10 Wrestling Matches You Won't Believe Happened In 2019

10. Hiroshi Tanahashi & The Rock N Roll Express Vs. LIJ - NJPW Fighting Spirit Unleashed

The nostalgic irony market has served Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson well in recent years - the former's winsome use of the Canadian Destroyer is the perfect distillation of it - but that sells the Rock N' Roll Express short. Somehow, through the dark arts of old school psychology, they can go when the audience most wants them to go.

But it's a different thing entirely to pull off a match in New Japan Pro Wrestling, with its stratospheric demands for supreme technicality.

Hiroshi Tanahashi performed the Ricky Morton role in a neat and effective tribute, before engineering his typically great comeback spot to build to the triple team, and, with a mere high knee-lift and air guitar strum, this inexplicable, wonderful trio - wrestling's version of Iron Maiden rocking out on the amps - popped the crowd huge. This was wonderful space-between-moves stuff; Robert Gibson was barely capable of physically jumping up for the triple dropkick spot, but Shingo Takagi was so desperate in clinging to the ropes that he made you believe he could.

Simple, timeless, perfect: when this trio did pull of that spot later in the match, the crowd went into meltdown.