10 Best Wrestling Matches Of 2024
The Year Of The Dragon.
As ever, there are many honourable mentions to highlight.
Will Ospreay could appear more than once on this list. His matches against MJF (July 17 Dynamite) Konosuke Takeashita (Revolution) and PAC (All Out) were all outrageous. The agility and the intricacy of the counters was something else. It should be physically impossible for him to throw himself at the canvas, head-first, with that velocity.
It’s difficult to care about Ring of Honor - there’s already too much AEW content as it is - which is a shame. Diamante and Leyla Hirsch went ludicrously hard at Death Before Dishonor, where at Supercard of Honor, Eddie Kingston and Mark Briscoe wrestled an incredibly emotional match with a superb tonal shift. Eddie’s performance as a situational heel who refused to let Mark have his sentimental moment without a gruesome fight was superb, and Mark is, arguably, the very best babyface in pro wrestling.
Zack Sabre, Jr. was involved in the high points of both NJPW (Vs. Bryan Danielson) and CMLL (Vs. Hechicero). WWE has its in-house style. A lot of the matches are paced in the exact same way, and the moves are drawn from a much narrower field, but something like Rhea Ripley & Damien Priest Vs. Dominik Mysterio & Liv Morgan was deliriously fun soap opera.
But which matches ranked among the very best…?
10. Bronson Reed Vs. Braun Strowman - WWE Raw (September 16)
It doesn’t matter that this wasn’t a long main event that strives for inclusion in such lists; if anything, the cynical star-chase match is becoming increasingly passé.
This wasn’t technically a “match” - the bell did not ring - but who cares. It was a triumph.
You know that feeling, in a pop or rock song, when the band drives into a key change and a sense of stunned euphoria takes hold as you punch the air?
This was the pro wrestling version of that. Braun Vs. Bronson was a violent festival of HELL YEAH moments. Just when you thought it could not get any more awesome, it did get more awesome - literally one second later, in the most awesome way possible. Bronson Reed threw a fan at Braun, to slow down his train spot, which was big dumb fun in the best possible way. Mere seconds later, Strowman dusted off a wild, unusual attack and smashed Reed through a barricade.
The brawl broke out in the backstage area, as the two wrestling soulmates continued the loop with the awesome physical sensation of destroying a video game environment. This was the reason a lot of millennials got into wrestling - watching big bruisers kick lumps out of one another - but it was miles better than your nostalgia.
Wade Barrett described the first phase of the melee as the greatest 60 seconds in the history of the sport. In the moment, he wasn’t wrong.