The image above these words contains not a shred of black and gold, save, pedantically, for splashes on Bayley's gear and the glimpse of Io Shirai's NXT Women's Title. And yet, objectively speaking it was perhaps the most successful match of the year for the brand synonymous with the colour scheme.
NXT started a war in 2019 that they've comfortably lost in 2020, but the match between Shirai and Sasha Banks obscured the reality for one night at least. A whopping 900,000 tuned into it over the 645,000 watching AEW Dynamite's main event, in a quarter hour that carried the whole broadcast over the line to win the viewership battle for the evening. The demographics were long lost by then, of course, but WWE's third brand has gotten used to taking second place a lot lately.
Indeed, Banks/Shirai's battle was simultaneously everything dead right and bang wrong with the way NXT books - or at least booked, for the majority of 2020. A banger match because the workers are amazing, as result of a grabby pitch because the process is flawed.
More on all of this later, anyway. There felt no purer distillation of the ups and downs of NXT's year than this contest, but there were certainly plenty more worthy of similar attention...
Michael is a writer, editor, podcaster and presenter for WhatCulture Wrestling, and has been with the organisation for nearly 10 years. He primarily produces written, audio and video content on WWE and AEW, but also provides knowledge and insights on all aspects of the wrestling industry thanks to a passion for it dating back over 35 years.
As one third of "The Dadley Boyz" Michael has contributed to the huge rise in popularity of the WhatCulture Wrestling Podcast and its accompanying YouTube channel, earning it top spot in the UK's wrestling podcast charts with well over 65,000,000 total downloads. Within the podcasting space, he also co-hosts Benno & Hamflett, In Your House! and Podcast Horseman: The BoJack Horseman Podcast.
He has been featured as a wrestling analyst for the Tampa Bay Times, Fightful, POST Wrestling, GRAPPL, GCP, Poisonrana and Sports Guys Talking Wrestling, and has provided in-person coverage of some of the biggest pay-per-views and Premium Live Events in wrestling history, including WrestleMania, Survivor Series, All In & Double Or Nothing in destinations such as New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, London and Cardiff. Michael's background in media stretches beyond wrestling coverage, with a degree in Journalism from the University Of Sunderland (2:1) and a series of published articles in sports, music and culture magazines The Crack, A Love Supreme and Pilot. When not offering his voice up for daily wrestling podcasts, he can be found losing it singing far too loud watching his favourite bands play live.
