9 Highest-Rated WWE WrestleMania Matches According To Dave Meltzer’s Star System

This bout is a popular choice for the greatest WrestleMania match ever, the greatest WWE match of all time even, and yet did not receive the elusive five-star stamp from Meltzer.

This was WrestleMania’s two most iconic performers, at the very peak of their powers. A stunning fusion of The Undertaker’s indomitable offence and Michaels’ unrivalled selling created a spectacle so spellbinding that it made a mockery of the relative lack of narrative. ‘Taker and Michaels did not need a convaluted backstory because they told their story in the ring, with HBK eventually succumbing to a second Tombstone Piledriver.

What more these two could have done to earn that extra quarter of a star is mystifying. There was the famous botched dive over the top rope, where cameraman Sim Snuka - son of WWE Hall of Famer Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka - failed to catch ‘The Deadman’, but that only added to the drama, attaching a vulnerability to ‘Taker which put the streak in danger.

Critics of Meltzer profess that he has an anti-WWE bias, and while that is difficult to prove, this was definitely one match that The Wrestling Observer Newsletter journalist sold short.