10 Best TV Wrestling Matches Ever

All Elite Wrestling is a promotion name that its critics have weaponised - well the Women's division is hardly elite! - but this stunning professional wrestling match, everything that built to it, and everything that followed, was AEW's vision perfectly crystallised.

Kenny Omega and PAC had feuded since All Out, and were 1-1 before Omega embarked on a run in the tag team division with Hangman Page. PAC's quest for supremacy was fuelled by Omega's apathy. His past wasn't through with him, and it returned to batter those he held dearest - Riho, Michael Nakazawa - to both drag him into a match and heat up, in parallel, the AEW Women's Title match between Riho and Nyla Rose.

The Iron Man match itself was worked at a level US TV matches just didn't or couldn't approach within the confines of the old touring loop. They worked an unreal pace (Jesus Christ, was it paced) and, telling an earned and explosive story of parity, beat the ever-living sh*t out of each other via several insane spots from the top rope to the outside. It built impeccably on their previous encounters; Omega located a counter to PAC's springboard moonsault, but PAC, revealing the layers of his prowess, immediately countered the counter with a disgusting DDT.

The entire match was beautifully arranged to cast doubt over the outcome of every sequence, much less the finish. It was structured, in a glorious subversion of the Iron Man norm, to make it seem that the first fall wasn't in sight, much less was a contrived platform for the babyface comeback. Again: they beat the f*ck out of each other at a scintillating, unwavering pace, and did so to reinforce PAC's 'Bastard' persona and reestablish Omega as the Best Bout Machine.

An incredible transposition of the Kenny Omega NJPW epic to episodic television, it somehow conspired to elevate a trope into a transgression when PAC earned a disqualification after a steel chair onslaught. It marked the first DQ in AEW history, enhancing in the process the earnest volume of the scorching support that powered Omega through the Brutaliser and over the line. But, magically, not after using the key weapon of Kota Ibushi, not Hangman Page, revealing to the most keen of fans his headspace heading into Revolution's fraught civil war.

More deft, dovetailing booking in the the post-match - the contrast between PAC's fury and Orange Cassidy's shrugging, why-not challenge was beautiful - informed the dynamic of one of wrestling's all-time great midcard show-stealers.

The greatest TV wrestling match ever was a diversionary grudge match subplot ahead of the greatest tag team match ever: All Elite Wrestling, all right.