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

5. Bryan Danielson Vs. Zack Sabre, Jr. (WrestleDream 2023)

If you follow a sports team, you’ve watched a key player plant their foot into the ground as the rest of their leg turns the other way.

Your guts churn and the blood drains from your face.

Oh, no.

Not gonna see them for another year, whoopee.

It’s enough to ruin your weekend.

In one of the best technical wrestling matches ever, Zack Sabre. Jr. took a dragon screw leg whip, and it looked like he’d shredded his ACL. His selling was phenomenal.

The match never ventured outside of the ring. Neither man scaled the top turnbuckle. There were no near-falls. Such limits were self-imposed, in a test to prove how much the wrestlers could do with so little, but it never felt like a wanky experiment. It felt like the two best technical wrestlers of the 21st century were trying to exert their brilliance over one another.

Bryan Danielson was so great that the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Best Technical Wrestler Award was named after him. Zack Sabre, Jr. was so great that, prior to 2021, he won the award almost as many times.

The story saw both men attempt to lull one another into their hold labyrinth, hoping to develop such an irregular pattern that the opponent would find themselves lost, exposed.

Often, in a bid to maintain control and force the tap, Danielson and Sabre set multiple consecutive traps. More often than that, no hold was even applied; the two doyens were so wary of one another and equipped with such deep knowledge that the fight was slippery.

The attention to detail was astonishing - best exemplified by a spot in which Danielson, protecting his surgically repaired right arm, alerted the audience to his weak spot by using it to bridge out of an early hammerlock before quickly adjusting to his left. He worked a lapse of concentration.

A trance of a match so intricate that you could readily believe each man had spent months studying tape in preparation for it.