10 Times The Competition Totally Embarrassed WWE

10. The CZW/ROH Inter-Promotional Feud

In 2001, WWE promoted the "Invasion" angle in which ECW and WCW - gutted, bastardised versions obviously - waged war with the WWF.

It was a painful disaster. Nobody bought Stone Cold Steve Austin as a WCW guy because he in effect became Stone Cold Steve Austin by savaging his original WCW run in ECW. Stephanie McMahon in a Kangol hat was a cursed image. The WWF did next to nothing - less than nothing, in fact - to build the invaders as a legit threat. It was just more bullsh*t McMahon melodrama that didn't even bother to masquerade as anything else.

Historically, WWE has looked at (or down upon) independent wrestling as a series of exhibition matches worked by guys who get too much sh*t in. This is why they are dispatched to the PC: to learn how to talk and how to unlearn bad in-ring habits. Triple H is on record, in 2014, saying that indie guys have "zero ability" to talk.

That's funny, because the ROH Vs. CZW feud of 2006 accomplished everything that the Invasion did not.

An unpredictable war between two evenly positioned companies, the programme extracted every glorious story beat from a bottomless narrative: set against a backdrop of ultra-heated tribalism, this bloody, philosophical war incorporated uneasy and unholy alliances alike as individual ambition undermined the united front in ROH, and the united front in CZW was only finalised through a shocking, temporary truce.

It was amazing - literally as great as the ECWCW Invasion was atrocious.