s done without this ever feeling like a lesser match for holding back even a little bit. It is a complete thing, even with all left to them, and with the fuck finish that this wields so expertly. 

Following the failure of the Choke and AJ’s own Styles Clash, Joe tries for the Muscle Buster for the first time since ending a career with it (very clearly weaponizing the knowledge of this among those who have it, to great effect based on the reaction), only for AJ to fight it and be knocked outside. As a slight cut opens on AJ’s face, Joe takes the microphone instead of staying on it, and tells AJ’s wife and daughter that daddy would not be coming home, but that he would be their new daddy, leading to AJ Styles tackling him off the announce table through the railing in both a bump that non-main events do not often get in the WWE at this point, but also the kind of big physical reaction that something like that clearly needed to feel effective as a genuine step too far, before AJ also begins repeatedly hitting him with a chair and attacking ringside workers for the disqualification.

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. On top of being one of the best matches of the year, period, it is also one of the most heartwarming, affecting, and impressive.

***3/4

AJ Styles vs. Rusev, WWE Extreme Rules (7/15/2018)

This was for Styles’ WWE World Heavyweight Title.

An easy thing would do would be to identify this as AJ Styles having a great but not epic match against a larger traditional heavyweight wrestler in the middle of the summer, on the weekend the G1 Climax began, and make some joke. The best G1 match of the weekend, or something to that effect. I’d like to imagine I would bring a little more art to it, maybe approach it with some slightly different language, but functionally the same idea. It has a whole lot in common with some of my favorite under-the-radar AJ Styles matches of the decade.

However, this was something just a little different and maybe just a little bit better.

One of my favorite things in wrestling is the idea of the mid-level title match, or the average title defense. When done right, few things impress me more. Not one that aims for epic, that clearly wants to be some long-term memorable outing with a bunch of kickouts and that goes over twenty minutes as if that was a necessity, but something far more assured. A title match in which there is a strategy at play, and the champion simply wins. It’s not to say I love a lazy version of this, because there are hundreds and maybe thousands of lazier no-effort title defenses like this, but there’s something I find so charming about a match like this done correctly. A match where, narratively speaking, things simply work correctly and, more behind the scenes, it’s done with a totally unshakeable confidence.

Styles and Rusev put on a great example of that here, having a match that is not wrestled as though it is much out of the ordinary, but that is simply so naturally great that I’ve wound up remembering it all this time anyways.

The match is only fifteen and a half minutes, but feels as substantial as title matches double its length (literal proof of this exists on the show, as this card is main evented by a truly rotten Seth Rollins vs. Dolph Ziggler thirty minute iron man matches that is nowhere near this match’s league). Both men have strategies, Rusev on the back and Styles on the leg, that matter from start to finish, but it’s also a match that takes a real mid-level obvious one-cycle challenger in Rusev and does its best — at least in the moment, it is WWE after all — to make him leave with far more than he came in with.

Beyond simple elevation or properly done double focus work (more on that later), the match also does a stellar job with a less obvious aim, working essentially an even match given the crowd support for the Rusev Day gimmick, offering equal chances for each side to support their guy without the match ever feeling like a thumb is being put on one side of the scale or the other. Rusev is the one in control before the big comeback and Aiden English interferes a few times, but Rusev has the more sympathetic injury (if only as a kind of expression as well that AJ is simply better at this), and if you are so inclined, the match offers ample opportunity to just cheer the big guy.

Performance wise, the match excels too. AJ is asked to do a little less here, only selling some slight back work, as the knee allows him openings he might not have had otherwise, but AJ is again really good with something like this. He is not a natural arm or leg seller (although by this point, he can), but something like non-major back work really allows him to shine. We’re not exactly going to break out the Working Class Hero/Bret Hart back selling idea here, a guy gutting it out through a shift, but Styles is very good at holding his back in a tighter and more rigid way. It always feels like a struggle, which is the most important thing.

The real star here is actually the challenger though. Under this name at least, and maybe even overall, this is Rusev’s career performance. His work on the back and offense in general is as good as it always is, but when asked to get real in-depth and express knee damage in something of a rarity, he does so so so so well. He is always limping or in some basic level of pain, doing so believably without exaggerating it or seeming phony. Rusev is expressive without feeling like he is Selling, and the fact that he does this while also doing these little bits the match never explicitly asks of him is so impressive. Little things like holding his leg after AJ kicks out of the big superkick or stumbling getting up, walking slower, so it feels like he’s unable to get out of the way or break up AJ’s leap up top for the match-ending Phenomenal Forearm, it’s all fantastic.

Rusev’s work and effort in these smaller moments not only helps the match by giving the early work some more consequence, Rusev could have maybe won or stopped/delayed the finish if not for the damage, but it’s a handy little bit of self protection too. He still loses almost entirely cleanly (there’s a mishap with an exposed buckle, but given that his sidekick exposed it in the first place, it hardly seems unfair), but he has a halfway sympathetic gripe, and it’s a whole lot better than nothing.

AJ Styles keeps the title in a stopgap title match, winning a gimme feud to fill up a pay-per-view slot before a longer feud begins, saving the first match for WWE’s second biggest show of the year, but the match accomplishes a whole lot more than that. More than it easily could have, more than it seemed like it would at the time, and even if Rusev wound up still being the next in a line of a million to briefly gain something and see it squandered, it’s still very impressive to see it essentially gathered from nothing and given form out of thin air like this.

That potent combination of narrative and performance that leaves everyone involved better than they found them, Rusev for pushing it like he did, and Styles for overcoming it with as steady and clear of a head as he did. Pro wrestling ass pro wrestling.

For all the many things it tries to do and does completely perfectly, one of the more impressive WWE matches of the year.

***1/4

AJ Styles vs. Shinsuke Nakamura, WWE Money in the Bank (6/17/2018)

This was a Last Man Standing Match for Styles’ WWE World Heavyweight Title.

It has not been the feud or even in-ring series that WWE or a lot of people thought it would be, to say the least.

Forget even living up to their famous and great Tokyo Dome match, these matches — WrestleMania, blood money show, and Backlash — have not been great, even by my most generous estimation. Chalk it up to Nakamura realizing what the game really is in WWE and never trying all that hard again once he got over, focusing on antics and entrance and aura above all else, if you would like. That is at least half of it, and probably closer to three-quarters of it. At the same time, AJ Styles has also not lit the world on fire in these matches either, representing something of a slump that had some people out there in the world wondering if Styles had finally fallen off after sixteen years of (relatively, you have to account for TNA sometimes) sustained quality.

Simply put, it is a dud of a feud that took three months away from an AJ Styles who, based on other output in 2018, could have been a serious Wrestler of the Year level guy once again otherwise.

However, this one works.

You could chalk it up to whatever you want to, I suppose, but the easiest answer here is probably the most accurate one (one could turn that plural if one would like, as them trying their hardest in the big blowoff match is also not out of character for either wrestler). Which is to say that a WWE Last Man Standing match allowed anything close to a full arsenal of bells and whistles is one of the easiest environments for good to great wrestlers to succeed in.

The rules of the match help them a lot, giving them the sort of spacing they need for a great Nakamura match at this point, but also allowing them to dig in and get a little crazy to help spice up a pairing that badly needs it. Styles can take the sort of big wild bumps — onto the steel ramp, in the crowd, outside, around the announce tables — that he wasn’t able to and/or didn’t bother with previously. It also lets them do some fun work near the end with Styles’ attack on Nakamura’s leg helping him out when he had trouble standing, helping him set up for the moves that led to the end, which is not the biggest deal in the world but a smart little thing that helps the work here feel a little more substantial.

If nothing else, the match and feud ends in a perfect kind of big babyface victory way, with Nakamura finally being totally beaten, only to taunt AJ before the end, goading him into actual revenge with a kick to the groin before the Phenomenal Forearm through an announce table finally does it. Not just something big and impactful to end a big blowoff, but preceding it with the kind of feel-good and totally appropriate act of protagonistic vengeance that WWE often denies its lead babyfaces. I’m not really ready to say any of this is what it’s supposed to be, given how much of this program sucked or, more generously, was at least deeply wasteful, but the ending itself is some real classical and successful babyface booking, the likes of which you do not often see here.

Not quite great enough to get talked up as some kind of major miracle, especially with the larger scale disappointment of every other match they had before this in 2018, but the fact that it is even borderline great at all is one of AJ Styles’ more impressive feats.

three boy

AJ Styles vs. John Cena vs. Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn vs. Dolph Ziggler vs. Baron Corbin, WWE Fastlane (3/11/2018)

This was for Styles’ WWE World Heavyweight Title.

Real sneakily, a pretty great match.

We’re not talking match of the year here or anything, it isn’t even the best match to happen on this day, but you have four and a half great wrestlers in a big main event fireworks show and allowed access to all (in 2018 anyways) of the benefits that go with that. It’s hard to go too wrong, and this is not a match that sets out to make waves.

In between all the cool things, laid out to get as much out of them as possible, you have your little narrative developments that help out. Kev and Sami trying to game the system but self destructing because only one guy can win, and also because Shane McMahon can’t stop interfering. AJ and Cena getting back into it a few weeks after their quietly great 2018 rematch, with Cena’s desperation to get into a big WrestleMania match again shining through, as well as the little nugget of Styles surviving something in an Attitude Adjustment through the announce table that he didn’t two weeks ago.

(There’s also whatever Ziggler and Barry Corbin are doing, I guess? Honestly don’t remember. You could edit them out of this match and lose very little and you could edit Corbin out and maybe even gain something.)

Mostly though, it is just a very simple roll out of a bunch of cool stuff. The easiest thing in the world, let talented people riff around for a while with every benefit you can offer them, and more often than not, yeah, it’s going to be a good time. Even the WWE, being the WWE, is not quite able to get in the way of this, even if it never becomes every single inch of what it could be.

Kev gets Cena with the Powerbomb, only for AJ to recover and hit the Phenomenal Forearm to keep the title, blatant striving opportunism once again being thwarted by the forces of relative good.

Genuinely fun piece of car crash bullshit.

three boy