10 Best Wrestling Talkers Of 2018

Honourable mentions should be vast, for Christ's sake. This is wrestling.

What's ironic about this era of scripted, stilted promos is that older fans have memorised certain legendary, improvised promos of the past far more than those who cut them ever did. And now, we don't have a hope in hell of remembering the vast majority of promos cut by the men and women who spend their Monday afternoons rehearsing them.

When you watch RAW now, and see these feckless men and women struggle through verbiage that is so obviously fake, frustration isn't the god*mn word for it. Those promos are bullsh*t! Nobody does a godd*mn thing about it. Nobody in the building cares, nobody in the dressing room cares - there's so much inauthenticity around here, I've had it up to here! Everybody knows it. I know it. Everybody knows it: WWE should cease scripting promos for its talent, right now, and let them swim in Becky Lynch's shark tank, or sink, hilariously, like Kalisto, rather than letting them drift in a sea of total anonymity.

Everybody knows it, except Vince McMahon.

Under his profoundly over-produced direction, very few prosper. The Miz is still bloody good at putting himself over as smarmy, Charlotte Flair's shrill superiority is loathsome in an effective way, Dean Ambrose handles rubbish material well - but while there are few if any Best There Ever Will Be talkers in wrestling right now, the Best There Are can still talk you into watching a bottomless product...

Trust the pretentious Japanese wrestling fan to include a guy whose native tongue he can't even understand - but those terrifying promos are translated, thanks to New Japan World. And, from those blocks of black and white text, we can infer that Minoru Suzuki is as capable of destroying his opponents verbally as he is slapping the sh*t out of them.

Immediately after storyline injuring company Ace Hiroshi Tanahashi earlier this year, Suzuki cut a promo ripped right out of badass 1970s cinema: "If you even think about standing up again, if you even try it, I'll break you again," he said, moments after putting him in a stretcher. He then, with a sadistic smile, crowed about and described in gleeful detail the agony Tanahashi must have endured.

Even if we can't understand his words, you need only look at the crowd reaction to gauge what a conductor this man is: they pop when he rips it out of them, and then pop again when he remonstrates with them for getting "carried away". Suzuki, whose wrestling work looks so awesomely believable and whose genuine MMA skills once tapped out Ken Shamrock, is a real contender for the most badass man to have ever lived.

With lines like "Shut up. Hopefully you go outside and get hit by a car," he's also in contention for funniest.