10 Best Wrestling Matches Of 2019
2. Kenny Omega Vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi - NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 13
It's funny: in a year in which he didn't wrestle as much as in years past, in which he was surpassed as the best in the world as a result, a year in which he was compared unfavourably to the stars of NXT, Kenny Omega wrestled the second best match of 2019.
The meta build was very intriguing; NJPW Ace, Hiroshi Tanahashi, declared Omega's dangerous style an affront to the purity of the storytelling art. Omega's matches only tell a story at the finish. They don't build, Tanahashi said.
Omega in response labelled Tanahashi's style old-fashioned. He "recycles" himself. This ambitious shoot premise played out wonderfully and congruously to a worked match that never broke the spell of suspended disbelief; in an early spot, Omega, introducing the table Tanahashi loathed, didn't put him through it. He clipped the Ace's back on its edge with a play-dumb expression, putting over that dangerous approach in a way that was more unsportsmanlike than dreaded worked-shoot posturing.
Omega smashed Tanahashi flush in the face with his Terminator dive, tweaking his awesome repertoire with millimetre precision to put the story over. Tanahashi responded, as the build intensified in his customary way, by spiking Omega with an uncharacteristic poison 'rana. He had to level up to and put that style over to go over. This was Paul Heyman's platonic ideal of a wrestling match performed at the very peak of the modern craft.
This magnificent tour de force was a philosophical and physical war waged by two masters of the craft working in perfectly obscured harmony.