10 Great Wrestling Matches You Didn’t Know You Wanted

Amid Invasion hysteria, the prospect of a throwaway TV match pitting one limited WWF hoss against another was hardly one to anticipate in itself, much less 24 hours removed from the worlds-colliding sight of Booker T dropping Vince McMahon with a scissors kick. In execution, something improbably brilliant happened. Perhaps mobilised by the threat of a roster soon to literally double in size, Kane and Albert wrestled an unexpected banger.

“This is going to be an all-out brawl,” said Michael Cole on commentary. He was always going to say that, irrespective of match quality, but on this occasion, the “little sh*thead” wasn’t talking his usual sh*t. Helped also by the No Disqualification stipulation, Kane assaulted Albert immediately. Albert responded back in the ring by meeting Kane’s charge to the corner not with a big boot, but a scissors kick. The bare minimum would not do.

Foreshadowing the stiff form with which he would later reinvent himself in the east, Albert drilled Kane’s head with a knee against the barricade. In a neat spot of escalatory storytelling, Kane, for once physically outmatched, leapt on top of Albert’s shoulders, countering the powerbomb counter with one of his own. That counter, and this, remember, was Kane, manifested as a Frankensteiner.

Kane, more on fire than he was as a child at this point, raced through his signatures in an electrifying sequence before Diamond Dallas Page cost him his Intercontinental Title. Kane and Albert tore the roof off, and DDP was part of something ace in the WWF.

And you thought this period was a wall-to-wall farce.