Lewis Howse's 10 Favourite WWE Matches Of All-Time

As someone who grew up watching wrestling during the Attitude/Ruthless Aggression eras (at a time when VHS and DVDs were pretty bloody expensive and the internet was in its infancy), I didn't get to see a great deal of classic WWE and matches from the 80s and early 90s.

The only exposure I had to that was the select clips that WWE showed in their video packages. They had a somewhat mythic quality to them but, in my ignorance, I didn't think these impeccably tanned, neon-wearing gladiators could compete with my Rob Van Dams, Eddie Guerreros and Kurt Angles, at least when it came to actual in-ring work.

Oh how wrong I was. As I began to see more and more of this stuff, I realised that these guys could more than keep up with the high-flying and hard-bumping men and women of the new Millennium. They were a little bigger and perhaps a little slower, sure, but they were also hard workers and, crucially, had larger-than-life personas that had crowds invested 100% in the action.

I wasn't around to see the build to Savage and Warrior's WrestleMania VII 'Retirement Match', but I was blown away by the intensity of their performance and how expertly laid-out everything was. Of course, that was Macho Man's style, to map everything out in advance, but that doesn't take away from the quality of this bout.

Warrior gets a lot of stick for being a supposedly crappy wrestler and while he's obviously not a Daniel Bryan level technician or anything he's not as bad as people make out, at least not when he's in there with a guy like Savage, who can bring the best out of him.

The match itself, full of big moves and Warrior kicking out of FIVE top rope elbow drops, is great, but it's the post-match scene of Miss Elizabeth reuniting that with her husband which is the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake.