10 Forgotten WWE NXT TakeOver Classics
4. Adam Cole Vs. Aleister Black - NXT TakeOver: Philadelphia
Just look at that GIF. One glance, and you can already see how vastly different this was from your standard WWE Extreme Rules Match.
Adam Cole and Aleister Black's outing at the January 2018 TakeOver: Philadelphia was undeniably one of the company's greatest weapons bouts promoted in the last few years. Everything was logical here. They simply wanted to hurt each other; at one point early on, Black just said f**k it and forearmed the piss out of Cole's face. This set the perfect atmosphere.
The rest of this was unreal. Black taunting Cole by both sitting on the mat and on a steel chair in the Dutch Destroyer's signature pose was mint, as were some of the spots that WWE matches had never before seen. A Death Valley Driver atop two chairs was the highlight for Black here.
That there wasn't much of a story didn't matter. All the focus was placed on the in-ring process from the two that totally blew minds that night. It's not exactly difficult to analyse what made it such a banger. You take Adam Cole and Aleister Black, you place them on a TakeOver card, and you give them a stipulation to work with. It was only ever going to be a scintillating end result.