10 Most Effective Wrestling Heels Of The 21st Century

10. Sasha Banks

Sasha Banks in NXT was cool; she captured the bling and bombast zeitgeist of modern urban culture to carve out her unique, vicious and crowing Boss character.

But she wasn't a continuation of the cool heel device popularised in the 1990s. Fans in the midpoint nadir of that DayGlo, antiquated landscape were alienated by the WWF's attempts to position Shawn Michaels as a doe-eyed dreamer, and WCW's beat-for-beat recycling of Hulk Hogan's passé American hero schtick - so they clung to the black-clad antiheroes of the New World Order.

As entertaining as that faction was, the purpose was self-defeating. Fans didn't want to hate them; they wanted to be them. Their nominal role of generating sympathy for babyfaces was, with a few rule-proving exceptions, undermined. The angle unravelled after just two years, painting it more as fad than revolution.

Banks in her 2015 pomp was too vile to endear herself to audiences. Her most famous rival, the inherently loveable Bayley, did much to help her cause. Banks, a member of the Four Horsewomen, channelled the Four Horsemen stable after which they were named by attempting to break Bayley's hand in an ultra-heated match at TakeOver: Brooklyn. In that match she also vaulted over the referee to drill Bayley with a suicide dive - fusing modern athleticism with classic cheating. She arguably bettered that heel performance at TakeOver: Respect, during which she ripped the headband from young Bayley superfan Izzy to massive jeers.

Banks is floundering as a babyface on RAW largely because fans know what she is capable of - mastery of a difficult and elusive skill.