Wrestling in 2024: A Review - Introduction
- Sep 4, 2025
- 26 min read
Introduction:
Something about my approach to watching wrestling needed to change in 2024.
That, of course, is completely normal, and a part of more or less every long-term wrestling fan’s experience. When I first became invested in wrestling – through WWE, as, again, tends to be the case – in 2013, I was happy to watch every weekly show I could get my hands on. Not just Raw or Smackdown, I was watching Superstars, Main Event, even pre-exploding in popularity NXT, with Bo Dallas on the run of a lifetime and Triple H attempting to convince us that Tyler Breeze was up next.
A few years later, things had changed. That was due to a couple of factors: My family dropping Sky, the WWE Network’s launch in the UK coming bizarrely later than it did in the US, and, more than anything, my own interest levels waning. It was time for the decision that all teenaged wrestling enjoyers make: Find something new to watch, or just stop watching altogether. Considering that you’re reading a review of wrestling from nearly a decade after I made that decision, you probably know which one I chose.
That’s right, I stopped watching wrestling more or less completely for about two years. I wasn’t completely out of the loop – I was still watching wrestling YouTubers who, with the wisdom of age, I can now safely assure you were pretty much all dogshit, and I could’ve probably told you who the WWE champion was at any given time – but I wasn’t actually checking out any wrestling. That lasted until mid-2018, where, by chance, I saw on Twitter that New Japan Pro Wrestling had uploaded the second Kenny Omega vs Kazuchika Okada match for free on YouTube. Having heard all of the buzz at the time, I decided to make that match a bit of a make or break. If it was actually as good as they said, I’d be all the way back into the sport of gods. If not, then I had better things to do with my time, like ignoring my A-Levels and realising that I had actually been a girl the entire time. I didn’t even make it all the way through the match before I’d gotten a subscription to NJPW World.
For the next few years, I was a devotee of Antonio Inoki’s baby. Truly, what Okada, Omega, Tanahashi, Ibushi and Naito were doing was the absolute pinnacle of the sport, the best wrestling could be. Strong Style was king, I didn’t need to watch anything else so long as Gedo kept cooking, and there was little doubt in my mind that Taichi was the best wrestler in the world (that one I do still believe). Even in the generally accepted downswing period that arrived with COVID, I was still on board. Yes, I started checking out other promotions – STARDOM at the suggestion of a friend, NOAH thanks to RealHero (rest in peace king) and his uploads of Go Shiozaki’s GHC title reign, then my subsequent obsession with how good a 58 year old Keiji Mutoh’s following run was – but New Japan was still my number 1. I watched every single fucking miserable clap-crowd addled show that promotion aired in 2020, and even in 2021, the nadir of New Japan and maybe even wrestling as a whole, I was still watching every big show, every tournament, even that one show where, despite taking place in a void-like Tokyo Dome with no audience noise allowed, the freaks booking this shit decided that every match would go at least 20 minutes, with the final two going fucking 40. I was simply in too deep to stop.
By 2023, I was watching plenty of other stuff – older matches and shows in particular, but the likes of CMLL, DDT and BJW had grabbed my attention – but, still, New Japan was most of my wrestling experience…even if, by this point, it really, truly was testing my patience. None of the newer, younger guys were grabbing me, my old favourites were being phased out, but, most importantly, I knew the house style too well. I knew that nothing really mattered for the first 15 minutes of main events. I knew that they’d become maximalist bomb-fests with little room for subtlety. I was watching G1 and BOSJ shows bored out of my mind because every match seemed to want to be exactly the same as the last. I didn’t know the term ‘checklist match’ at the time, but I sure as hell felt it. They were doing the consensus Right Things, but robotically, feeling as if they were following a script with no space for spontaneity or any real emotional investment. I was being dragged away as it was, but early 2024? Early 2024 finally broke me.
Allow me to set the scene: In the red corner: David Finlay: a floundering heel coming off a dreadful first year in the role. In the blue corner: Dolph fucking Ziggler. This was the main event of a major show. A major show which, might I add, had already seen a title change hands via count-out, and the great Hiroshi Tanahashi put over the modern day Teddy Hart that is Matt Riddle. Was this what wrestling had left for me? Cookie-cutter matches and heavy pushes for WWE has-beens and never-weres in my King of Sports?? This probably wasn’t the worst New Japan show that I’ve ever sat through, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I just couldn’t do it anymore. New Japan Pro Wrestling simply could not be the central point of my viewership. Essentially, I was exactly where I had been as a teenager, stuck with the decision of whether to change things up, or just quit entirely.
Considering that you’re reading a review of wrestling from 2024, you probably know which one I chose.
The reason I’ve given you what is essentially a tour of my experience as a wrestling fan is to make it clear that this review is very much through the lens of me. There will be no attempt at finding a consensus opinion, or focusing on what did and didn’t work for others. Frankly, I think ‘The Zeitgeist’ is overrated, and that people should dedicate themselves not to figuring out what the most people enjoy, but what they enjoy. Being that this is only one particularly attractive woman’s experience, I’m bound to have blind spots on particular styles or promotions, but at the same time, I do think that watching 1,200 matches by around 850 wrestlers from 68 different promotions is pretty damn thorough, so hopefully, in reading this, you find something you didn’t know about and would enjoy. I will be including links to any matches available for free, and for those that aren’t, I will link where they can be bought.
I can honestly say that this year, I watched more wrestling than I ever have before, and likely more than I ever will again. By that, I mean that I’ve sought out as great a variety of wrestling from different places, promotions and people as I possibly could, with the intent of learning more about what I care about in wrestling. I truly believe that, in doing this, I have a vastly better understanding of what I seek in wrestling than I did before. This was an education for me above all else, and a pretty fucking fun one too.
From here, I’ll be going into Internet Friendly Segments to discuss my highlights of the year. I’ll be starting with:
Promotions of the Year:
It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to you given how I started this review that I had no ‘main’ promotion this year, no one company where I watched most, if not all, of their product, instead focusing on watching bits and pieces, matches and shows that captured my interest. While I feel this was overall the right decision for my own enjoyment and education on varying styles of wrestling, the consequence is that I can’t claim to have a complete knowledge of any one promotion’s year. I’m bound to have blind spots – good and bad that just passed me by – and even in the promotions I enjoyed the most this year, dedicating myself to watching everything would’ve been far too time consuming. This ‘2024 review’ is already coming out in mid-2025, giving myself more to watch would’ve been completely unhinged.
Still, you don’t have to have watched absolutely everything to understand where a promotion is at. I didn’t watch every episode of Impact this year, but I saw enough to know that TNA was putting out some of the absolute worst garbage in their entire history. Likewise, when shit is going well, when the vibes are good, I can be confident that it carried through even the shows that I didn’t get to see for myself.
Narrowing down the single best promotion of the year was hard…so hard that I just didn’t do it. Instead, I offer you the three best promotions in the world in 2024, companies riding hot streaks built by strong rosters, good booking, and styles that really grabbed me.
Sendai Girls
Joshi is in a weird old spot at the moment. Many of the greats are retiring, leaving a large but clearly not quite on that level pool of wrestlers in their wake. STARDOM is hot, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. They’ve bled their biggest stars, and no matter how much The Internet bigs up the Maikas and Saya Kamitanis of the world, they simply do not connect with me at all, their matches feeling boring, formulaic and samey. TJPW is just never going to be my style, and Marigold, the newest company attempting to establish itself as major, was pretty transparently being carried by a select few, with a thin, weak roster making up the rest of the undercard. With the three best wrestlers in the company – Sareee, Nanae Takahashi and Bozilla – now either elsewhere or retired…Mayu had better be a fucking miracle worker to get them going again.
And then there’s Sendai Girls, the shining hope of Joshi throughout 2024. The bigwigs in Sendai came up with a genius plan to have a great year: why not simply have the best rivalry in wrestling take place almost entirely in their ring? It cannot be understated how much of Sendai Girls’ greatness should be attributed to the truly outstanding Team 200kg vs Bob Bob Momo Banana feud – a rivalry that delivered something different and outstanding every time they got in the ring together. It’s not something they can rely on forever – Mio Momono’s long term injury during the first half of 2025 and Yuu’s impending retirement in December highlight that – but promotions shouldn’t be afraid to ride the wave of something that’s obviously working and Sendai Girls were happy to surf for as long as they could.
Beyond the small matter of the best rivalry in wrestling, it felt as if there was always something good going on up and down the card with Sendai Girls, regardless of their main roster being relatively thin compared to the comically large likes of Stardom. Mio Momono’s heated rivalry with Mika Iwata pulled the best work out of Iwata that I’ve ever seen, and Yurika Oka’s rivalry with Manami accomplished the same for her. Beyond the BBMB duo, Meiko Satomura’s surprise world title win, and subsequent retirement run was excellent, even if only about half of it can be considered for 2024. Seeing her in the ring with Aja Kong again after so fucking long was bliss, and it obviously doesn’t hurt that both are more than capable of putting on great matches even this late into their careers.
Sendai Girls will never be the biggest Joshi company going, but it doesn’t really need to be. All they need to do is keep being the promotion with the highest ceiling, the most consistency, and the most exciting talent in Japan, and that’s really all they need.
CMLL
For my money, there was no hotter promotion in the world than CMLL. There’s just a fucking joy about the place, man. Before anything else, I absolutely adore the atmosphere of basically all CMLL shows. In a wrestling atmosphere so often poisoned by irony, there’s a great sincerity to the weekly Super Viernes shows at Arena Mexico – the home of professional wrestling - where fans are loud and noisy for basically everything, rooting for their guys as hard as they can. That doesn’t necessarily mean following the tecnico/rudo lines to a tee – poor, poor Atlantis Jr. is testament to that – but there’s a sincerity to their crowds which really comes through and makes their shows infinitely more enjoyable, a kind of honest love for pro wrestling that the ‘sing songs and sit on your hands during matches’ crowds that seem to have completely taken over a lot of North American wrestling just do not have.
All of that, and I haven’t even discussed the actual wrestling in CMLL yet. The main event scene in particular has the 2/3 falls multi-man tag down to a fucking art. Each fall feels different in pacing and tactics from the tecnicos and rudos, held together by the connective tissue of what happens in the previous fall effecting the behaviour of the wrestlers in the next. The dynamics are fairly simple – tecnicos with beautiful, flowing offense meant to wow the audience, and rudos with ugly, unsatisfying cutoff spots designed to infuriate, with the best of them being sure to make the crowd feel as much like participants in the match as the actual wrestlers, reacting to their chants, cheers and jeers as if its offence in its own right.
And the actual talent? Oh my god. Their main event scene is absolutely packed, with the single best ace in the business today, Mistico, holding together a frankly ridiculous collection of young, top level tecnicos like Mascara Dorada, Néon and Atlantis Jr., all of whom visibly get better and better with every match, fighting a wonderful love-to-hate collection of top rudos like Los Guerreros Laguneros, Los Infernales, Zandokan Jr. and Soberano Jr. The mixture of youth and experience ensures that the all important Old Ways aren’t lost in the hunt for innovation, ensuring the safety of the special connection that CMLL has to its own audience.
In 2025, CMLL genuinely is vital to the upholding of the traditions of lucha libre now that AAA, the second largest promotion in Mexico, has been bought by a WWE prone to turning everything it touches into the same stylistically dull sludge with the full intent on monopolising the country’s wrestling scene. The steady build of momentum that 2024 accelerated has left me in little doubt that CMLL are more than up for that challenge.
DPW
Professional wrestling should be so fucking easy. The crux of DPW’s success in 2024 was dedicating the full year to building up a babyface and a heel slowly but surely to the top of the card, their parallel rises making them natural rivals, with the babyface overcoming the odds and winning the right way while the heel benefits from cowardice, cheating and sheer luck, until you just have to see the babyface beat them. Of course, it does help that the heel is Adam Priest – probably the single best pure villain in wrestling today – while the face is LaBron Kozone – a lovable ace full of creativity who is just obviously going to end up as a giant fucking star. The simple but effective story made the twin rises of Priest and Kozone an absolute delight on every DPW card, but putting the rise of what, for my money, is pretty obviously the best wrestling company in America solely down to two guys wouldn’t be fair. The majority of long-reigning world champion Calvin Tankman’s title defences are extremely fun. He wears his Samoa Joe influence on his sleeve, but that’s far from a bad thing considering that he’s inspired by one of the absolute best to ever do it. The tag division is another highlight, with the Guns and Speedball & Something having plenty of fun defences, and Violence is Forever being among the world’s best tag teams at this point.
The company is far from perfect – their women’s division could do without relying on champions based in Japan who rarely actually make DPW appearances, and the overreliance on spot-fest matches early on their cards hinders more than it helps for my personal taste – but Deadlock are perhaps the most trustworthy promotion in wrestling today: You can trust that their stories will be simple, highly effective, and ultimately pay off in satisfying fashion. That might not sound like much, but in an industry like wrestling, it’s far from a guarantee for most.
Tag Team of the Year:
It’d be easy to look at the most watched wrestling companies in 2024 and come to the conclusion that tag team wrestling is absolutely on its arse. If those were the only promotions you watched, then, honestly, you’d be completely right. WWE has this fun bit where they care about tag team wrestling for about two years per decade, and rest assured we are not in one of those two years right now. AEW’s tag division was largely dominated by the Bucks, a team I’m already largely not a fan of, in a storyline that was obviously doomed to failure about a month in, and yet they powered through with their bullshit anyway. New Japan…well, New Japan gave Chase Owens and KENTA TWO IWGP Heavyweight Tag Title reigns. I feel like I don’t need to explain myself anymore than that.
But, contrary to the image the biggest promotions will give you, tag team wrestling is still alive and well, you just have to dig a little deeper to find it at its best. Dedicated teams putting on fantastic matches and excellent rivalries really aren’t that hard to come across, you just need to know where to look. Considering that great tag team wrestling is basically the best thing that wrestling can provide, it should come as no surprise that the backbone of several of the best promotions of the year were forged on their high-level teams.
In terms of the absolute best, I’ve narrowed it down to the three most standout tag teams of the year, but, before getting to those, here are a few honourable mentions that I thought deserved attention:
- The CMLL Tecnicos (with particular credit to Mistico, Mascara Dorada & Néon)
- Villano III Jr. & El Hijo del Villano III
- Los Infernales (Averno, Euforia & Mephisto)
- Motor City Machine Guns (Chris Sabin & Alex Shelley)
- Sting & Darby Allin
- Violence is Forever (Kevin Ku & Dominic Garrini)
Los Guerreros Laguneros (Ultimo Guerrero, Gran Guerrero & Stuka Jr.)
Recommended Viewing:
- Ultimo Guerrero, Gran Guerrero & Stuka Jr. Vs. Titan, Atlantis Jr. & Templario (20/09)
- Ultimo Guerrero, Gran Guerrero & Stuka Jr. Vs. Villano III Jr., El Hijo del Villano III & Templario (05/07)
- Ultimo Guerrero, Gran Guerrero & Stuka Jr. Vs. Néon, Mascara Dorada & Mistico (01/10)
To be honest, I was seriously tempted to give this spot to, like, CMLL in general. CMLL, and lucha in general, is traditionally dominated by tags of around 4-6 people, and, my god, they’ve just got the formula down perfectly. CMLL matches at their best (and they regularly are at their best) are, essentially, a clash of wrestling ideology. Tecnicos are free-flowing maestros, focused on wowing crowds with constant movement, flair and awe-inspiring high flying, while the rudos work to rip away audience satisfaction with blunt, brutish cutoff spots and ugly, painful beatdowns. They see the beautiful wrestling the crowd wants to see, spit on it, and tear it out of their hands, making them all the more desperate to see the tecnicos wrest back control and do what they do best.
No team was better equipped to do everything that’s asked of a rudo team this year than Los Guerreros Laguneros. Regardless of being on the older side of the roster, they’re absolutely phenomenal bases for the complicated moves they have to take from the tecnicos, capable of controlling their movement through the often experimental offence of the Doradas and Néons of the world without dropping them on their heads – an extremely underrated and underappreciated skill that the best rudos absolutely need. Their cut-offs are always perfectly timed and appropriately cruel: catching dives and swinging their smaller opponents into the barricades, countered ranas into top-rope powerbombs, or the good old-fashioned, honest, humble low blow behind the ref’s back. Their beatdowns are perfectly contrasting the modern tecnico style, intentionally ugly and designed to infuriate the extremely receptive Arena Mexico crowds they perform in front of. Mascara Dorada can hit a double lariat over the top rope directly into a diving hurricanrana onto the floor? Fuck that, we’re throwing Gran Guerrero into stinger splashes on all of the tecnicos. Brutish, ugly and mean, exactly as great rudos should be.
But what really makes Los Guerreros Laguneros the best tag team in CMLL throughout 2024 is their crowd interaction and character work. That is carried largely by Ultimo Guerrero: one of the best and most underrated wrestlers of the year. They manage to make themselves comical even on offense, with Ultimo looking around in baffled annoyance at the fact that they’re getting booed. Who cares if they just kicked a crowd favourite directly in the dick? They raise the roof! Ultimo getting into petty arguments with the crowd mid heat-segment serves to make them even more invested in their eventual downfall. That, really, is the heart of CMLL: the connections tecnicos and rudos build with the audience, and through that, Los Guerreros Laguneros continue to thrive as the best of the promotion’s rogues gallery.
Team 200kg (Chihiro Hashimoto & Yuu)
Recommended Viewing:
- Chihiro Hashimoto & Yuu vs Mio Momono & Yurika Oka (11/02)
- Chihiro Hashimoto & Yuu vs Mio Momono & Yurika Oka (18/05)
- Chihiro Hashimoto & Yuu vs Meiko Satomura & Takumi Iroha (12/06)
There are few more surefire ways to make a great tag team than to get two people who are bigger and scarier than all of their opponents, and put them together. Team 200kg are the perfect meathead alliance, coming together to maximise their ability to hit tiny little people really, really hard, and throw them really, really far.
I think what really makes Team 200kg’s dynamic tick isn’t the similarities between big Hash and Yuu, but the differences. They’re both bigger and stronger than the vast majority of people they wrestle, but that manifests in different ways for both. Yuu is, largely, a traditionalist in terms of being a big powerhouse wrestler: difficult to move let alone knock down, powerful strikes, big slams, splashes and sentons, using her weight as a weapon in obvious, blunt and logical ways. If Yuu lands on a smaller woman it’s gonna fucking hurt, and that makes her offense feel satisfying and painful. Hashimoto is a far more complicated, varied, and, in all honestly, capable wrestler than her partner. She named her finishing German suplex after Gary Albright, and she really embodies his philosophy as a uniquely big and strong grappler, outwrestling people on the mat through technique, but also through shows of brute strength, leading to suplexes designed to drop people directly on their poor, sad necks. Their differing approaches to what a power wrestler is mean that they present completely different challenges to their opponents, which keeps their matches surprisingly varied for a team who proudly present themselves as dumb, powerful jocks.
It'd be impossible to explain why Team 200kg are one of the best tag teams of the year without mentioning the fact that they were in the single best feud of the year, against Bob Bob Momo Banana. I’ll explain more of the full picture of their wonderful series against one another in both BBMB’s profile and on the matches of the year list, but, in terms of what made Team 200kg such perfect roadblocks for Mio and Yurika, their absolute best trait is knowing exactly how much to give. A team like them shouldn’t just be bumping around. Getting anything on them at all should be an achievement, and when BBMB do get the advantage, it’s through speed, technique, teamwork or sheer, stubborn tenacity, and that can be credited to big Hash and Yuu knowing when to sell and when to completely block out anything and everything their far smaller opponents try.
It's honestly wonderful that Team 200kg had such a fantastic 2024, considering that we now know it was nearing the end for them, and for Yuu as a wrestler overall. Once her career ends in December, these are twelve months that she should be extremely proud of.
Bob Bob Momo Banana (Mio Momono & Yurika Oka)
Recommended Viewing:
- Mio Momono & Yurika Oka vs Mika Iwata & Miyuki Takase (19/05)
- Mio Momono & Yurika Oka vs Manami & Ryo Mizunami (09/06)
- Mio Momono & Yurika Oka vs Chihiro Hashimoto & Yuu (27/10)
This section of the review wasn’t really ranked, but if it were, then Bob Bob Momo Banana would pretty comfortably be at the top of the list. There is no better tag team in the world today than BBMB, and it’s not particularly close.
I fell in love with BBMB from more or less the first time that I saw them team – naturally against forever rivals Team 200kg. They’re just so fucking lovable, from the pump up chant they give one another before all of their matches, to their habit of rushing their opponents from the bell (and instantly getting wiped the fuck out). A lot of great babyface tag teams earn the love of the crowd through the beatings they take and the selling they get sympathy with, and while that remains both the most important element of a great face team and something that Momono and Oka are extremely good at, they throw in so much stuff to make themselves easy to like. I love their stupid hats and crazy frog ass theme song. I love Mio’s running gag of immediately eating shit on her own hot tags, only to bravely find a way to regain the advantage anyway. God, I love it when Yurika delivers seemingly endless dropkicks to whoever is unfortunate enough to be on their knees in front of her. All of their staples pop the crowd, but, more importantly, they pop me, and make me all the more desperate to see them win.
The little intricacies of tag wrestling can feel like a lost art in modern wrestling, where the key seems to be getting to the Cool Movez as efficiently as possible, regardless of how little is done to get the faces cheered and the heels booed, and even less attention paid to the suspension of disbelief on the moves being hit. I remain grateful to those who keep the Little Things alive in tag team wrestling. Mio Momono is, for my money, the best tag team wrestler in the world, and a large reason for that is what she does when she’s not legally in the match. She’s constantly on the move, yelling and clapping and encouraging her partner, giving the crowd something to root for, an air of hope even when poor Yurika is getting absolutely obliterated. My favourite part of her work in tags is how she works pin breakups. The vast majority of the time in wrestling, people will just conveniently escape the grasp of their opponent to break up the pin just in time. It’s fine, but it’s never going to be a match highlight. Mio, on the other hand, when she realises Oka is about to take a potentially match-winning move, is sprinting around on the outside, looking for a root into the ring, ducking and dodging around her opponents like it’s a fucking rugby match to save the day. It’s such a small thing, but gives you yet another thing to cheer for, a show of struggle, of effort, and of caring enough to make the little things in the match matter.
The best of BBMB, as with their opponents, can be seen in the phenomenal Team 200kg feud. They’re perfect as underdogs, scratching and clawing for anything they can get against women who are, in kayfabe terms, simply way too much for them to handle. They wrestled on 4 separate occasions this year, and in each match you can see little strategical changes, the slow realisation that trying to single out Hashimoto just means they’ll lose when Yuu eventually gets in, the team getting closer and closer to victory until, eventually, it happens. For me, that was a euphoric moment, and one that wouldn’t have happened without BBMB being more or less the perfect babyface tag team. Now that Mio is finally back from her early 2025 injury, here's to hoping we get to see the best rivalry of 2024 return, at least one more time.
Worst Matches of the Year:
I’ll be honest: I’m not particularly interested in writing about this year’s bad matches. For one thing, I’ve watched far more good than bad this year, actively going out of my way to avoid shit that I’m unlikely to enjoy. I didn’t watch a single weekly WWE show in full, I only watched TNA for a laugh with the legendary Discord Wrestlefriends (shoutout), GCW was kept firmly to WrestleMania week, so, really, it’s not like I’m the best authority on Bad Wrestling in 2024 anyway. The bigger reason, though, is that I just don’t think that most bad wrestling is particularly interesting to talk about. You don’t need me to explain to you that Jimmy Uso vs Jey Uso was bad. I don’t need to tell you that Blake Christian cannot sell a leg to save his life. Everybody knows that Callum Newman had a terrible G1. If I went through every bad match I saw this year, a lot of it would just be repeating the consensus, and I don’t really think there’s much worth in that.
As such, I’ve decided to focus only on matches that might’ve gone under the radar in terribleness, or that are bad in interesting ways. There’s no point focusing on dogshit that isn’t at least fun to laugh at, after all, so here’s my curated selection of 2024 Bad Matches That I Actually Have Something To Say About.
The Fiend-likes
Well, friends, 2024 came along and I’m happy to say that plenty of people still really, really wanted to be The Fiend. It doesn’t matter that The Fiend was a gimmick woefully unequipped for wrestling more or less from the very beginning, reducing a capable (if spotty) in ring performer to one-note horror movie schtick and bullshit, because, folks, the people love Bray Wyatt, they love The Friend, so that means they’ll love it when I do my cheap, hacky Fiend-wannabe gimmick too, right?
...Right!?
Even beyond my own personal distaste for the original Fiend, it’s pretty safe to call every attempt at aping the gimmick a complete failure, earning little more than laughter and ridicule from audiences. Starting from the beginning of the year, with probably the least Fiend-inspired of the Fiend-likes, it’d probably be more accurate to call TJP’s Aswang gimmick a discount Great Muta, but if that’s the case, then they’d probably be better off giving it away for free. The gimmick made its debut in front of a truly dead, heatless crowd for Catch 2/2’s match against Clark Connors and Drilla Moloney at Wrestle Kingdom (04/01), and it really should’ve been done right then and there. Say what you will about The Fiend, Bray Wyatt at least knew how to move with personality, act with a spirit embodying his character. If Wyatt is at one end of the spectrum, TJP belongs at the other; a technically proficient Good Match merchant with agonisingly little life behind the eyes. His attempts to be Spooky, are, honestly, laughable. You can honestly just feel the lack of commitment oozing through the screen, the idea that just occasionally biting and spitting mist while otherwise wrestling exactly the fucking the same as he would otherwise is enough to warrant a whole new ‘’’’’’terrifying’’’’’’ persona being utterly pathetic. Ultimately, the Aswang was a total bomb, failing to achieve TJP’s obvious goal of becoming a heavyweight or, more crucially, of not making me point and laugh every time this fucking joke turned up.
There’s less to be said about Jonathan Gresham vs KUSHIDA (03/05), beyond what a crushing fucking disappointment it was, all thanks to TNA deciding that nobody in the world was more fit to be their Fiend than World of Sport-style technical man Gresham. Maybe it was my fault for getting excited about a TNA match in 2024, but, gang, I really was eager to see this one! It seemed like a pretty ideal grapple-based match with shoot-style elements to me. Unfortunately, before the match, Jonathan Gresham was possessed by the spirit of an octopus (because he’s The Octopus, you see), causing him to become really quiet scary, which of course translates to occasionally breaking from just being Jonathan Gresham to bite KUSHIDA and cough up ink (again, because he’s an Octopus). But, watch out friends, this was Poisonous Ink, which caused KUSHIDA to be rendered helpless! It is so staggeringly TNA to have an obviously good matchup on paper, but find an exciting way to completely ruin it.
Saving the best for last, I cannot stress to you enough how funny Lio Rush’s attempt at being The Fiend was, and it’s absolute best showcase was in his match against Amazing Red for Prestige (12/07). This match, admittedly, doesn’t have the lacking commitment issues that plagued the Aswang and the Octopus, but Lio’s sheer, obvious determination to make his weird, possessed zombie gimmick work makes the whole thing even more embarrassing to watch. He wants me to take this shit seriously, and, brother, I promise you that will not be happening. Bro is freezing the referee using his magic necklace and casting spells to make Red fall out of the ring (something Red typically just does on his own) and going invincible via pulling scary faces and, again, insisting that you take all of this completely seriously. It was both an agonising watch and a hilarious one. I’m honestly kind of sad that the gimmick is a thing of the past.
CM Punk vs Drew McIntyre (03/08) (WWE)
Away from the Fiend-likes now and onto something truly, deeply horrifying. That’s right, it’s Seth ‘Freakin’ Rollins.
To explain how bad this match was means going back into the feud itself. It was really good! Saying WWE capture anything ‘real’ in 2024, where everything is overproduced within an inch of its life, is probably not accurate, but they really did hit on something with Drew McIntyre doing the absolute best work of his career as the living embodiment of Punk Derangement Syndrome. The hatred was built well on and off screen, even through Punk’s early 2024 injury, giving us reason to believe that, at Summerslam, these two were gonna have a fucking fight, a proper ugly grizzly scrap.
But they couldn’t do that. Because they had to get Freakin involved.
Seth Rollins has been tied to the ankle of CM Punk like an anchor since his WWE return, dragging him down into the worst of the company’s bad practices (in ring, I mean. As far as we know Seth Rollins isn’t doing the actual worst practices in WWE) in a transparent and completely failed attempt to make him appear a star on the same level as him. Because fake, comedy wannabe Rollins was involved, it couldn’t just be a serious fight, could it? No, it had to be Cinema – the modern WWE main event style in which wrestling takes a distant back seat to the worst theatre kid Acting you’ve ever seen in your fucking life, combined with the endless finisher spam that WWE fans used to make fun of the indies for being addicted to. It's a true worst of both worlds and never results in anything worthwhile at all, and now, that was what CM Punk vs Drew McIntyre had to be to accommodate its shitty useless little third wheel.
It was the most obvious thing in the world for this match to just be a fist fight, but, instead, it was about CM Punk’s fucking bracelet. It was about Seth Rollins giving Punk a deeply pre-scripted Piece Of His Mind. The real hatred gave way to a fucking pantomime, and, honestly, it was absolutely pathetic. Thank god this feud got the match it deserved eventually, because if this was the climax, it might’ve been one of the biggest fumbles in recent times.
KONOSUKE TAKESHITA vs Ricochet vs Will Ospreay (12/10) (AEW)
When it comes to the great sport of professional wrestling, ‘three’ is the opposite of the magic number. You get two people in a ring to wrestle? Lovely. You get four people in a ring to wrestle? Fantastic. You get 60 people in three separate rings to wrestle? Sounds like my kind of party. Three people? No, absolutely not.
It's not impossible to have a good, or even a great triple threat, but I would say that 99% of triple threat matches would be vastly improved by a return to the honest, beautiful world of one-on-one wrestling. It takes miracle workers to avoid breaking my suspension of disbelief in three-ways. If it’s not somebody being out of the ring for WAY longer than they should be, it’s a hideously contrived three-way spot designed to make me ask such questions as ‘bro why the fuck aren’t you just moving?’, or ‘surely you’d try to dodge that, right?’. Most importantly, though, is that I always find that, in wrestlers attempting to figure out how to get the unnatural dynamics of three-ways to work, they tend to sacrifice their own characters in the hunt for big, cool three-person spots. For me, if it doesn’t make sense for a wrestler’s character to be doing a spot, it should be thrown out.
Unfortunately, this particular three-way was cooked up directly to spite me, to have absolutely no spots whatsoever thrown out no matter what. Among AEW’s worst habits is their insistence on making every PPV match go at least 20 minutes, which results in every single possible idea being stuffed in whether it really needs to be or not. Combine that with Will Ospreay, the epitome of the ‘and then we do this, and then we do this, and then we do this!’ style of wrestler, and this was doomed to be a nightmare for me in particular. This is a match filled with ‘can we do this?’, with absolutely no thought for ‘should we do this?’, or ‘why are we doing this’? Their insistence on doing everything, for me, took pretty heavily away from the finish, because, after watching Ospreay survive about a million TAKESHITA killer blows, I simply could not believe that a screwdriver shot could finish him off.
This was a match that really brought out the worst habits of everybody involved. I’ll never like Ospreay but TAKESHITA and Ricochet either had already done or would go on to do some really great work in 2024! But this checklist-wrestling movement porn devoid of all three guys’ personalities and full of the fakest looking bullshit of all time is a black mark on their years.
Chris Jericho vs Mistico (13/09) (CMLL)
Man, this one was just a fucking complete disaster. One of those real once in a generation matches where everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. A Triple H vs Roman Reigns Mania 32 style absolutely hilarious calamity where the signs were there, but the company simply knew better than the fans.
Most of the world would probably be happy to never watch Chris Jericho wrestle again. It’s not just the fairly rapid decline in the actual quality of his matches and storylines over the past couple of years. Even if he was still at his best, the allegations surrounding him make his presence extremely uncomfortable and unwanted. He, truly, should fuck off. Still, in Mexico, Jericho is a legend, and he hadn’t worked CMLL since the 90s. Nobody else wants him, but Arena Mexico wanted him on this night, and neither he nor Mistico had any idea of what to do with that. That’s really fucking embarrassing, right? These two guys, with around 60 years of wrestling between them, couldn’t adapt to the crowd sentiment. Watching Jericho resort to flipping the audience off in a desperate attempt to get them to follow the script, rather than switching it up and not necessarily working tecnico, but simply playing into the dynamic rather than pretending that it wasn’t happening as he and Mistico ended up doing.
The match itself was sloppy, and not in the grizzly fun way that lucha is at its absolute best. They were just never on the same page, and the collective realisation of the entire wrestling world that, no matter what, Chris Jericho was physically incapable of taking the front bump required of him in La Mistica was absolutely hilarious. They tried it twice! Complete insanity.
Realistically, this match never stood a chance, not at the main event of the biggest CMLL show of the year. Right before this match was a mask vs mask match which, spoiler alert, will be appearing rather high on my best list, and the VERY loud Hechicero matches throughout this one made it clear which bout the crowd thought should’ve been on top. Still, even if they had slotted this in as the semi-main where it really should have been, it likely would’ve always been a total bomb, and proof that Chris Jericho should never, ever, main event again.
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