7 Match Star Ratings For WWE WrestleMania 38 Night 1
4. Bianca Belair Vs. Becky Lynch: RAW Women's Title Match
This was comfortably the best WWE match of the year: a monumental over-achievement scarcely believable in how special it felt.
This is a match WWE ran back on TV with a f*ck finish last year and yet, on the night, would have belonged in the main event slot as one of the better headline attractions in the show's illustrious history. It disrupted the pattern of a standard big WWE match to phenomenal effect. The energy was frenetic, the tone urgent, the risible tropes - broad facials, melodramatic body language, dull pacing - all abandoned. This was as pure a wrestling story in WWE as you're likely to see: it was a tale of a powerful super-athlete overcoming a dark arts veteran capable of using her opponent's power to her own advantage.
This was Becky's best-ever in-ring performance. Her counters were outstanding. The athletic endeavour driving her work was impressive enough - unironically stupendous, in fact - but her sense of timing was out of this world. She looked done for, and then, a nanosecond later, another nanosecond away from completing the smash-and-grab.
Bianca Belair has worked two matches on the stage and is already Mrs. WrestleMania. She emoted the struggle of her resolve brilliantly, and she didn't just unleash her power game when it was her turn on offence. There was an unvarnished spirit to everything she did. She lost herself in the story and wrapped the crowd up in the fiction along with her.
The opening sequence was superb - they worked a callback to the SummerSlam squash with two heart-stopping twists at a blistering pace - and the drama never relented from there until its feel-good ending.
Star Rating: ★★★★¾