10 Wrestling Matches Everybody Gets Wrong
Don't cry for Shawn Michaels.
What is any of this for, if not to scream your own subjective opinion into a void when the world won't listen?
This is why everybody takes to Twitter - to be heard, to be validated, to feel more worthwhile in your digital reflection than your real self.
This is just a list, a list informed by a universal need to put the wrestling world to rights because there's no greater pain than having a correct take that nobody else has caught up with, is there? Equally, there's no better a petty feeling than that take forming the consensus. Your writer was adamant that NXT's format was functional to a fault, and the move to the USA Network was brought everything into focus. It is functional to a fault; the post-match attack to build to another match is clinical and uninspiring - and, as it happens, ineffective.
It's a good feeling. It would be better, if NXT was a better show and Wednesday nights were even better, but it's nice to be right, especially when you (I) was naive enough to think WWE could book Bray Wyatt correctly. Read those six words again and die inside.
Agree. Disagree.
It's all in the name of The Discourse from which you cannot escape...
10. Kenny Omega Vs. Joey Janela - AEW DARK Episode 2
These guys shouldn't have killed themselves for a dark match. This wasn't just worthy of Dynamite; AEW squandered a pay-per-view main event.
This was a wonderful, ultra-violent pretext to a major main event match: Kenny Omega Vs. Jon Moxley at Full Gear. Omega mirrored Moxley's G1 Climax run by braving his opponent's demented, plunder-strewn battleground. This was, for all its gruesome awesomeness, a chapter in a well-crafted tale advanced through expert in-ring storytelling. The match put over Jon Moxley, implicitly, as a killer. Omega risked his skull thudding against a ladder, and bumped through the wrong side of a table, just to prepare himself for something even more brutal. This was Omega's training montage.
And though he won, he still failed the test; in a great, character-driven spot, he mocked Dean Ambrose's wacky line lariat because he still doesn't know who he's f*cking with.
This made business sense, too. The inaugural DARK failed to maintain AEW's huge buzz - no matches stood out, and one was a diminished return from a superior, PPV-calibre original - but the on-demand show may have just become appointment viewing.