10 Greatest WWE TV Matches Ever
3. Daniel Bryan Vs. Randy Orton - Street Fight, RAW (June 24, 2013)
The problem with wrestling television in the PG era is that there is too much of it - so much so that even superb matches like Cesaro's answers to John Cena's US Open Challenge in the early summer of 2015 have been lost in an homogenised shuffle.
To underscore that, WWE presented another Street Fight on the very next episode of SmackDown, between Sheamus and Damien Sandow - but this Street Fight, presented when Daniel Bryan was on fire as a babyface, was so stunning that it lingers in the memory years after the fact. Bryan's match with Orton the previous week - again, everything is too recycled to really resonate - was cut short when Bryan suffered a stinger. This led to a blow-up with Triple H and a chip on his shoulder. It wasn't just Orton's usually outlawed chair shot that symbolised Bryan's ascent to the headliner ranks; Bryan's excellent selling and perfectly-timed comebacks were the stuff of a genuine star.
It wasn't just Bryan's match. Orton, sometimes fairly criticised for his methodical (read: tedious) mode was at his short round, explosive best here in a match which extracted drama from what moves weren't performed as much as those that were. Bryan's inability to put Orton through a ringside table with a clothesline saw Orton stagger on the apron in an agonising, protracted sequence. Showing that he had the crucial smarts as well as the fire, Bryan slid underneath Orton's legs and drilled him through it with a powerbomb.
It was a superb match, in and of itself, but it also acted as a launching point for Bryan's proper main event run.