25 Best Wrestling Shows EVER

The pro wrestling fan is often characterised and buried as an ungrateful , spoiled know-it-all who would rather ruin the magic and figure out how it’s done than be swept up in it. 

That, frankly, is a crock of sh*t. 

The resurgence era of New Japan Pro Wrestling had long since peaked when the promotion finally established a working relationship with AEW. This bleak reality worked against the concept of a co-promoted show well before the first Forbidden Door pay-per-view was cursed through a spate of injury and illness. 

And yet, the desire for the show was so strong that AEW fans willingly broke that hex. They used their imagination to magic up a feeling that, realistically, did not exist. 

Forbidden Door ‘22 was a show on which Clark Connors, a promising enough rookie deputising for the great Tomohiro Ishii, felt like a breakthrough star. Wheeler YUTA felt like a world-beater, too, when he blasted Chris Jericho with a barrage of suplexes in an awesome trios opener - and he wasn’t even the star of the match. The very patchy Shota Umino looked like the next Ace of New Japan for one night only. 

Orange Cassidy Vs. Will Ospreay required no such latitude. Ospreay was in excellent form; Orange was even by his standards unreal as the five-moves-ahead chessmaster. His mocking of Ospreay’s martial arts pose was piss-funny as well. 

Dudes With Attitudes Vs. Bullet Club was so utterly fantastic - it was the match in which, after a head-spinning superkick party, Sting no-sold the Young Bucks to an eruption of a pop - that Sting set the terms for his retirement match then and there. 

Marred by a serious injury suffered by Adam Cole, the main event restored the feeling. It was the last great Hiroshi Tanahashi performance; watching him fade in Jon Moxley’s bulldog choke was a display of unparalleled selling that evoked incredible pathos. 

It didn’t matter how many decades ago you found out wrestling was a work; you felt Tana’s pain and just hoped beyond hope that he would prevail.