10 Best Wrestling Matches With The Worst Builds
For a vegan, Bryan Danielson sure knows how to make chicken salad.
Every single wrestling match has an in-built story, contrary to the horrific discourse you've no doubt encountered this year.
The idea is to draw on an attribute - strength, technique, resilience, the willingness to take risks, the psychotic abandon of one's senses to just block out the pain and keep punching and punching - and defeat one's opponent in order to make a successful visit to the "pay winda".
If this whole thing was meant to be on the up and up, every U.S. promotion should book cold "fixtures" as a matter of course to make the events of episodic television feel less contrived. WWE doesn't care about this, and increasingly, AEW does not either, sadly.
That should form only part of the weekly experience.
At its core, these are pro wrestling promotions. The idea should be to promote the living daylights out of a match and make it feel enormous, heated, unpredictable, like you cannot wait for it to happen. In the case of major events, events that cost a not insignificant one-off fee or yet another streaming subscription, you should be emotionally engaged before the bell rings.
Some matches are so good, however, that they can shake you from your numbed - or even irritated - disposition...
10. Brock Lesnar Vs. Daniel Bryan - WWE Survivor Series 2018
In the old, mercifully dead days of Raw Vs. SmackDown, the World champions of the respective shows wrestled one another.
Up there with the stupidest developments in WWE's modern history - top stars did jobs for stakes nobody gave a hoot about on an annual basis - the format reached a dire lull when, in 2017, WWE seemed to forget which month they were in. Paul Heyman outright said - on television - that even he couldn't promote WWE Champion Jinder Mahal, fellow heel, as a threat to Universal champion Brock Lesnar. Realising that there was no better time to end the experiment, the belt was swiftly awarded to AJ Styles.
Worse, arguably, was the 2018 edition: just five days away from the show, WWE suddenly realised that they had sleep-walked into a second consecutive Styles Vs. Lesnar match, and the decision was made to turn Daniel Bryan heel to win the WWE title and wrestle...fellow heel Brock Lesnar.
What?
It's just as well the Bryan was a pro wrestling genius capable of keeping his heat.
Faced with a cursed set of circumstances - of course WWE gave Bryan his dream match and messed up the dynamic at the same time, of course they did - Bryan laid out a masterpiece of a structure. A sort of squash/sprint hybrid that defied every convention, Bryan seamlessly transitioned from underdog to killer, perfecting an impossible task, by playing dead and lulling Brock into a massacre of strikes. He beat the piss out of him, earning some of the most scorching near-falls ever witnessed in a WWE ring, and he did it not with babyface spirit by conniving heel tactics.
Bryan Danielson's AEW run might be his best ever - but this was his masterpiece.