30 Best AEW Matches Ever (So Far...)

15. CM Punk Vs. Eddie Kingston (Full Gear 2021)

CM Punk Vs. Eddie Kingston disrupted AEW’s booking patterns to incredible effect. This wasn’t a meandering long-term story that was highlighted sporadically on TV.

Elevating a familiar and contrived trope, a furious Eddie Kingston ranted about losing to Bryan Danielson so loudly that it prevented Punk from completing a backstage interview. This picked the scab. Years of distant resentment seeped back out in an iconic face-to-face confrontation on Rampage.

Kingston, shifting from sarcasm to anger to full-blown apoplectic fury, attempted to eat Punk’s face. That sentence reads as silly. Kingston wasn’t f*cking laughing.

The feud, from the perspective of both men, was more relatable than most heightened wrestling storylines. Everybody has endured a work colleague they think is a sanctimonious ar*ehole - or a colleague who does less than you, and still has the gall to complain.

The match or rather fight started with Eddie immediately striking Punk before the bell with his Uraken finish and pissing himself laughing. Punk was right - Eddie took a lazy shortcut to satisfaction - but Eddie could not have cared less. He shut that condescending mouth.

This was a match at which you could only laugh and roar: a pissy, ugly, petty, funny scrap in which they took turns not to exchange moves and counters but to ridicule one another and scream in each other’s faces. Then, when they were gassed by the release of pure hatred, they popped back up to do pro wrestling’s best and most earned take on the Frye/Takayama spot.

Totally unique and incredibly refreshing at “just” 10 minutes, any notion that this should become a lesson for excessive modern wrestling left the mind as soon as it had entered.

This was CM Punk Vs. Eddie Kingston. Only they could have worked it on those terms.