Wrestling in 2024: A Review - Top 100 Matches of the Year

This is Part 2/3 of Wrestling in 2024: A Review. If you are yet to read the previous part, click here for the introduction.

Top 100 Best Matches of the Year:

Now that the negative side of this review is over, we can focus on what was actually good in wrestling from here on out, starting with the 100 best matches of the year. To summarise how this is going to work, I’ll list matches 100-51, with each of the top 50 matches of the year getting their own mini reviews (because if I tried to review all 100, this already extremely late writeup would be coming out in 2027). This is already going to be very long as it is, so I won’t waste your time with preamble. Here’s the top 100 best matches of 2024!!

100. ZERO1 World Heavyweight Championship: Go Shiozaki vs Akitoshi Saito(c) (NOAH Limit Break 2) (29/05)

99. Minoru Fujita vs Ikuto Hidaka (Fuminori Abe & Takuya Nomura Produce Kakuto Tanteidan II ~ From Shinjuku With Love) (23/10)

98. Virus vs Zack Sabre Jr. (CMLL Lunes Clasico) (24/06)

97. Hangman Page vs Swerve Strickland (AEW All Out) (07/09)

96. Mascara Sagrada NG vs El Hijo del Fishman (RIBA) (22/03)

95. Soberano Jr. vs Templario (NJPW/CMLL Fantastica Mania) (18/02)

94. SANADA vs Tetsuya Naito (NJPW G1 Climax 34) (29/07)

93. DOUKI vs Robbie Eagles (NJPW Best of the Super Juniors 31) (31/05)

92. El Hijo del Fishman vs Macuarro (Zona 23/Lucha Memes Junkyard Mania) (18/08)

91. GHC Heavyweight Championship: Kaito Kiyomiya vs Kenoh(c) (NOAH Star Navigation) (11/04)

90. Yota Tsuji vs Hirooki Goto (NJPW New Japan Cup Finals) (20/03)

89. Bryan Danielson vs Yuji Nagata (AEW Collision) (27/01)

88. Yoshinobu Kanemaru vs El Desperado (NJPW Best of the Super Juniors 31) (21/05)

87. ROH World Championship: Mark Briscoe vs Eddie Kingston(c) (ROH Supercard of Honor) (05/04)

86. Kazusada Higuchi vs Shuji Ishikawa (DDT King of DDT Second Round) (11/05)

85. DOUKI vs Hiromu Takahashi (NJPW The New Beginning in Sapporo) (24/02)

84. Fuminori Abe vs Takuya Nomura (GCW Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport X) (04/04)

83. Hechicero vs Mistico (CMLL Viernes Espectacular) (29/11)

82. Ren Narita vs KONOSUKE TAKESHITA (NJPW G1 Climax 34) (14/08)

81. Okumura, DOUKI & Hechicero vs MUSASHI, Dark Panther & Atlantis Jr. (NJPW/CMLL Fantastica Mania) (18/02)

80. Santino Marella vs Kazushi Sakuraba (Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport Bushido) (21/06)

79. Kozo Hashimoto & Fuminori Abe vs Kosuke Sato & Takuya Nomura (BJW) (15/09)

78. Fuminori Abe vs Roderick Strong (DPW Limit Break) (19/05)

77. Ilja Dragunov vs Bron Breakker (WWE Raw) (22/07)

76. IWGP World Heavyweight Championship: EVIL vs Jon Moxley(c) (09/06)

75. Ryohei Oiwa vs Kaito Kiyomiya (NOAH Star Navigation) (14/09)

74. Ikuro Kwon, Mansoor, Flip Gordon, Akira, Rocky Romero, Robbie X, Davey Boy Smith Jr., Yota, Kyle Fletcher & Claudio Castagnoli vs Valiente, Esfinge, Euforia, Titan, Ultimo Guerrero, Templario, Mascara Dorada, Atlantis Jr., Volador Jr. & Mistico (CMLL Grand Prix Internacional) (23/08)

73. Jay White vs Hangman Page (AEW Full Gear) (23/11)

72. Edith Surreal vs Daniel Makabe (SHP/LOL Euphoria) (04/04)

71. Sendai Girls Tag Team Championships: Mio Momono & Yurika Oka vs Manami & Ryo Mizunami(c) (Sendai Girls) (09/06)

70. CMLL World Trios Championships: Averno, Mephisto & Euforia vs Star Jr., Neon & Mascara Dorada(c) (CMLL Noche de Campeones) (27/09)

69. Tam Nakano & Natsupoi vs Aja Kong & Kaoru Ito (STARDOM All-Star Grand Queendom) (STARDOM)

68. AEW World Championship: HOOK vs Samoa Joe(c) (AEW Dynamite) (17/01)

67. El Barbaro Cavernario vs Mascara Dorada (CMLL Viernes Espectacular) (19/01)

66. Atlantis Jr. vs Mascara Dorada vs Mistico (CMLL Viernes Espectacular) (19/04)

65. Hangman Page vs Bryan Danielson (AEW Dynamite) (10/07)

64. Roderick Strong vs Lio Rush (AEW Collision) (01/06)

63. WWE Women’s Championship: Bayley vs IYO Sky(c) (WWE WrestleMania 40) (07/04)

62. Angel de Oro, Brillante Jr. & Atlantis Jr. vs Soberano Jr., Neon & Mascara Dorada (CMLL Viernes Espectacular) (23/02)

61. Bryan Danielson vs Jeff Jarrett (AEW Dynamite) (07/08)

60. Templario & Soberano Jr. vs Mascara Dorada & Mistico (CMLL 81. Aniversario Arena Coliseo) (06/04)

59. GUNTHER vs Randy Orton (WWE King & Queen of the Ring) (25/05)

58. Angel de Oro, Soberano Jr. & Hechicero vs Atlantis Jr., Mascara Dorada & Mistico (CMLL Viernes Espectacular) (08/11)

57. Ultimo Guerrero vs Blue Panther (CMLL Sabados De Coliseo) (30/11)

56. KONOSUKE TAKESHITA vs Minoru Suzuki (DDT Dramatic Dreams Vol. 11) (19/05)

55. Mio Momono & Yurika Oka vs Chihiro Hashimoto & Yuu (Sendai Girls) (18/05)

54. Zack Sabre Jr. vs Bryan Danielson (NJPW The New Beginning in Osaka) (11/02)

53. El Hijo de Mascara Sagrada vs El Hijo del Fishman (Arena Del Valle Lucha Libre) (01/12)

52. Takeshi Masada, Masahiro Takanashi & Chris Brookes vs Kaisei Takechi, MAO & Yuki Ueno (DDT Dramatic Infinity) (29/09)

51. Claudio Castagnoli vs Darby Allin (AEW Dynamite) (20/11)

50. Demus vs Lunatik Xtreme (Zona 23 Angeles Y Demonios Enero) (21/01)

Zona 23 was one of my absolute favourite discoveries of 2024. I adore unique locations and atmospheres in wrestling, so ultraviolence in a scrapyard exactly what I was looking for, and this match is the perfect demonstration of what that entails, and Demus in particular is its ideal practitioner. He’s a shitty little gremlin man who tortures his poor victim with a cruel, crazy smile on his face, letting Lunatik Xtreme dive directly onto a pile of sawdust before gleefully driving an only half-empty glass directly into his forehead, or stalking him, grabbing whatever random discarded weapons happy to be laid around and hitting him as hard as he can. He’s a perfect demonstration of how you don’t necessarily need size in wrestling to be a monster. You just need that energy about you that you’re willing to do absolutely anything to your opponent, and that you’ll happily enjoy it all too. The desire that man has to do more, to cause as much pain as he possibly can, is as effective in conveying the story as his decision to simply try to murder Lunatik by northern lights bombing him onto the windshield of a car (although I am obviously extremely thrilled to see him simply try to murder Lunatik by northern lights bombing him onto the windshield of a car, because I am just as sick as Demus.

When you list out the big spots in this match – the northern lights bomb, the Lunatik splash off of a truck onto Demus’ beloved car, the light tubes, the package piledriver onto a pain of glass which, when the crowd seems disappointed by its failure to shatter, famous crowdpleaser Demus decides to pick up and smash directly over Lunatik’s head to give the people what they want – it’d be easy to think that this match is a mindless display of head-empty, dudes rock violence, and while that would remain extremely cool, I don’t think that’s a fair reading of the match at all. Between Lunatik’s excellent shows of bravery and brilliant selling of both pain and the fear of what his psychotic opponent will do next, and the unstoppable air of Demus, this is, at its heart, a classical underdog face versus a cruel, bullying heel. It’s like Sting vs Vader if Sting was a skinny scene kid with a penchant for bleeding and Vader was a short goblin armed with a tire. Demus’ offence is wonderfully spontaneous and mean, but Lunatik’s comebacks are incredibly thoughtful, coming directly as a consequence of Demus’ arrogance – trying to go back to the car one too many times, or attempting to ram a clearly still aware Lunatik through a door – and Lunatik responds with this excellent frantic speed, like he knows he needs to take advantage of any chance he’s given.

All in all, it’s the intelligent layout and dedication to the face and heel dynamics of Lunatik and Demus that earns them the right to brutalise each other artistically. The finest pure garbage wrestling you’re likely to see all year.

49. Takeshi Masada, Hideki Okatani & Tetsuya Endo vs Kaisei Takechi, Shunma Katsumata & Yuki Ueno (DDT Into The Fight) (25/02)

I touched briefly on the importance of the atmosphere of a wrestling match in the previous entry, but this time, rather than the venue being the focus, it’s the crowd itself. Crowds in wrestling nowadays are one of my biggest pet grievances, and, for me, a bad crowd can severely impact how much I enjoy a match. WWE crowds are fucking hellish these days, making noise only when prompted into a singalong, and otherwise sitting in deathly silence during the actual matches. For a company that is supposedly On Fire Right Now, that doesn’t feel sustainable. AEW crowds are admittedly better, but they are largely just popping for big spots, rather than in support of opposition to the faces and heels. All too often it feels like the beauty of a crowd living or dying on the successes and failures of their heroes is a dying art.

If modern crowds are a poison in wrestling, then Kaisei Takechi is its antidote. In an era where WWE is increasingly just a celebrity wrestling camp, there should be no doubt that Takechi is the best celebrity wrestler in the world. Takechi is a J-Pop idol, and, I’ll be honest, I knew essentially nothing about him when his first match, teaming with The 37KAMIINA’s Shunma Katsumata & Yuki Ueno against Takeshi Masada, Hideki Okatani & Tetsuya Endo, was announced, but that didn’t matter. The crowd sure as fuck knew who he was.

The closest approximation to the frenzy that this nearly exclusively teenaged girl-dominated crowd is stirred into by Takechi’s mere existence is a pre-90s AJW, where girls screamed their desperate, endlessly passionate support for the Crush Gals against Dump Matsumoto and her evil army. It’s constant, unending screaming, fans adoring Takechi’s every move, loving the pure babyfaces, loathing the dastardly, tricky heels. It’s a throwback in the absolute best sense of the word.

Most celebrities are basically just treated as wrestlers nowadays. Maybe they’ll get special treatment if they pull something particularly athletic off, but not much more than that. Takechi, on the other hand, is treated like the idol he is by the crowd, as if this is as much a concert as a match…except, at this concert, sometimes the pretty boy’s gotta step up and dropkick some disrespectful fucker in the face. Sure, Takechi is obviously inexperienced, but he hits all of his marks. The match is wisely built around what he can do, and what he can do is get a fucking reaction. Every heel cutoff is treated by the crowd like they’re watching a hate crime. His hot tag is greeted like superman saving the day. When he gets beaten down, this may as well be a murder taking place right in the middle of Korakuen Hall.

Ueno and Katsumata are useful in bursting things to life with their more complicated, high-flying offence, but the unsung heroes of the match are the heels, who are happy to slow things down and really get the most out of everything they do. The cheap tricks they pull to keep Takechi in danger, giving a crowd they’re in full control of just enough hope before ripping it away, it’s all magical. The highlight has to be Masada, who quickly establishes himself as Takechi’s primary antagonist, acting like an above-it-all bully, intentionally knocking him out of the ring as if to tell him he doesn’t belong there, forcing him to earn his way into the ring, into wrestling as a whole, before letting Takechi take him apart with offence that scales up in terms of impressiveness, letting the awe and joy of what he's doing build by the moment.

In a sea of audiences who don’t really care who wins, seeing this was the ultimate breath of fresh air for me. Takechi’s later matches in the year were great as well, with the immediate follow-up to this nearly making the top fifty, but, for now, the original – for the restraint it showed, the uniqueness of the atmosphere and the excellent performances of all involved – remains the best of the lot for now.

48. Independent Junior Heavyweight Championship: Fuminori Abe vs Hikaru Sato(c) (Hikaru Sato Produce Indie Junior Festival) (28/03)

The head empty match of the year. Just two idiots hitting each other as hard as they fucking can just to prove that they can take it. Dumb jock wrestling. Dudes rock wrestling. Whatever you wanna call it, it fucking rules so much.

Of course, this match is not all shoot kicks and punches directly to the skull. It’d be disingenuous to say that a Hikaru Sato match was devoid of thought entirely. I love his highly technical shoot style, he’s got that classical ‘every little movement matters’ approach to technical wrestling,  The difference between him being in a hold and winning the match can be as small as a tiny jolt of the leg, and that detail-oriented shit forces you to really pay attention to everything, because you never know what could win a match where.

Still, there is a reason that the majority of my notes for this match are just reacting in shock and horror to the strikes. The fucking sound of Abe’s knuckles colliding with Sato’s head is just something that I’m never going to forget, and the kicks? Occasionally they’ll throw a thigh slap in there just to fuck with me, but 90% of the time that is just pure leg-on-torso action baby, the way God intended it to be.

There are plenty more great intricate matches in Hikaru Sato’s 2024. His matches with Zack Sabre Jr., Ulka Sasaki & Hideki Suzuki are all great, well thought out battles of wizards on the mat, and yet the one that revolves around two men hitting each other as hard as they can, over and over again, is quite clearly the best of the lot. Sometimes you just need that straight up caveman shit.

47. MARIGOLD World Championship: Bozilla vs Sareee(c) (Marigold Fantastic Adventure) (24/10)

MARIGOLD has had a difficult first year. It always seemed pretty obvious that they expected more STARDOM names to make the immediate jump than ended up happening, and losing Giulia – their biggest name – to an unexpected injury and a very expected WWE move left them with little more than a very weak undercard and a few wrestlers good enough to make their shows worth seeking out at all.

The two best of that small group for me were undoubtedly Sareee and Bozilla. Sareee was no surprise – she was already in the middle of a career year when MARIGOLD was founded – and making her the heel anti-ace of the company was as obvious as it was effective. Bozilla was the real shocker, though. A giant German woman nobody had even heard of who had wrestled a couple dozen matches before MARIGOLD decided to make her a main event talent? It could’ve easily backfired, but, instead, Bozilla ended up being one of the most fun wrestlers to watch in the entire world, instantly having a superstar charisma and quickly discovering the extreme amounts of confidence needed to smugly talk as much shit as she does throughout her matches, all while easily destroying tiny little joshi trainees.

Putting the two best wrestlers in the territory in a world title match just made sense, and the two paired up wonderfully. Sareee simply cannot miss in 2024, and did an outstanding job of setting up the match’s dynamic from the very beginning of the match. Bozilla is massive, she can’t throw her around or beat the hell out of her with her incredible forearms the way she would with most, so Sareee shows this by instantly failing a German suplex and easily being out-struck, setting up the challenge of the match: if Bozilla wasn’t going up for a German, how the hell was Sareee gonna get her uranage? That gave the crowd something to grasp onto while Sareee tried to get the advantage using her speed and technique, countering power moves into submission holds and rushing around with dropkicks and double stomps.

The match really kicks into high gear, though, when Bozilla gets sick of being outsmarted and caves Sareee’s head in on the outside. She literally just fucking throws chairs at her skull, it’s so sick. All the while, she’s smugly smiling and mocking Sareee, just making herself as irritating as she can, like any good heel should. The absolute best decision in this match, though, is the bladejob Sareee does. Blading is fairly rare in modern joshi, and seeing Sareee emerge from the wreckage with what looked like a fucking gunshot wound on her forehead, just pissing blood down her face, was absolutely amazing, and perfectly fitting. Wrestling somebody as monstrous as Bozilla should be a war and now Sareee looks the part. Bozilla obviously does her part too, showing the veteran instincts to work the shit out of that wound, just fucking pounding into it. It’s disgusting and fucking awesome, and makes Sareee headbutting her way back to life feel all the more satisfying.

As for the question Sareee established earlier in the match, she answers it wonderfully. Can Sareee uranage Bozilla? Sort of! I have no fucking clue if it was meant to be smoother than it was, but the fact that Sareee only gets her high enough to dump her directly down on her arm ends up being PERFECT for the ending, as she goes straight for a brutal armbar. If that was improvised, then even more credit to a woman who got more credit than almost anybody in 2024.

This match, more than most, demonstrates Sareee’s expertise at laying out a match. She made Bozilla feel more dangerous than she had done coming in, and still presented herself as being unstoppable using her technique and toughness. It’s probably Bozilla’s best individual performance so far too, although, if she keeps going at the rate she is, she’s going to be among the very best in the world sooner rather than later.

46. Chris Brookes vs El Desperado (DDT Wrestle Peter Pan) (21/07)

I am a big supporter of subtlety in wrestling. Maximalism has made a great deal of wrestling feel exactly the same to everything else, like they’re all aiming for the same goals, hitting the same beats and doing the same thing, so what you’ll see on this list is a lot of matches that differentiate themselves from that. Yet, here we are, with the single most obvious match of 2024. This match has one singular goal: be gay porn in a wrestling ring, and what a fucking success it is at that.

Most of this match is just sick freaks doing sick freak shit to one another. DDT has a habit of its gayness veering into homophobic stereotypes (Danshoku Dino being the obvious example), but here, the match is extremely horny and sexual while simultaneously remaining serious. El Desperado and Chris Brookes are not doing what they’re doing because lol being gay is funny, they’re doing it because they’re sadomasochists getting off on making one another suffer.

And god do they ever make each other fucking suffer. I cannot express to you the noise I made when I first saw Chris Brooke take a stapler to Despe’s nipple. Exactly the kind of horrific yet arousing spot that a match like this absolutely demands. The more traditional deathmatch spots deserve credit too. Chris Brookes dropkicking Despe into a barbwire board is one thing. Him dragging Despe and the board fucking sticking to his back, now that’s the kind of follow-through that makes a good spot great.

Of course, the telltale sign that this match is great is that it features Maskless Despe. It’s honestly a science at this point: El Desperado ALWAYS has his best matches when the mask comes off. He’s different without it, so much more intense, so much nastier. The fact that the crowd react so loudly to just that is proof that he’s established that…and, hey, in a match designed to be pure smut, the fact that he’s insanely hot doesn’t hurt either.

Wrestling realistically always has a whole lot in common with pornography – it comes with the territory of involving half-naked people grinding against each other – but leaning into that fact so deeply here was a total success. They rode the tightrope of avoiding just becoming a joke, and that might be their best achievement of all.

45. Mio Momono vs Mika Iwata (Sendai Girls) (24/08)

It is impossible to have a great wrestling match off of the back of just one performer, but that doesn’t mean that one wrestler can’t stand out vastly more than another in said great match. As much as Mika Iwata makes a very good account of herself here – perhaps the best account of herself in any singles match she’s ever had – this is just a tour de force of a Mio Momono performance.

I absolutely adore Mio Momono. She wrestles with such energy and personality, making it really feel as if she’s throwing everything she has with all the passion in the world. That passion makes her incredibly easy to root for, and her willingness to get absolutely fucking destroyed when she’s selling only adds to the sympathy she creates.

Here, the best element of her performance is her desperation. She knows what beating Mika – a wrestler above her on the Sendai Girls pecking order – would do for her career, and makes it look like it’s the only thing that matters in the world. I love when a fast start actually means something in a match, and here, it perfectly conveys Mio’s desperation, rushing in and hitting two Germans suplexes, before locking in a near match-winning crossface, before Mika literally collapses out of the ring due to being completely fucked up. Everything makes sense, both physically and in terms of selling Mio’s emotional need to win the match.

Mika does of course do her bit in this match, and her bit is to fucking murder Mio with a brainbuster. Mio’s first and greatest wrestling love is neck bumps, and she lands so high on the neck here. It’s not just the bump that makes it great, it’s the way she groans in pain, trying desperately to drag herself up on the ropes, all while subtly setting herself up for Iwata’s knee. The pain comes across for more than just the duration and shock value of the bump, and that’s the difference between those people on Twitter call a great seller and actual great selling. Usually, Mio will spend most of her matches here taking an utter ass beating, but here, she gives as good as she gets. Her forearms to Mika’s neck are perfect, targeting the area she’d already attacked using her German suplexes (and the area her finisher goes after too), and god they look BRUTAL. She’s stiffing the shit out of her, and Mika does an excellent job going more and more stiff with each one.

This perhaps isn’t the most notable match of the year for Mio, but it’s a great demonstrator of her strengths as a performer. She makes sure she has constant, clear motivations that are followed through by her actions, her determination and passion are infectious and her selling is perhaps the best in the game. If there was one 2024 match I’d use to prime somebody on Mio’s excellence, this is probably where I’d start.

44. Slim J vs Adam Priest (ACTION DEAN~!!!) (04/04)

Similarly to the last match on this list, Slim J vs Adam Priest is an ideal primer to exactly how incredible Adam Priest is at being the world’s biggest fucking dickhead that the world has ever known. He makes a point here of absolutely NEVER getting the advantage fairly. Cheap knees on the ropes, throwing elbows as Slim J is trying to get in the ring, then hiding behind the referee. The second that anything is going wrong for him, he’s cheating. He takes a singular chop from Slim J? We’re going straight to the eyes.

And when he’s getting owned? God, he’s getting OWNED dude. He’s bumping off of shoves, crying to the ref and the audience whenever anything doesn’t go his way, he even manages to get punched by the ref after hiding behind him. Consequences to his actions! This is a no redeemable qualities type of performance, and that’s what makes it so wonderful.

Slim J is also excellent here, living up to his billing as an indie legend returning to where he rightfully belongs. His ear is targeted heavily in this one, so he makes sure to sell as if he’s completely off balance the more Priest goes back to it. Both men deserve credit for how wonderfully they start the match, with the kind of violent, struggling, aggressive lock-up that makes you with that most wrestling put as much thought into something as fundamental as the collar-and-elbow tie-up as these two do. They really look like they’re trying to get the advantage, arching to throw their full weight into it. It not only makes it feel more real, it makes it feel more hateful, and that hateful energy is a necessity for a match between a returning hero and an unbearable villain.

If I do have one complaint about this match, it’s the finish. It comes a little too suddenly for me, and too soon after a brutal neck crank on the ropes to Slim J. I honestly feel like they could’ve milked another five minutes of Priest torturing the neck leading into Slim coming back and winning, which is a big compliment to how well these two worked together. Overall, this match was a triumph in both introducing Adam Priest to a wider audience and in making Slim J feel right at home again. The fact that this was actually only the third best match on the card really says it all about how special DEAN~!!! was.

43. Timothy Thatcher vs Alex Shelley (Prestige Alive or Just Breathing) (16/05)

Battles between technically minded wrestlers don’t have to be mirror matches. It feels a lot of the time, even in good technical matches, that wrestlers get caught up doing cool chaining shit and forget what makes them unique. It’s a more intricate, technical version of what I call Ishii Syndrome, in which lesser talents facing Tomohiro Ishii abandon their own personalities and become inferior clones of Ishii.

This match avoids that obstacle wonderfully by setting out two things. Number one: Alex Shelley and Timothy Thatcher, while both highly technical, are technical in entirely different ways. Shelley excels at fast movement and quick counters, while Thatcher focuses on slower grinding holds that Shelley is really forced to work to escape. For example, Shelley has to get out of a double wristlock in multiple stages, before bursting into a fast series of wristlocks, then using a little llave to catch Thatcher off guard, before Thatcher counters with a blunt, simple, painful ankle lock. The match is full of counters like that, which fit each wrestler’s particular style and personality without abandoning the fact that everything they’re doing is very fucking cool.

This brings us on to important detail to set Thatcher and Shelley apart number two: Timothy Thatcher is quite simply fucking better at this than Alex Shelley. Instead of going for the fifty/fifty, evenly matched style that dominates wrestling today, from beginning to end, Thatcher’s skillset is presented as superior to Shelley’s. Even something as simple as Thatcher only actually once going to the ropes the entire match, while Shelley is constantly using rope breaks, demonstrates that consistently throughout. Shelley sells his own inferiority in this match wonderfully, staying as close to the ropes as he possibly can through the latter stages because, well, he has to! Even better is that Thatcher actually responds to this, altering his grinding, crushing style to make his approach towards his Fujiwara armbar finish more sudden, more similar to Shelley’s approach, because otherwise Shelley is just gonna keep going to the ropes. It feels like we’re watching two masters of their craft evolve their strategy to deal with each other throughout the match, rather than just escalating with bigger and bigger moves, and I fucking love that.

The whole match and evolution of tactics builds brilliantly to the finish itself, with Shelley losing grip of one of Thatcher’s arms on a backslide, and Thatcher, realising that this might be the only time Shelley isn’t hugging the ropes all match, just fucking rips his entire arm out of his socket with the Fujiwara. A brilliantly well thought out bout where every decision makes logical sense while constantly being exciting and impressive. A near-best effort for both men this year.

42. Boltin Oleg vs Taichi (New Japan Soul) (05/07)

Objectivity isn’t real. In all art and all walks of life, personal biases are bound to paint our experiences, with what is most important to you in a piece unlikely to be the same as what deeply matters to me. With all of that said, we can all agree that Taichi is the single greatest professional wrestler to ever live. He is the perfect mixture of everything that makes wrestling great: a defined personality that fits his wrestling style, an incredible mind for structure and timing in a match, phenomenal selling and striking, and a love for creativity that never dives into self indulgence. He is flawless, and the further away a wrestler is from being Taichi, the worse they automatically are. The fact that he has just one match on this list is not a condemnation of him, but of New Japan Pro Wrestling for their incredibly foolish decision to downsize his importance on the card. When this match happened, it was reasonable to assume that it’d be the last truly notable singles match of his New Japan career, and the only thing to have changed that is a truly unfortunate injury to Hirooki Goto, allowing him the 20^th and final spot in this year’s G1. But here? This was it. The crushing heartbreak of seeing a company fail its greatest asset. Taichi likely thought that way too, and decided to go down swinging, seeping every last bit of emotion out of his final stand, and giving Boltin Oleg – one of the more exciting young talents New Japan has to offer – comfortably his best match in the process. Of course he did.

As with so many of Taichi’s best efforts, the highlight of the match – beyond the awesome heavy strikes and heaving suplexes – is the layout. The first half of the match establishes Oleg’s power, showing him literally running straight through everything Taichi tries, until it’s Taichi’s veteran tactics that get him the advantage, baiting Oleg into a fake strike exchange before just fucking decapitating him with a gamengiri, which, obviously, he hits better than that coward Kawada ever did because he’s superior to him in every way. It’s a hard enough strike to avoid hindering the air of invincibility Boltin has, and a trap perfectly befitting of a man who’s seen it all before to catch a super rookie off guard with. Taichi’s control segment is well done too, with Boltin giving just enough to make it clear that this is his hardest fight to date.

Where this match really marks its spot as a Taichi classic, though, is in the second half, where Boltin Oleg catches Taichi suddenly with his kamikaze rolling fireman’s carry. Here, the match transforms into a masterclass of how to use a finisher if it’s not going to end a match. The kamikaze doesn’t end Taichi, but it completely fucking ruins everything for him. His selling is astonishingly good, he’s writhing around in pain after it connects, to the point that, on first match, I really did wonder if something had gone wrong and the rookie had broken my hero’s rib. At no point from here is he treated like he stands a chance. He’s just defending himself, going out on his shield. Rather than just using the finisher as an Exciting Near-Fall and treating it like nothing from there as is the style currently, it completely changes the mood and dynamic of the match. Taichi’s slow, methodical approach to dissecting Boltin becomes frantic, hopeless big moves and desperate pinning combinations. He’s a man who knows he’s on extremely borrowed time, in the macro of his career at large as well as the micro of this match in particular, so he has to do everything, now, and if it doesn’t work, he can’t win, and he simply cannot win. Where Taichi throws everything, all Boltin needs is one more attack on the ribs and it’s all over. The whole match is excellent, but that second half is absolutely outstanding. The fact that New Japan were ready to throw away his quality again this year until they were basically forced not to is fucking damning, but, with the G1 about to start at time of writing, you can rest assured that Taichi will be stealing the show every single night. He’s the best of all time, it's just what he does.

41. AAAW Championship: Takumi Iroha vs Mayumi Ozaki(c) (Marvelous) (08/08)

This match starts awesome and just never stops being awesome. From the moment Takumi Iroha bursts through a flood of red ribbons to launch herself at Mayumi Ozaki, it’s obvious that this is going to be one to remember. This match feels like an event, the kind of atmosphere when it truly just feels like the world is willing the hero to conquer the villain, but for that to be truly effective, the villain has to be outstanding, and, god, what a fucking evil piece of shit we have here.

Ozaki is quite obviously one of the best wrestlers to live, and the fact that she’s still going at a ridiculously high level in her mid-50s only serves to improve her case. She’s spent most of her career doing her best to be the worst person in any given room, and she’s refined that to perfection, knowing exactly what buttons to push and exactly how mean to be at any given time. She’s not some supernatural villain or a comical laughing schemer, but the joy she takes in sadistically torturing her opponents is what makes her so fucking loathsome. She whips, slaps and drags her opponents around in dog collars, all with this smile on her face that shows isn’t doing this because it’s the most effective way to win, but because it’s just the most fun.

For much of the first act of this match, it’s Ozaki just fucking bullying Iroha, torturing her and the crowd. She literally chokes her with her own entrance gear. Her fucking entrance gear is weaponised! Ozaki wants as many advantages as she can get, and she uses them to grind, crush and torture Iroha. Iroha’s comeback spots are well timed too. Iroha rarely gets long control periods but they always come at the peak of the crowd’s desire to see a fightback. Ozaki is a suffocating force in the ring (figuratively and literally), but when she gives, she does it with gusto and lets the crowd be satisfied by her punishment.

The star of the show, though, is Ozaki. She just throws herself into everything and is constantly acting to get heat. She’s a lesson in the art of wrestling cruelty, whether it be a chain to Iroha’s face, demanding unearned cheers from the crowd, or just dismissively kicking her battered foe while walking away from her.

Oh, or whether she’s fucking hanging Iroha in the middle of the match. Because she’ll happily do that too. That’s the biggest spot of the match and it earns the fucking screams that it deserves. Then she just hits a watching Mio Momono with a chair because she hates her (we’ll get onto that in a bit) and all of us. When Iroha is hanging it feels like Ozaki is suffocating all of us too, ripping all hope from us before, after a long fightback, Iroha earns it back. Her comeback is just great, because her striking, rarely for her, feels unrehearsed and unplanned, like a big fucking burst of hate and revenge. She’s just driving her palm into the back of Ozaki’s neck, and you’d better believe she’s not too much of a coward to smash a chair over her head too. The crowd and the commentators go fucking nuts for it, and it's totally deserved because the heel used the chair first! Wrestling morals 101. Even better, the collar ends up on Ozaki, the most embarrassing thing that could’ve happened to her and you know she’s earned every bit of it.

It all concludes in just a burst of total joy when Iroha wins. Even the commentators are losing it, because everybody hates Ozaki, which, in the weird world of wrestling, means that she has fucking nailed it.

40. Chihiro Hashimoto vs Sareee (Sareee-ISM Chapter III) (16/01)

Putting two of the absolute best wrestlers in the world, who had already proved that they have incredible chemistry, in the ring together for a big match is a pretty solid recipe for success. Sareee’s mindset of just putting herself against everybody she matches up extremely well with for her Sareee-ISM shows is always a winner, but this was perhaps the first match that gave the impression that she’d be having a career year. The same, of course, has to be said about her opponent, and together, they made magic for the second time in January alone.

In big main event-style puro matches, it’s easy for wrestlers to focus on aura, big moments and huge moves to be the whole story, but here, it feels like they really put thought into how a Sareee vs Chihiro Hashimoto match should logically look, based on their styles, histories, and strengths and weaknesses. I love that it’s made clear for practically the whole first ten minutes of the match that Sareee is simply not good enough on a technical level nor strong enough to hang with Hashimoto that way. Those are her weaknesses, while her strengths are her sheer determination, will and heart…and also the fact that she’ll just throw the goddamn craziest forearms in the game at will. That helps too.

Another major strength of the match is that it feels as if it builds directly from its own preview match. It feels almost wrong to talk about the two separately, but, spoiler alert, that match is also on this list, so I’ll only discuss what’s specifically relevant here. Namely, that Sareee has been given very good reason to be fucking terrified of that Albright German suplex. If I were to highlight Sareee at her best in this match, it’d be the way she sells the fear of knowing that that fucking suplex can and will beat her whenever it hits. Whenever Hashimoto so much as gets behind her, Sareee is flailing, struggling, doing anything she can to get the fuck out of her grip, because she knows what happens when she doesn’t. When Hashimoto ultimately does get the move, the only reason it doesn’t beat Sareee is because she couldn’t keep the bridge thanks to the damage she’d taken, ensuring that Sareee’s fear of the move is fully justified. Also linking back to the previous match is that the best offence that Sareee and Mio Momono managed to get on big Hash was all arm-work. Not only does Sareee use that to target the arm, Hashimoto is also still selling the damage that had been done a week or so earlier, screaming while trapped deep in an octopus stretch. It feels like you’re being rewarded for paying attention!

As I’ve hopefully demonstrated, this match is more than two big fucking deal wrestlers throwing big fucking bombs at each other…but if we can just talk about those big fucking bombs, god they’re cool. Hashimoto fucking rugby tackling Sareee into the chairs at ringside, Jesus fucking Christ. Hashimoto wheelbarrow German Suplexing Sareee, holy fucking shit dude. Sareee delivering like 5 uranages because she knows that there’s no hope in hell of her keeping Hashimoto down if she doesn’t, that’s what it’s all about.

More than anything else, this match feels like a fucking war. By the end, they’re both hanging on for dear life, selling like they’re about to collapse at any second because they’ve both been beaten the fuck up. This is a serious, honest to god battle, and it may well be the best 2020s puro-style main event match of the entire year.

39. Mike Bailey vs Nicole Matthews (LPW x CWS 12) (28/03)

I am not a huge Mike Bailey guy. I like them a hell of a lot more than most indie wrestlers of their ilk, but they have a tendency to go several near falls too long with the intent of doing every single possible thing rather than trying to peak at the right time. Their biggest strength is the inherent likability they have. They wrestle with a smile and personality, and regardless with my stylistic issues, it’s hard not to root for them. How strange it is, then, that Bailey’s best match of the year (and, as is tradition, they had a LOT of them) was the one where they played the villain.

Running endlessly likeable Mike Bailey vs career douchebag Nicole Matthews and having Bailey in the heel role is an absolutely baffling decision, but it works! It really, really works! They set it up by having a great, really technical feeling out process in which Matthews, being far more of a grappler than Bailey, is comfortably controlling, forcing Bailey to escalate by throwing the first strike of the match, which, while not exactly breaking the rules, feels like it’s breaking an unspoken agreement between the two and positions them as the reluctant villain. It makes sense without making Bailey really seem like a bad guy because that’d betray their character. Despite, or perhaps because, they’re almost exclusively the victim of heat segments, Bailey knows exactly how to control the match as a de-facto heel, not cheating but just being flat out mean to make Matthews more sympathetic. They throw arm wrenches with extra snap and smash her into the barricade before cracking her fingers on the floor. It’s shockingly good and violent from somebody so typically likable. Even in just taking longer between big moves, letting shit breathe and socking in the audience, it feels like this all comes bizarrely naturally to somebody so suited to being a face. Maybe this is something for them to come back to on a more permanent basis at some point in their career.

Matching Bailey’s weirdly effective heel performance is Nicole Matthews stepping effortlessly into being a babyface. She sells the ever-loving fuck out of her arm, it constantly informs what she can and can’t do for the remainder of the match. She can’t suplex Bailey because it puts too much pressure on her arm, she can’t fully apply her cravat crossface for the same reason, it all makes perfect sense and pays off the previous work in the match while giving Nicole a mountain to overcome. Just wonderful match-structuring all round.

This is all before the landmark spot of this match: Matthews gets a spider German suplex on Bailey, but Bailey’s leg gets caught on the turnbuckle. It’s hard to explain it in words rather than just seeing it happen, but it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and it looks fucking nasty as shit, and I swear to god I have no idea whether it was intentional or not. If it wasn’t, the recovery to focus on Bailey’s leg is absolutely fantastic and genuinely admirable in shifting the match in accordance with what happened rather than what was planned. If it was, then it’s an extremely creative spot, I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and Bailey sold it brilliantly.

The focus given to the arm and the leg are used to perfectly set up the ending too. Matthews loses the match because she still can’t get the cravat thanks to the damage to her arm. She’s too dedicated to her favourite hold rather than adapting to Bailey’s fucked up leg, and it costs her. Here, Matthews’ shift away from targeting the leg feels not like a structuring mistake but an intentional, kayfabe reason why Bailey sneaks away with the win. It’s just one clever moment in a match absolutely full of them. Among the most underrated matches of the year for me.

38. Adam Priest vs LaBron Kozone (DPW Live 6) (16/06)

As with the Hashimoto/Sareee match I talked about earlier, there is a slight weirdness to discussing individually a match that is part of a two-part series. In this match’s case that’s especially true, because the other Priest vs Kozone bout from later in the year gets a lot more attention and praise – rightfully so, it is the better match – but I would argue that this match is great too, as a standalone fight of good and evil where the villain luckily and unjustly squirms his way out of this jam, but especially as the sad first chapter of a fantastic two-part story, designed perfectly to make you want to see Kozone lariat Adam Priest’s shitty little grin off of his stupid fucking face.

Priest gets to really show off his mastery at working a crowd in this one. He treats the audience as just as much an adversary as Kozone is, encouraging them to hurl abuse his way as he stalls through the early goings of the match and cheats his way into control. Something as simple as fleeing the ring, then rolling back in just as LaBron goes to grab him and yelling at him to get back into the ring works so well at making him seem like the most annoying coward in the world. Priest even uses his endless war of words with the crowd to add to his offence – claiming that Kozone is pulling his hair only for somebody in the audience to remind him ‘you don’t have hair!’, that’s what it’s all about man. Beyond his crowd work, all of his petty heel bullshit is on full display throughout the early goings. As is his trademark, he never gets the advantage fairly, here using an eye poke to take control, and maintaining it with frustrated back rakes and grinding holds. Everything about him is designed to make you explode when the face comes back, and, for me, it works every single time.

To make for a truly great match, a heel’s shittiness has to be matched by the face’s fire, and I would pretty seriously argue that LaBron Kozone’s mid-match comebacks are among the best in the business. His moveset, for one thing, is just perfect for it, just huge power moves and pure explosiveness, all working wonderfully as he launches Priest around like he's nothing. Priest is great at selling as pathetically as possible, constantly fleeing when on defence, whining about everything, coming across as wrestling’s greatest coward, but Kozone’s offence is the star of the show here. It’s not just about what he does, but the energy with which he does it, there’s a joy to the way he moves that makes it impossible for me to not love seeing him take charge.

The way this match transitions from a party to a heartbreak is just so damn good. Adam Priest should in no way shape or form regain the advantage, let alone end up winning the match. He just gets lucky that Kozone jams his knee on a 450 splash, allowing him to cruelly destroy his leg. It feels like a fucking robbery from that moment onwards, like this little shit who somehow wins every match has gotten away with it once again, and that’s because that’s exactly what he did. He didn’t earn control, not even by cheating this time, Kozone just made one mistake and it cost him everything. The finish is crushing too, with Kozone struggling and fighting so much to keep away from Priest’s half crab finisher, only to end up caught in an STF and choked out. He didn’t cheat, but he got so fucking lucky, and for a heel to win clean but still feel like absolute bullshit requires being at the top of your game, and god if Adam Priest hadn’t been at the top of his game all through 2024.

37. Mima Shimoda & El Desperado vs Starlight Kid & Dragon Kid (Despe Invitacional) (10/06)

There was a point where the El Desperado vs Starlight Kid match that both obviously wanted felt as if it was never going to happen, largely because of New Japan’s cowardly baby approach to intergender wrestling. At their one intergender show a year, Historic X-Over, they’ve largely stuck to showing a series of mixed tag, requiring men to only wrestle men and women to only wrestle women. Now, this might sound like an exaggeration, but the mixed tag may well be one of the only match types in history to have never had even one single good match. Here, thank god, El Desperado decides to show his home promotion what they’ve been missing on his own terms.

SLK and Despe starting the match against each other is enough to earn a pop in its own right, and that’s before they’ve even done anything. The people want this, and that’s only helped by how blatantly the wrestlers want it too. There’s such a joy to the fact that this match is even happening at all, but positive vibes and good energy can only get you so far. The strength of this match is its simplicity. Once the initial buzz of the match happening at all wears off, they wisely decide to play this as a straight heel vs babyface match, reliant on all of the oldest tricks in the book. SLK slowly escaping and countering Despe’s headlock is so simple, but it gets a massive pop. It’s pure babyface fundamentals, matched by the defiant slap to the face she gives him after backing him into the ropes. Likewise, Despe is getting huge heel reactions for shit as basic as rolling SLK out of the ring and stepping on her face, and is happy to play the butt of the joke as he and Shimoda’s attempt to Irish whip the Kids into each other is countered to send the heels crashing comically together. This shit is straight out of the Midnight Express tag book, and just like it did then, it still gets a big laugh out of the crowd now.

As for the veteran tag partners in this match, Dragon Kid is always a delight to see, in that he’s just doing shit that should realistically be impossible for him to do at his ages. His flips look so cool and are consistently timed to perfection, his biggest spots coming in at the right time, but, god, it’s crazy that the best performance in this match comes from the one wrestler who doesn’t work full time. Of course Mima Shimoda is good at being a horrible fucking cruel rudo-style heel tag wrestler – that it entirely her bag – but she’s just as good here as she ever was. Watching her using old-school rudo cutoffs on SLK just feels right, like this is exactly how they should be interacting with one another. Mima Shimoda should 1000% be tearing at her face and ripping at her mask in a camel clutch with a huge, shit-eating grin on her face because that’s what she fucking does. SLK does fantastic with her too, going straight to the Manami Toyota school of selling by screaming her way through Mima’s holds, making the crowd get more and more behind her to escape them. When she’s first introduced, Shimoda is greeted with nothing but love by the crowd. It’s a testament to how good she is at this shit that she turns them on her so damn quickly. Once she’s in the ring, she flat out refuses to be loved.

The novelty value of this match happening at all after New Japan had repeatedly blown it when it comes to intergender wrestling shouldn’t be ignored in making it feel as fun to watch as it is, but if the work from all four wrestlers wasn’t there, then it wouldn’t have made it this high on the list. They used the positive vibes they had created to work an excellent, simple but incredibly effective heel vs face tag match, carrying the great energy in the building all the way to the finish. Considering that New Japan finally booked an actual, honest to god intergender match at the Historic X-Over that followed this show, maybe they’ve finally learned their lesson.

36. Takuya Nomura & Kazunari Murakami vs Fuminori Abe & Yuki Ishikawa (Fuminori Abe & Takuya Nomura Produce Kakuto Tanteidan II ~ From Shinjuku With Love) (23/10)

Listen man, I don’t know what to tell you. If the up and coming wrestlers of today were able to convey even a fraction of the hatred that the two grizzled old fuckers in this match manage, the industry would be a better place for it. Imagine being in your late 50s and having as much hate in your heart as Yuki Ishikawa still does. He and Kazunari Murakami are throwing live fucking rounds at each other, trying to choke one another out, there’s a realness to this that the new-school cannot match and it’s a truly beautiful thing to behold.

Murakami in particular is maybe the most unhinged that any human being has ever been in this match. This horrible old man kicks the ever-loving FUCK out of Ishikawa, throws insane mounted headbutts with the full intent of helping his rival develop CTE, booting at Ishikawa while he’s down to just to be a dick about it, all while wearing his shiny suit and looking proud of himself than anybody in history has ever been.

There’s just a pettiness to these guys that great wrestling rivalries should have. Whenever they’re locked up together, they’re throwing little, ineffective kicks and punches not with the intent to really hurt one another, but just to convey their shared hatred. There’s nothing clean or smooth about a single goddamn thing they do, they’re sloppy and violent and childish and aggressive and I absolutely fucking love it.

That’s three paragraphs down and not a single mention of the two guys the show was booked by and is named after. Obviously you know that Fuminori Abe and Takuya Nomura are fantastic at wrestling each other. This is literally their third time on this list doing exactly that. Despite everything - their wonderful grappling that combines smoothness with a sense that they’re actually trying to outwrestle one another, their strikes that always come across as brutal and every once in a while feel as if they’ve actually knocked one another out, their general willingness to beat the living shit out of each other - somehow I’m convinced that their highlight in this match is their first major action: having to drag Ishikawa and Murakami back to their respective corners because, if they don’t, they are never going to get to be in this fucking match. It’s hilarious, made even better by Ishikawa and Murakami just sitting there on the ground like children after the fact. When the natural pairings split off from going against each other, the hits just keep on coming. Abe develops a habit of dropkicking Murakami directly in the face as hard as he can and it is glorious, but I would love a singles match between Nomura and Ishikawa. Their whole hold-for-hold counter-for-counter run is fucking great. Ishikawa rolling straight through an Indian deathlock into a double wristlock is so cool looking, and I like that, when Nomura counters it into an attempt at the same hold, Ishikawa is immediately out of there. Of course he knows the escape, he’s an expert at this shit. On occasion, Murakami even decides to kick the shit out of Nomura for being too soft on Ishikawa. He’s such a wonderful bastard in this match.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t on the level of the first Fighting Detectives main event. Very few matches this decade are. Still, this is a completely different main event, heated and hateful and brutal and funny in equal measure. For me, it deserves a lot more credit than it got.

35. Isaacs, Nelson & Lawlor vs Ku, Garrini & Kozone (DPW No Pressure) (14/04)

“You know who Ichiban’s tag partner is? Scratchiban.” – Caprice Coleman, 2024.

And that line, by the last good English commentator in the game, is why this is the 35^th best match of 2024.

Okay, there may be a few reasons beyond that, but it’s comfortably the biggest one.

It’s important to establish that this isn’t just a normal six-man tag. Similar to a fall in a traditional lucha six-man, each team has a captain, in this case Tom Lawlor for Team Filthy, and LaBron Kozone for the faces. Their teammates can be eliminated via the usual means, but the match only ends if one of the captains is pinned. This is used wonderfully to set up the face and heel dynamics of the match, as well as the overarching story. Kozone, the brave never-say-die babyface, is in the match constantly, always on the hunt for Lawlor, but Filthy Tom obviously isn’t getting anywhere near that ring unless his team already has the advantage. With Kozone regularly lunging for Lawlor and getting cut off, the story of the face trying to get his hands on the cowardly heel is set up as the main throughline of the first half of the match.

It's a shame that Team Filthy aren’t a thing anymore, because they’re really great heels. They always allow enough from their opponents to keep the crowd on side, but they’re great at cutting them off as a unit too, rarely if ever making it a fair fight. Their long heat segment on Kevin Ku is excellently worked. He’s never fully out of the fight, always trying something, but they keep him trapped in their corner, brutalising a cut they open on his forehead, using Kozone’s desperation to get his hands on Lawlor against him to distract the ref while they cheat away. I wanna give particular credit to Jorel Nelson, who is fucking fantastic in this match, comfortably a career best effort from him. He comes up with all sorts of violent ways to target Ku’s cut, but beyond that, he’s really great all match. His cutoff to stop Ku from getting the tag, just tackling him into the corner the moment he starts to fight back, is smart and cowardly all at once. There’s just a viciousness to him, a pit-bull energy, that I’d love to see more of. Ku too deserves big praise for his selling during this long segment, keeping the whole thing moving. His exhaustion selling from his bloodloss is excellent too, and it’s the work he did that makes the tag he eventually gets to his Violence is Forever partner feel all the more satisfying and earned.

The restraint of making the crowd wait a full 15 minutes for Kozone to complete his mission and finally get his hands on Lawlor really is admirable too. It pays off wonderfully, feeling like the hero really has had to earn this, rather than taking any shortcuts, and once he’s got him, he’s absolutely unstoppable. And the finish? Oh my god, the fucking finish. The best strike exchange of the year, mainly because it’s not really a strike exchange. It’s just two guys fucking punching each other as fast and hard as they can, directly in the head, until one of them finds an opening and gets the knockout. The way it’s shot, right up close on them as they unload before Kozone’s lariat suddenly strikes and Lawlor just goes completely limp…it’s fucking beautiful man, up there with the best finishes of the year, and just another reason why this ended up being outstanding.

…But it was mostly the Scratchiban line, not gonna lie.

34. AJ Styles vs Randy Orton (WWE SmackDown) (10/05)

I’m probably not qualified to tell you that Randy Orton was WWE’s best wrestler in 2024. I haven’t watched enough of either his output nor the promotion in general to make a claim like that, and when I asked a few of my more fed-inclined friends who they felt WWE’s best was, Orton’s name didn’t come up. What I will argue, though, is that, in the WWE matches that I did watch, Randy Orton’s performances compelled me the most, and of those, this was the best of the bunch.

I stand before you today to confess that I am a leg-selling pervert. If you take a load of damage to your leg and proceed ignore that fact for the second part of your match because you feel the desperate desire to hit all of your cool moves, I will sadly hate your match, and probably you as a human being, for the rest of time. This year I watched more bad leg selling matches than I think I ever have before, with the Best of the Super Juniors being a particular nightmare to get through because of them. My personal theory is that people think leg matches are easy: you just sell on your back, not really taking bumps as your leg is beaten down, before making your comeback like nothing happened. For something like the BOSJ, where you’re working at least 9 singles matches in quick succession, it’s the lazy way out, but, I’m sorry, it drives me crazy every time. If you’re going to have one of your limbs be targeted all match, I don’t think that it should be too much to ask for you to adapt the way you wrestle to that. If you have a bad wheel, don’t do a springboard 450 splash. That’s all I’m asking here.

Thankfully, reports of leg-selling’s demise were greatly exaggerated. On this list alone, there’s KONOSUKE TAKESHITA’s wonderfully thorough loss of his wider move-set against Ren Narita, and Bayley’s sympathy grabbing showcase vs. IYO Sky. And then there’s Randy Orton here, and this one, for my money, is the best of the best.

Before moving onto Randy Orton’s performance, I do think that it’s worth saving a word for AJ Styles, who, while far from the star of this match, does a very good job. He’s typically snug on his offence, and from the moment Orton takes that first bit of damage to the knee, he’s all over it for the rest of the match. In a limb-work match, I do think it’s important that the one on offence stay tenacious when it comes to going after the wounded body part. As with limb-selling being forgotten, lesser wrestlers will often just abandon attacking what they were going after in favour of hitting all of their biggest and flashiest moves, but that’s not a trap AJ falls into.

This match, though, is all about Orton, because he fucking nails his leg-selling to perfection from beginning to end. I adore the way he goes into it, subtly limping after landing from a stun gun, and AJ is instantly all over him, intelligent, opportunistic and crafty. When he’s getting beaten down, Orton sells the agony progressively, making it seem like what was at first a slight reignition of an old injury is getting worse and worse with everything AJ does to it. He’ll regularly try his best to actually avoid AJ’s leg offence, dodging around as much as he can, and I swear NOBODY does that. When Randy does get control, his leg remains in agony, because it should! He can’t hit his Garvin stomps without wincing after every delivery. He reinjures his leg by going for his powerslam because the motion makes his knee impact the mat. In his signature comeback sequence, he manages to sell the impact that hitting clotheslines has on his knees in two completely different ways, one more intense than the last because he’s having to throw his body into it, giving AJ time to prepare and avoid the powerslam that takes his leg out again. When AJ goes for the calf crusher, Orton is desperately struggling, not from being in the move, but to avoid AJ getting it all the way on, eventually countering with a chin lock because it’s all he can think to do. Hell, he fucking sells the leg while doing the RKO taunt!  It’s all so fucking smart, I was just completely in awe of it.

The whole ‘if you built a pro wrestler from the ground up it’d look like Randy Orton’ bit JBL used to do was always cringe and was memed on for a reason, but I really do think all aspiring pro wrestlers should watch Orton in this match to learn how to properly sell their bad limbs. It’s not enough to just be in pain on defence, it has to actually, honestly effect you throughout the match. Forget high-flying, Orton fails to hit his signature DDT three separate times in this match, all because of the bad leg! That’s fucking dedication, and you have to be dedicated to get this kind of match right. People need to learn from this match, or I’m going to spend many more years losing my mind at how bad everybody is at limb matches nowadays. If you’re not going to learn for yourself, please, learn for my sake.

33. Ryohei Oiwa vs Go Shiozaki (NOAH Sunny Voyage) (18/05)

Usually when a match is compared to the classic All Japan style, the mind travels to the ever-escalating, neck drop-heavy Kings Road of the 1990s. I’m not going to be a contrarian here, I fucking love Misawa, Kawada, Kobashi and Taue (especially Taue), but if I told you a NOAH match called back to that style, it wouldn’t exactly be news. The promotion itself was quite literally born from it, after all. Here, when I say this match carries the spirit of classic All Japan, I don’t mean the four pillars killing each other, because this match is honestly more like something out of Jumbo Tsuruta’s 1970s catalogue than what you’d picture a NOAH main event looking like: Gruelling, grinding battles to try desperately to escape holds as things get more and more grizzled and frantic while the time limit approaches.

That is a style that Ryohei Oiwa spent his NOAH days working to revive. As great as Yuya Uemura may be, whether by ability, creativity or simply a greater number of opportunities presented by an infinitely better-fitting excursion promotion, Oiwa’s peaks are comfortably the highest of New Japan’s new hopes. In modern wrestling, holds tend to just be a midpoint between bigger moves, a path into doing something big, explosive and eye-catching. Ryohei Oiwa ignores that trend by making his whole philosophy revolve around the fact that once he gets you in a hold, he is not fucking letting go no matter what. There are better matches than this one to demonstrate that fact, but it’s still absolutely gorgeous here. Watching him refuse to give up a ground arm lock when Shiozaki armdrags him, keeping the hold on all the way through, is a beautiful thing to behold. Really, I love Oiwa because it’s clear, in kayfabe, that he always enters matches with an exact idea of how he’s going to win them. He goes to the arm immediately here, and, for thirty long, agonising minutes, he never stops.

More experienced wrestlers than him would use arm work as an easy way to get through ten or so minutes before bursting into a series of unrelated Cool Moves, but Oiwa is more disciplined than that. His explosive moments aren’t gigantic moves (although his Doctor Bomb is notably sick as hell), they’re him slowly tripping Shiozaki in a hammerlock, driving his knees into the exposed arm, they’re Oiwa taking a hip toss but refusing to release the arm, turning it into a keylock on the mat. He wows the audience not with flashy bullshit, but with his sheer fucking will to never, ever let go, to make sure that Go Shiozaki’s arm is never the same again once this is over. Where other wrestlers would be tempted to massively escalate with a top rope move, Oiwa goes to the top…to drag Shiozaki back to the mat in an armbar. When countering Shiozaki’s terrifying lariat, he doesn’t go into a huge bomb of his own, because he knows that a far realer, more legitimate way to win the match is to Japanese arm drag into another armbar. His wrestling is logical, technically flawless and rugidly.

It’s not just Oiwa working long trial and error wear-down holds, forcing his opponent to try several counters before eventually discovering an escape. Shiozaki is more than happy to hold up his end of the bargain. The battle they contest for just over a minute of Oiwa trying all sorts of different things to escape a headscissors is just awesome. Oiwa fails to get to the ropes, briefly escapes by targeting the legs, and finally fully gets out by rolling Shiozaki over and trapping his legs, before promptly going back to his beloved, the armbar. It reminds me of a similar headscissors battle in a Tenryu/Steamboat match I watched last year, and that is very high praise.

As much as Ryohei Oiwa is the architect of this match’s greatness, Go Shiozaki is obviously one of the best wrestlers of his generation, so he’s more than a passenger here. If you’re gonna target an arm, there are few better wrestlers to do it to than Shiozaki, who has been having his arm targeted for, like, 20 years at this point. He’s not the kind of seller to give up using his arm completely, but he makes a point of having every chop and lariat he delivers using it look like it’s killing him, differentiating between lacking the usual power in his chops with Oiwa able to no-sell a few earlier ones, to flat out being in too much pain to get his arm up to deliver them at all, to landing his machine gun chops, but collapsing in agony after the fact. It’s a wonderful, varied selling performance that keeps things interesting and glues together Oiwa’s 30-minute masterplan. It simply could not have been as good as it was without Shiozaki’s arm being sent to hell and back.

If given the right platform in New Japan, there’s every chance that, in a year or two’s time, Oiwa will flat out be the best wrestler in the world. His greatest skill of all is being able to convince far more experienced men than himself to give his style of match a try, to go back in time to wow the present, and so long as that continues, there’s no reason why he can’t be the greatest.

 32. 1 Called Manders vs Mad Dog Connelly (SLA Gateway To Anarchy) (26/01)

There really isn’t a massive amount of, like, analysis that can go into a match like this. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, two fucking monsters slugging the absolute shit out of each other, and it is a glorious thing to behold. This isn’t a strong style, NEVER coded tough man contest, this is something off the streets, which is exactly Mad Dog Connelly’s entire vibe, and Manders is arguably the perfect opponent to match that energy, more than willing to hit and get hit in the head with not even remotely pulled chain-assisted punches.

It's important to point out that this is a dog collar match, the environment where Mad Dog is always at his absolute best. There’s just a savagery about their use of the chain. They never try to get too cute and creative, they know that the best ways to use the chain are to hit and choke with it, and by god do they ever hit and choke each other with this chain as hard as they fucking can. There’s an instinctiveness to everything they do, no hint of preplanning, just whatever feels like the best way to cause maximum pain to the other guy at any given time. Whenever they decide to deviate from that and hit each other with what would traditionally be considered Wrestling Moves, they are the ugliest, most brutish things you’ll ever see. There will be no clean landings here, if you’re getting gutwrenched by Mad Dog, you’re getting dumped on your neck. If you’re getting a rope-hung suplex, you’re just being fucking thrown, with no cooperation from you whatsoever.

Even the biggest spots in this match feel entirely incidental and lived in the moment. You don’t think about Manders and Mad Dog sitting in the back coming up with the idea for Mad Dog to be knocked brutally to the outside off the top rope with a lariat, only for the newly formed distance between the two to end up hanging Manders, you only think HOLY FUCK HE’S DYING HE’S GONNA DIE!!! It’s so fucking sick, and Mad Dog goes down with absolutely no finesse at all. Every single thing about it is rough, and that’s why I absolutely adore it. Hangings in wrestling are, of course, always appreciated, and a second hanging being enough to beat Manders in this one. Nothing about this match feels staged. It’s just pure hatred and violence, and it’s fucking gorgeous man.

31. Hechicero vs Zack Sabre Jr. (CMLL Sabados De Coliseo) (22/06)

One of the consistent highlights of 2024 in wrestling was the triangle feud between Bryan Danielson, Hechicero and Zack Sabre Jr. over the title of best technical wrestler. Now, despite the fact that this question has a very obvious answer (ain’t no way these bums are touching Hechicero when it comes to going hold-for-hold), it led to plenty of great wrestling this year, with this match being the highlight.

The early technical freestyle in ZSJ’s matches is consistently the best part of his work, with his individuality fading the longer he goes and the more he relies on basic 2010s New Japan structuring. In Hechicero, he finds an ideal opponent, somebody more than capable of doing anything technical that he wants to try, but with a firm difference in approach, his llave style of complex submissions contrasting with the Billy Robinson school of thought Zack comes from. When meshed together, they make magic. There’s just this real awe to watching Hechicero counter a ZSJ chokehold by pressing his leg down on Zach, and then, without ever letting go, tying up all of his limbs and catching him in a leg-trap crucifix pin, or ZSJ countering a Romero special by just pulling Hechicero’s fingers apart (after he worked on them earlier in the match! Consistency!), then somehow rolling into yet another hold that traps all of Hechicero’s limbs. I find the complexities of technical wrestling somewhat challenging to put into words, the holds they’re capable of getting each other in, while never feeling inorganic and like they’re cooperating with one another,  is so impressive, and just beautiful to watch.

What’s a whole lot less complicated to explain is the art of being a heel dickhead. Even with how gorgeous I think the hold-for-hold action in this match is, my highlight, comfortably, is Zack Sabre Jr.’s heel work. This, right here, is where he thrives, as an unbearable foreign invader, ignoring the idea that this is some sort of ‘dream match’ and making sure every single person in the crowd just wants to see him getting beaten the fuck up. He basks in being a piece of shit to the local hero, mocking a neck injury he caused to Hechicero and loving every second of the loud chants for his opponent, all while being unnecessarily cruel and mean, using the ropes in a way that, sure, isn’t cheating, but you know for a fact that it isn’t sporting. At one point, he labours his way out of the ring at the first sign of threat, then promptly steals a fan’s beer, before getting on the apron and mockingly imitating a bull while Hechicero urges him to get back inside. He enrages Hechicero into going all out after him, leaving him open for an easy enough counter to get the first fall of the match, after which he promptly moons the fans. Watching him play this antagonistic, old school, stooge-like asshole here makes it almost laughable that most people’s wrestler of the year case for him would be built on his work as an honourable foreign ace in New Japan. Fuck that, this is what he’s a master at, and I’m glad he got plenty of opportunities to lean into that this year.

It's Zack’s heel work that builds to what I think is the highlight of the match, the climax of all of his bullshit, when, finally, Hechicero abandons all semblance of a battle to prove technical superiority by obliterating him with a big fucking chop. Zack goes down like the chop had him fucking out, and the crowd absolutely explode from it, like that one moment is the ideal punishment for all of his shittiness towards the audience. Moreover, I love seeing Zack having striking as a genuine weakness to his game. It used to be more of a factor in his work but it’s unfortunately been largely phased out nowadays. Seeing how effective it proves here shows how important it is for wrestlers to have weaknesses. It makes their matches so much more interesting if there’s something to target, something you know could completely fuck them over.

I will admit, I’m not a huge supporter of the finish not being clean. A douchebag like Zack does deserve to be beaten properly by Hechicero, but, then again, with how much of a dick he’s been, maybe a little rope holding on the loss is warranted. My mixed feelings aside, it’s obvious that, with New Japan’s plans for ZSJ later down the line, and the clear need for Hechicero to win this one, this was a political compromise, and one that I don’t think takes too much away. At the end of the day, Hechicero isn’t exactly the greatest human being of all time either, and he’s far from above a little shenanigans. This match is more about the journey than the destination regardless, a show of Zack Sabre Jr. at his best, and Hechicero at his most heroic. The best display of a foreign invader being taught a lesson all year.

30. Chris Sabin vs Alex Shelley (Prestige Combat Clash PDX) (12/07)

The Guns fucking rule. This is a statement that has been true for well over a decade and a half now, but it’s also specifically true of their 2024, largely thanks to a great tag title reign in DPW, before they made the move to the WWE in an effort to save their disaster area tag division. All that being said, naturally, the Guns’ best match of the year wasn’t a tag match at all, but a singles match pitting them against each other.

Usually, calling a match ‘not heated’ would be an insult, but here, it’s very intentionally not. This is a match between friends, with not even the slightest hint that it’s going to lead to any sort of friction of breakup of any kind. I adore how they work a match between close friends as it realistically would be: an honest fight for technical superiority, based on intricate and logical counters to what one another tries, with no real big impact moves that would risk hurting one another. It’s not that they’re holding back, more that you can imagine, in the back, they’ve agreed to find out who is technically superior. The answer to that, ultimately, is both, because god this is good fucking shit.

This is one of those matches where I come out of it having seen several holds and trips into holds that I have simply never seen before. Sabin in particular is fucking phenomenal here, trapping Shelley in what is technically a figure four, but also traps his arm in the middle while he uses his hands to apply a half strangle hold while he’s still tied up. Like, how the fuck do you come up with that shit!? As fun as the complicated stuff is, sometimes he’ll just chicken-wing both arms and grind Shelley into the mat, and that’s gorgeous in a whole other, more violent way. Alex Shelley, being Alex Shelley, also fucking owns in this one. My highlight of his work here is when he counters a skull end by wrapping his legs around Sabin’s, dragging them down to crush his ankles. It’s so smart, and, crucially for a wrestling counter, makes absolute sense. Even in a sport where most the holds likely wouldn’t do that much damage, the greats are those who find ways of making them look painful, and making it look like their escapes would actually, honest to god work rather than going overly flashy.

This match is another where it lends better to being seen than described, but, at its heart, this, more than anything else, just makes sense. The Motor City Machine Guns figured out how to wrestle each other in a way that it feels like their characters should – they like each other too much to truly want to hurt each other, and what we get as a result is the kind of technical showcase that only two guys who know each other inside and out can give.

29. KONOSUKE TAKESHITA vs Yuya Uemura (NJPW G1 Climax 34) (25/07)

I’m not really sure why, but I did actually watch the entire G1 Climax this year. Maybe it was out of a sense of loyalty or obligation, but, as much as New Japan was not my bag for much of this year, it wasn’t anything close to a waste of time. The home of a massive amount of my favourite matches of the year as was the case in the past? No. But the matches that were good deserve love, and, usefully enough, most of the matches that were good were had by KONOSUKE TAKESHITA and Yuya Uemura, so it just makes sense that they would do something wonderful together.

KONOSUKE TAKESHITA is excellent at showing exactly how good he is, but this is a match all about Yuya Uemura proving that the expectations on him as a young lion were justified. For context, Uemura didn’t enter the G1 feeling like a big deal. His return from an unsurprisingly bad excursion from eternal failpromotion TNA was a bit of a damp squib, his World Tag League run with Taichi felt cursed by a lack of chemistry and confidence on his part, and while I did like most of his matches with Yota Tsuji and Great O-Khan, they weren’t exactly setting the world alite. It was this match that brought all of the ‘Yuya should be the face of the company’ heads back, that showed us that guy was still there, and, hopefully, he’ll never be disappearing in a Joe Hendry-shaped void ever again.

Describing what makes this match awesome is really just describing what Yuya Uemura is great at, because this match is so thoroughly built around putting him on a pedestal. On offence, Yuya Uemura is relentless. Once he finds TAKESHITA’s arm, he simply will not be letting go of it. He’s similar to Ryohei Oiwa in that way, but where Oiwa uses holds to grind away on opponents for as long as he can, fitting the heel mould far more, Uemura’s holds are designed to impress and wow the audience, showing off his skill while delivering smart and targeted offence. Uemura is cheered for a great many reasons, but, to start out this match, he’s being cheered by simply being a great wrestler, proving himself to be better in that regard than TAKESHITA, turning an Irish Whip attempt into a hip toss, rolling through with TAKESHITA to maintain a wristlock, and wrestling his way out of a headlock rather than relying on power, even using a dropdown to, yes, actually trip an opponent! Nobody does that anymore! His style is a serious blast from the past, giving the audience something to cheer about by letting the face get stuff over on the heels through sheer wrestling ability.

We then move on to Uemura’s great strength, and another gift that this match keeps on giving: his selling. Fuck, man, he’s as close to perfect as a babyface seller as it gets. For one thing, he bumps big – taking a TAKESHITA tope as if it’s a fucking clothesline and just folding from it – but that’s only a minor part of his game. I adore that he’s not just selling moves, he’s selling their buildup. When TAKESHITA winds up for a knee in the corner, he grits his teeth and closes his eyes to get through them. When he’s taking moves, fuck, man. He makes the audience cry for him, beg for him to fight back. When he takes a superplex and reaches out to the crowd, it’s an implicit call to action, and one that the audience takes to instantly. This is ace shit, like a less cartoonish Hogan approach to selling, where the entire point is to make the crowd feel like they are in the match, making the comeback happen. Taking more inspiration from Ricky Steamboat, he’s never fully out of the match, always throwing shit, no matter how futile, as TAKESHITA tears him apart through much of this match.

And, god, TAKESHITA is brilliant here. The match revolves around Uemura, but TAKESHITA is the base to make it work, delivering a shockingly effective and mean heel performance to make Uemura feel like an absolute world beater. Everything that he does looks killer, as is normal for TAKESHITA, but it’s the little things that make his performance wonderful. The way he’s always bringing attention back to the fact that, as much as he’s got control, Uemura still did a number on his arm. The mean smirk he gives before trying to throw him into the ring post. The way he forces Uemura to work for every little thing he gets, denying him a bulldog and making him struggle desperately to get a backdrop instead. Wrestling TAKESHITA is hard fucking work, and it should be hard fucking work. Even the way Uemura gets back into the match, by dodging a big forearm which ends up crashing into the ring post instead, looks like HELL to take, and is a perfect punishment for how mean and cruel TAKESHITA has been all match. And the sound, god the sound. Audio is underrated in wrestling, and just hearing the thwack of metal against bone here is as beautiful as it is horrifying.

This all builds up to maybe the best use of the best finisher in wrestling today. The deadbolt suplex is fucking wonderful, used to maximise the struggle, the battle of getting a match winning move. It’s never hit easily, Uemura has to work for it, build up the drama, and, power his way to landing it. Uemura traps the arms in the right position with a backslide, the crowd popping huge when they realise, but it’s not over yet. TAKESHITA throws headbutt after headbutt to try to loosen the grip, but Uemura rushes him into the corner, using good old fashioned momentum to get him over. Even better, TAKESHITA doesn’t sell it as a knockout, squirming and writhing to try to escape the pin. The deadbolt isn’t a knockout and shouldn’t be sold as such, so the way TAKESHITA takes it is just perfect, and makes it feel like a real struggle from beginning to end.

This match, like Uemura, is extremely traditionalist. It’s a simple babyface vs heel structure built around a bully trying to dominate physically somebody with technical superiority to him. The little things are maximised and details are remembered, all coming together to make this an incredibly rewarding match.

28. Giulia & Utami Hayashishita vs Sareee & Bozilla (MARIGOLD Fields Forever) (20/05)

It really felt as if Marigold was going to be something fun and exciting for a moment back there. That moment was exactly one show – their debut show – and from then on they were only worth checking out for, like, three wrestlers, but that debut show was so much fun. The natural comparison point was STARDOM and MARIGOLD felt like it was trying to answer everything that drove me insane about that promotion. It had counters to the generic wrestling style, the total lack of atmosphere, the eerily silent crowds, through a mixture of new names and high-quality unaligned stars, a dedication to feeling big (they used streamers!!!), and an audience who loved everything they saw and let you know.

Most importantly of all, though, it had this main event, which was an absolute party of a match. More than anything else, this just felt big, largely off the back of the clamour for Sareee vs Giulia. That’s not exactly my dream pairing for Sareee, but it was quite obviously the biggest matchup MARIGOLD could offer, so it was wise to start with the two facing off, to guarantee the crowd would be with them every step of the way. Giulia is ultimately the least important element to this match’s success, but it’s worth noting that she breaks her wrist very early on, and yet she insists on continuing to wrestle, because she’s hard as fuck and that is naturally sick as hell.

Realistically, though, this match is all about Bozilla. This was the first match that pretty much anybody had ever seen of her, she was main eventing a new company’s first ever show, she had to deliver, and, fuck, she was just so awesome. Watching her simply decide against being double Irish whipped by Utami and Giulia before launching them both off the ropes and lariating their heads off, that’s art man. She isn’t the uber-confident smug asshole that she’d become, but it’s clearly in there, and the more she does, the more comfortable she looks in her role. The fans just take to her instantly, as they should, because she’s clearly the most incredible human being to have ever lived.

It's probably nerd shit to call the best part of a match its structuring, but, fuck it, here it really is. The way that they build Bozilla slowly, showing off everything she can do in order of how impressive it looks up until she’s throwing a fucked up brutal moonsault (/pos) is brilliant and natural. It never looks as if they’re inorganically letting her do her coolest and craziest moves, just like Bozilla is deciding, in the moment, that she will murder somebody today. Utami in particular is brilliant here, bumping her heart out so much that she proceeded to decide to never, ever try again afterwards, which honestly is GOAT shit.

Watching this is just a fucking great time from beginning to end. For a near 30 minute match it feels like a breeze, it was a total success in introducing Bozilla, and it made the MARIGOLD main event scene look fantastic…before they failed to actually build on the momentum by simply deciding not to run with Bozilla in main events for the next several months. Truly a baffling company, but for one glorious night, they were on top of the world.

27. Hechicero vs Atlantis Jr. (NJPW/CMLL Fantastica Mania) (19/02)

Fantastica Mania has long been New Japan’s real, secret best tour of the year. You can have your G1s or your BOSJs all you want, they are severely missing out on CMLL guys who are openly and obviously better than the Nooj’s entire roster. It’s fairly rare for a Fantastica Mania match to reach the level of complexity afforded to in-house CMLL at its best, but that’s not  really the point. The idea of the tour is to show off what top CMLL names are capable of to an audience that rarely get to see them, and my god this match does a bloody brilliant job of making you want to watch a whole lot of Hechicero singles matches.

When I first watched this match, I ended up making a thread of gifs on good old X, basically because there were so many things in this match that Hechicero does that I instantly became obsessed with and I wanted to show them off. Stuff like Hechicero dropkicking Atlantis’ knee as he’s running at him while he’s on the apron to send him flying to the floor, or the insane way he gets into a sunset flip pin, or his signature insanely awesome stooge heel bump of going in for a dropkick, only to hit the ropes and end up flipping flat on his face, or holding him in an armbar while just scraping his boot across Atlantis’ face like a fucking asshole. I’m not usually one to focus specifically on awesome spots over structure, but Hechicero is just so slick and cool here that it’s really hard not to, and it’s awesome to hear that Korakuen crowd buy into him as he gleefully tortures Atlantis’ leg in crazy llave fashion.

Poor, poor Atlantis Jr. For the crime of being a little less flip-centric than most of his CMLL main event peers, and also for being a very obvious nepo baby, he gets a hell of a lot of shit from Arena Mexico crowds. Okay, yes, he is a nepo, but he’s one of the good ones! Atlantis Jr. is brilliant at getting the best out of his opponents, spotlighting them and taking all of their shit before launching into well-timed and spirited comebacks. In a world of Mascara Doradas and Neons, you need an Atlantis Jr. to ground things and avoid matches losing their story and structure. Here, as much as this match is about showing Hechicero off, it wouldn’t be possible without his great leg-selling job, and willingness to adapt to even small changing circumstances. As impressive as everything his opponent does is in this match, just as brilliant is Atlantis noticing that his tights had been accidentally torn during the attack on his leg, showing it off to the camera to put over the damage Hechicero has done, and, when it comes time for him to try using that leg again, he rips away his tights so that there’s less pressure on his leg! This is the kind of shit you’d expect from a Terry Funk, something awesome, sensible and unique but lost to time, and Atlantis Jr. still makes a point of doing it. Those are the kinds of instincts that deserve to be celebrated.

So enjoy Hechicero in this match. He’s fucking fantastic, and the match is supposed to be all about him through its structuring alone. Still, you should spare a thought for Atlantis Jr., his selfless showcasing of his opponent, his brilliant sense of when to fight back, and his willingness to dig into what worked in the past to boost his own performance in the present. The Arena Mexico boo boys aren’t ready for him, but he’s one of CMLL’s best.

26. AAAW Tag Team Championships: Mio Momono & Yurika Oka vs Chihiro Hashimoto & Yuu(c) (Marvelous) (27/10)

The second Bob Bob Momo Banana vs Team 200kg match on this list (and, rest assured, not the last), this is the last match to date between the two best tag teams of 2024, and potentially – with Yuu retiring at the end of 2025 – their last match ever, but if that ends up being the case, good god did they ever go out with a bang. Of all of their matches, this one feels the biggest, aided by titles on the line and a main event spot, but also by the fact that, by this point, people just knew that their matches were must-watch.

Considering the dynamics of these two teams, with one being made up of giant fuckers and the other by tiny speedy women, it might strike as surprising that this is the first match that Team 200kg can really be considered largely dominant over. From the beginning, they’re completely on top, just throwing and tackling BBMB around in all of their meatheaded glory, which obviously makes BBMB’s already monumental task feel even more impossible, the mountain they have to climb feels even bigger. This is one of their best matches to demonstrate the brilliant dynamics the teams have with one another: the sheer physical prowess of 200kg vs BBMB’s speed, planning, and need to constantly work together just to get anything over on their enemies. Yurika can’t even get something as small as a crucifix pin attempt on Yuu without Mio lending a hand, and that makes everything feel like even more of a struggle.

I’ve always been a fan of Yuu’s, particularly in 200kg matches, as a more bit-centric, playful contrast to Big Hash’s seriousness, but also as a total brick wall of a wrestler who BBMB just never seem to have a plan for. They’ve always got something in mind for Hash, some way of getting offence on her, but Yuu just steamrolls them. I say all of that because I honestly think this was her best performance to date. She doesn’t lose the air that she’s having fun whenever she’s in the ring, but watching her just demolish Mio in particular makes that joy take on a more sinister turn. I’m far from the biggest fan of strike exchanges, but Mio and Yuu do several of them here, and they’re all perfect, because they don’t ever make it seem like the far smaller, weaker woman ever has a chance. Yuu just destroys her, but it still puts over Momono because, for all the punishment she takes, she simply will not stay down, throwing everything at the wall, up to and including throwing a chaotic series of headbutts to finally get something over her. Hashimoto tends to get the majority of the credit for Team 200kg’s best matches, and that’s usually rightly so, but Yuu is awesome here, giving just enough while smothering and overwhelming a team that have constantly had no answer specifically to her.

That, of course, is what makes the fact that, when the finally do beat Team 200kg, it’s by pinning Yuu. For all the control they’ve held over Hashimoto, targeting limbs and using fast, smart double teams to maintain control, Yuu has been too much for them, up until here, where it’s a sheer refusal to die that finally proves to be the solution to her. Mio takes an ungodly beating out there, and enhances it with her selling, knowing when to fight back in vain, and when to just be completely out of it after getting physically crushed by splashes, sentons and powerbombs. There’s about a minute of this match where Mio just has nothing left, and watching Yurika’s increasingly desperate attempts to buy her time becomes an incredibly compelling story, up until Mio finally manages to turn a powerbomb into her signature pinning combination to barely get the three over Yuu. It’s a wonderfully emotional climax to the best feud of the year, a reward to anybody who’s watched the rest of their 2024 classics, and a truly euphoric happy ending, where, after it felt impossible for so long, the best tag team in the world overcomes all odds to win by the skin of their teeth. Another absolute triumph by two teams who can be relied on to deliver every time.

25. Bryan Danielson, Jon Moxley, Claudio Castagnoli & Matt Sydal vs Ultimo Guerrero, Blue Panther, Volador Jr. & Mistico (CMLL Homenaje A Dos Leyendas) (29/03)

An absolute party of a match. From the incredible atmosphere generated by an Arena Mexico crowd at its absolute best, entirely on the side of the luchadores against the invading Blackpool Combat Club, to the awe of seeing one of wrestling’s very few remaining dream matches in Danielson vs Panther actually coming true before our eyes, to the near-perfect structuring of pure heels roughly pummelling the faces until their dramatic, impressive and wonderfully timed comebacks, this was a pure a celebration of professional wrestling, of lucha libre, as I saw throughout 2024.

I may not have watched every Blackpool Combat Club match ever, but I would say with some confidence that this is their best ever performance. They slot shockingly well into the CMLL main event formula (although they are helped by that very formula being perhaps the best in wrestling today), while bringing something different to the usual rogues’ gallery of rudos CMLL has to offer. While I think CMLL is full of highly effective rudos, I wouldn’t say they have any capable of being quite as stiff as the BCC. Mox in particular stands out, just throwing hands and elbows at anybody he sees, while the whole faction taunt and fuck with that loud ass crowd to make the boos even more aggressive than their wrestling. Each of the BCC team brought their own totally different dynamic as well, with Mox being vicious and stiff, Castagnoli in pure power guy mode, Sydal sneaking in and out with high flying moves on his coward shit, and Danielson being as smug an asshole as he could, targeting his idol while he was trapped just to be a dick about it.

Of course, the most attention-grabbing pairing in this match was Danielson and Panther, a match that would’ve seemed flat out impossible until a couple of years ago. At this point, we didn’t know that we’d be getting a singles match out of the two, so, with that in mind, it was incredibly bold of them to approach their interactions the way they did. A true showdown of two of the best technical wrestlers in history would have to wait, this was about Danielson being as big a dick as he could, ducking and dodging Panther, only attacking from behind or when he had the numbers advantage, making the story of the match revolve around Panther finally getting his hands on that arrogant little bastard. Danielson, despite being one of the most popular wrestlers of the century, remains perhaps an even better heel than he is a face, turning his cowardice and smugness up to eleven to make it all the more satisfying once Panther puts a beating on him.

And yet, somehow, the best performance of the night went to Ultimo Guerrero. Despite spending the majority of his year, and career, as a bullying rudo, he takes the heat segment in this match like his fucking life depended on it. He gets the shit kicked out of him for ages and with his brief fightbacks and desperate struggle to escape, garners as much sympathy as possible while allowing himself to be demolished. I honestly came out of this match wanting a Guerrero/Mox singles match as much as I wanted a Panther/Danielson one, with Guerrero taking everything Mox dished out and giving it back as hard as he could.

Just a fucking awesome match, perhaps the straight up most fun wrestling has been all year. A crowd living and dying on their guys winning, and those guys feeding off of the energy while the villains give a futile fight against the tide of Mexico’s love for their own. By the time Mistico has transformed Danielson’s yes chants into si’s, the invaders are already doomed. Wrestling lives in Arena Mexico.

24. AAAW Championship/OZ Academy Openweight Championship: Mio Momono vs Mayumi Ozaki(c) (OZ Academy Big Battle Bonus) (28/04)

From a celebration of pro wrestling to a funeral where joy goes to die, and somehow I mean that in a good way! It feels nowadays like a large portion of wrestling’s audience will react as if something bad happening to their favourite wrestlers is bad booking. We’re in a new era of kayfabe, where people are still extremely mad about heels winning, they’ll just try to make it an issue of booking to avoid looking like marks, which instead makes them look more like marks.

All that being said, how fucking dare that horrible monster Mayumi Ozaki rob Mio Momono here, she and those horrible fuckers she runs with should go directly to hell for their crimes.

The simplest stories in wrestling tend to be the best. Having the purest and best babyface in the business fighting through absolute hell to get some, any revenge on maybe its most evil heel is as perfect a dynamic as you’re ever going to get. I fully buy into Mio charging through the metaphorical brick wall of Mayumi’s army, featuring all time great heel manager Police, while there’s no doubt in my mind that the already gleefully sadistic Ozaki would take extra special joy torturing somebody so inherently lovable. The crowd starts out on Ozaki’s side (this is literally her promotion after all), but it's both wrestlers’ hard work that changes that, with Mio’s heartbreaking selling and Ozaki’s pure cruelty fixing the audience dynamic and fast, a credit to how perfect they are in their roles.

Ozaki matches are at their absolute best when they feel like complete chaos, like nothing was called for her matches besides ‘we’re gonna raise some hell and I will kill you’. That effect is achieved almost immediately here, with things breaking down in a way that feels so rough and so real. There’s nothing clean or polished about Mio and Mayumi clawing at each other, grabbing hair, throwing desperate slaps, until Ozaki has full control. It feels like Mio is being dragged into her world and it isn’t working for her. Most of this match is dominated by Ozaki, and she is just AWFUL here. The way she gets one single whiff of Mio’s blood after a chairshot to the head and is instantly smashing her in the open wound with a chain…that’s what it's all about. Mio, as usual, is perfect when taking the mother of all beatings, trying desperately to fight back through the pain only to get overwhelmed, not due to a lack of skill but by the fact that Mayumi feels like she has like 30 or 40 guys out there while Momono only has herself.

All of the pain, humiliation and punishment Mio goes through builds up to her finally snapping, and once that comes, it’s so, so satisfying. She’s taken this evil, cheating beatdown and she’s just fucking had enough, so she simply tackles Ozaki to the floor and starts launching into headbutts and forearms with 100% of her passion and her force. Mio never holds back, it’s part of what makes her so great, but it feels like she’s extra violent here, and that overexertion ends up leading her directly into a series of backhands with a chain wrapped around Ozaki’s fist. The way she sells it, trying to hang on but getting knocked all over the place, less and less able to take the beating she’s getting, makes what could’ve been a tad excessive feel like a brave last stand.

 This match, by design, is completely unfair, unjust and wrong. It’s painful to watch, it makes you crave Mio finally getting revenge on Ozaki, of seeing Mayumi fail, and that, my friends, is what pro wrestling is supposed to be.

23. AEW TBS Championship: Mercedes Moné vs Willow Nightingale(c) (AEW Double or Nothing) (26/05)

After just over a year of work, Mercedes Moné is already pretty comfortably the best female wrestler in AEW’s short history. Whether that says more about her extremely high quality or the failings of the promotion’s women’s division is up to you, but she already has a catalogue to be proud of. For my money, though, her best AEW match was her first, and it could credibly compete with the highest level work of her career.

Firstly, I really respect that they resist the urge to make this match a pure Mercedes Moné showcase, with her opponent being little more than a warm body to lose to her after she does her thing. It would’ve been entirely understandable had they gone that route, but it would’ve been a damn shame for that warm body to have been Willow, one of the most popular wrestlers on the roster. Instead, they instantly establish that Mercedes is a vindictive, bitter heel behind her air of glamour, and Willow is presented as more than an equal. Instead of being a generic ‘wow Mercedes Moné is in AEW!!!’ match, it’s a clever building on the events of their previous match in NJPW Strong, where Moné badly injured her leg. The match stands alone just fine, but with the context of that match, Mercedes’ desperate desire to inflict intentionally on Willow the injury that she endured accidentally comes across as so much crueller and more effective.

Obviously the fact that this match’s entire story revolves around a leg injury and an attempt at inflicting another means that it’s time for another discussion of limb-targeting. I’ve spoken about leg-selling plenty already, and I will do so again in this segment, but, to start, I think it’s important to discuss the difference between Mercedes’ approach to leg attacks and Willow’s. Mercedes’ attacks are vicious, often sudden, occasionally grinding and mean. There’s nothing flashy or cool, and they regularly look cowardly, like when she uses the ropes to trap Willow’s leg before bringing her full weight down onto it. Willow doesn’t go after Mercedes’ leg, no matter how obvious a target it might be, until after Mercedes has gone after hers, because she’s a goddamn babyface and babyfaces shouldn’t be the one escalating an attempt at aggravating an injury. All of her attacks on the leg are designed to pop the crowd just as much as they hurt Mercedes, showing skill and power rather than just pure maliciousness. Where Willow will do a sick spinning cloverleaf, Mercedes will counter by simply jumping on her foot as hard as she can.

On the selling side, Willow in particular is brilliant. It’s the little things that she throws in that really makes it – not being able to hit her Doctor Bomb because her leg won’t support her, hitting a fisherman suplex but stretching her leg out on the pin because she couldn’t use it to base herself, giving Mercedes space to kick out, and the way she constantly fights back, always throwing something, no matter how ineffective, so the crowd knows she’s not out of it – and so that they boo even harder when Mercedes cheaply maintains control by kicking the shit out of her leg. Mercedes’ selling is less about the offense she takes, and more about her response to the fact that, for a long time, it seems like she just can’t beat Willow. She’s SO petty and childish, lashing out when Willow survives her assault on her leg, hitting these petty, flailing, pathetic kicks just to show how much of an asshole she is, but also to show that she’s gotten to by Willow’s resilience. People like to paint Mercedes as a selfish wrestler – mainly because she’s a star and that fact drives many weirdos online into a state of derangement – but she puts over Willow HUGE in defeat here, makes it feel like she was throwing everything at her and ultimately couldn’t beat her without a referee distraction. When she eventually loses the TBS belt, it really should be to Willow.

…Hopefully by then she will have stopped doing the Monémaker, but besides that, this match is so much more complex and intelligent than it actually needed to be, a treat for the leg freaks everywhere, established Mercedes as still the best and made Willow a far bigger star than she was walking in. A fantastic effort all around.

22. Sendai Girls Tag Team Championships: Mio Momono & Yurika Oka vs Chihiro Hashimoto & Yuu(c) (Sendai Girls) (11/02)

The first match in the best rivalry of the year, and, for me, the best of the bunch. This was my introduction to both teams (I knew Mio, big Hash and Yuu as individuals, but not their units), and it really was a perfect first impression, the ideal form of their particular styles clashing to make for one of the best tag matches of the year.

For my money, this was both teams working at their absolute best. Team 200kg are brilliant at towing the line between being the heels of the match without outright becoming villainous. There’s a playfulness about them that prevents you from hating them, even if you definitely want them to lose to the best babyface team on the planet. Their love of running into each other and roaring because they’re simply too powerful to contain all of their energy in even their mighty bodies is as charming as ever, but they make sure to throw in just enough mean-spirited shit – walking over their opponents, letting them bounce harmlessly off of them to rip the satisfaction of well-executed and successful tag offence away from the crowd – to ensure that the BBMB comebacks consistently hit the right notes, feeling satisfying and earned for them, and deserved for their opponents.

As for BBMB themselves, man, this is a tour de force for them, probably their best performance ever. They remind me of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Express in that it feels like everything they do is as a unit. They set each others’ offense off from the apron or the ring, target limbs in unison with a shared vision and plan of how to win, create distractions for one another. A lot of this stuff is almost just seen as a heel trait, like smart and effective tag work makes you a bad guy now, but BBMB recontextualise it to be not only great babyface work, showing the value of teamwork and friendship, but also genuinely quite touching. Their unity is inspiring and lovable, and here it’s at its best. Mio in particular is an absolute ball of energy in tags, constantly on the move, doing something whether she’s the legal competitor or not. Nobody in the game is active on the apron like she is nowadays, constantly shouting encouragement or trying to get the crowd behind Yurika. Probably her best moment as a non-legal competitor in the match is when she interrupts the Team 200kg double splash, letting Yuu fall while locking Hash in a choke, saving her partner from certain doom in the process without doing so having to be a more common ‘get in the ring and wrestle as if you’re legal’ spot. It’s smart and tenacious, and leads to her body-scissoring Hash into swantoning her own partner, which is honestly just sick as hell.

Yet, perhaps the best stretch of the entire match is its ending, and that ending is all about Yurika Oka. Yurika is not as good as Mio, not yet, but this was her career best performance to date, and that gap keeps closing more and more as the year goes on. The way she powers Hashimoto up and over using suplexes that never look too clean, always looking like they take a ton of effort and struggle, gets the crowd on their feet, and makes them audibly groan when they’re not quite enough to get the job done. The finish itself is deflating in the best possible way, seeing the usually dominant and powerful Chihiro Hashimoto get a desperation powerslam and basically have to shoot-style pin Yurika to keep her down. It’s not cheap or lucky – she did genuinely outwrestle her – but it feels like progression for Yurika, because it’s not like she was knocked out, Hash had to do something desperate to win, building up her own (thus far unsuccessful) journey of trying to pin her.

This whole rivalry deserves your full attention. Even the one match they had this year that didn’t make the top 100 was dangerously close to doing so. Regardless, I think they peaked at the beginning, with an immovable Team 200kg faltering just the right amount, and the best tag team in the world giving their peak performance. Here’s hoping for one more round.

21. Demus vs Mad Dog Connelly (ACTION DEAN~!!!) (04/04)

“This isn’t really pro wrestling.”

That’s what commentary say in the midst of Demus vs Mad Dog Connelly, and, in a way, they’re right. You will not see a traditional wrestling move in this match. No holds, suplexes, none of that. It’s live punches flying, it’s weapons cracking against skulls, it’s a body being flung into and onto fans. It’s steal on flesh, oh god, over and over again, ripping skin as one man attempts to kill another.

It is perhaps the single most fun to watch match of 2024.

In a kayfabe sense, this might not be wrestling, it might just be a horrific, brainless, thoughtless beatdown from Mad Dog Connelly, the man most capable of dishing out horrific, brainless, thoughtless beatdowns in the entire industry today, but, in reality, nothing is more of what wrestling should be than this ten minutes of ultraviolence. There’s nothing showy about it, nothing performative at all. You get the feeling that Mad Dog and Demus would be doing exactly this if the fans weren’t there at all, and they’re happy to throw each other into them as if they aren’t. Hell, Mad Dog throws a bin at Demus – just an entire bin – and it bounces off and hits a fan, because, hey, innocent people are casualties of wars as brutal as this one.

It cannot be stressed enough that Mad Dog fucking kills Demus unlike anybody in wrestling has been killed in years. The closest comparison point is what Joe does to Necro, but even that, in as startlingly brutal and fucking incredible as it is, is perhaps more of a showman-like performance than what Mad Dog does. The way he drags him to the ground by his shirt and just throws punches at his head, there’s no cooperation here, and, even in a professional wrestling setting where you can safely say that everybody knows what they’re getting into, as I watched that, I knew that I would end up in fight or flight mode anyway. There simply isn’t any way to view Mad Dog hanging Demus by a chain over his shoulder as anything but sick and disgusting, and I mean that with absolute love. In the midst of it, Demus attempts a small package, and that really sums this whole thing up. Demus, DEMUS, one of the single most insane people in wrestling, cannot take anymore and is doing whatever he can to get the fuck out of here. That’s the level of monstrous violence we’re talking about.

So it isn’t wrestling, not in the performative way. But, really, this is what wrestling should be. A nasty, brutish struggle, the Hobbsian Leviathan of fights. It feels fucking real because you come out of it believing that the guys involved thought it was real too. That’s what pro wrestling’s goal should be, to completely suspend disbelief and show you something that you buy, fully, and I buy Connelly vs Demus without hesitation.

20. KONOSUKE TAKESHITA vs Hirooki Goto (NJPW G1 Climax 34) (04/08)

The best New Japan match of the year probably wasn’t even on the cards when 2024 started. In a year where basically of the guys Goto’s age or older were forcefully removed from the G1 in favour of younger, less tenured but regularly less interesting or talented kids, Goto got into the G1 basically by accident. In a world where Finlay doesn’t get injured, necessitating a surprise Goto run to the New Japan Cup final, he likely would’ve been left in the role that had been set for him for years now: tag specialist, slowly falling down the card as his Bishamon team’s role becomes putting over younger (worse) teams, essentially training his replacements.

Instead, fate would position him as the representative of the old guard, the man who put the legacy of his generation on his back and stubbornly, aggressively refused to die. He forced the young punks up to his level, and, regularly, they couldn’t match him. The audience became captivated by Goto’s last stand, and he became the hero of the block. For me, somebody who is still full of love for the men Goto is representing, it was easy to latch onto his quest to defeat father time. Against TAKESHITA, pretty comfortably the best of the next generation, he demonstrated the best that New Japan could be in 2024.

At his best in this tournament, TAKESHITA feels like an invincible force for much of his matches, and he makes sure that you know it. The way he easily shoves Goto into the ropes right at the beginning of the match, looking like he’s not even trying, establishes instantly what he is: stronger than everybody, faster than everybody, better than everybody. TAKESHITA escalates this match really quickly, dropping Goto with a DDT on the ramp and another on the apron, with this air of casual disrespect. It feels like he’s trying to end this match fast, not because  he views Goto as a threat, but because he views Goto, perhaps not unfairly, as a bottler who isn’t worth his time. Goto always fails at the highest level, at this point it was kind of his whole deal. TAKESHITA shows a degree of respect to the likes of Tsuji, Finlay, even Uemura, but not Goto, because, in his eyes, Goto is a washed up failure. When that throws that monster forearm directly into his skull, it feels like him telling Goto to just pack it the fuck in and go home.

Of course, it’s Goto flatly refusing to do so that that serves as the emotional heart and soul of this match. TAKESHITA throws everything at him, getting increasingly annoyed by his inability to win, but Goto’s roars of defiance and desperate struggles back up to his feet. Sure, a lot of this stuff can fall under strong style trope list-checking under a lesser wrestler, but Goto feels like he earns it, like his improbable survival of a beating is designed not to do what you’re meant to do in New Japan matches, but to display the real, actual heart of a man fighting the odds just to be in the tournament at all. When he finally turns the match around with an ungodly fucking clothesline (that TAKESHITA takes a wonderfully dramatic bump off of), and Milano roars his name on commentary, god, it feels so fucking good. He’s doing it! He’s actually doing it!

All of this leads up to maybe the single best finish of the year. It’d be so easy for a samurai-style two guys running head on into each other and only one surviving spot to look corny, but they NAIL it. Goto and Takeshita go in for a headbutt and a forearm at the same time, and it’s timed so well that you don’t know which took the damage until they change the camera shot to an over-the-shoulder from Goto’s perspective, where Takeshita drops out of frame. It’s beautiful shit, and feels so fucking good, seeing an unbreakable wrestler finally break at the hands of the perfect man to do it. This match, perhaps above all others, established what Goto could still do, how emotionally impacting his journey was, and, ultimately, got him to the very top. This match made the impossible dream come true, and, for that, it deserves all the credit in the world.

19. Daniel Makabe vs Timothy Thatcher (ACTION DEAN~!!!) (04/04)

Demus vs Mad Dog Connelly got the most attention and love of any match on the DEAN~!!! card, and obviously I’m okay with that – for one thing, it was comfortably the most unique match on the card, and for another, it fucking kicked absolute shedloads of ass – but, for my tastes, the show peaked with its main event. There is no genre of wrestling I enjoy more than highly technical but incredibly rough grappling that just looks fucking miserable to be the victim of, and there are very few wrestlers of that style that I would rank above Daniel Makabe and Timothy Thatcher.

The best praise that I could give to these guys is that I would fucking hate to be in a wrestling match with either of them. There are no breaks, everything is designed to cause you pain, discomfort, or both, and if you let up your guard for even half a second they’ll just instantly win with the most horrific hold you’ve ever seen. Whether it’s Thatcher just rubbing his forearm all over Makabe’s face, Makabe punching Thatcher in the small of his back and grinding his knuckle in while holding him in a headscissors, or just the general fact that neither guy gives the other any time to breathe at all, I almost felt claustrophobic on both of their behalf. They’re desperate to outwrestle one another and never give an inch of room to let the other guy try anything. I honestly love it.

As much as this match would be fantastic if it was just two guys doing grizzly nasty genius-level grappling – and this match is absolutely full of counters, attempts at counters and counters for counters that will just blow your mind – its structure is what sets everything in motion. Makabe manages to hurt Thatcher’s leg really early on, and that injury dictates every decision both guys make from then on. Thatcher is constantly on the backfoot, to the point that, even when he does take control, Makabe is literally always moving, adapting and trying escape attempts, usually targeting his leg. Makabe is too smart to forget the damage he’s done, and, for Thatcher, it works as the incentive for him to be the one to escalate the match’s brutality, throwing the first standing strikes of the match because he needs to go further thanks to the damage he’s taken.

But, god, the grappling in this match is just too good for words. Be it Makabe escaping a bow-and-arrow using a wristlock, Thatcher countering a counter to his belly-to-belly with an armbar, or the more simple, brutish and cruel countering of a Thatcher keylock by just punching him in his injured knee, this shit is just so clever. These things are so often removed from wrestling in favour of the more flashy, athletic style of the modern day, but this stuff impacts me and sticks with me so much more for the sense it makes, the real feeling of a human game of chess it inspires. Of course, it’s never just the holds that make a great match, but the emotion behind it. Both Makabe and Thatcher are great at facial expressions in wrestling but in different ways. Makabe is so expressive and emotive – he wears the pain and exhaustion of such a gruelling encounter in his winces pants for air and visible panic, while Thatcher, with nothing in my heart but love, looks like a fucking serial killer, with absolute madness behind his eyes, only faltering when he’s truly in danger. The look of terror on his face when Makabe catches him in a heel hook is one of the match’s highlights because, with a simple change of expression, it transforms from a wear-down hold into a genuine potential match ender. Thatcher wouldn’t be that afraid if he couldn’t lose then and there!

Makabe is basically the world’s foremost specialist at finding super unique, wonderful ways to set up the finishes to his match, and this has one of his best. Escaping an armbar by pressing his head down as hard as he can on Thatcher’s injured leg? Just brilliant, so clever. The kind of finish that rewards you for paying attention to the story of the match, and, in a match of the improvisers, feels wonderfully off the cuff. He has no other way of getting out, so he just drives his head down and prays that it’ll be enough, setting up the Makabe Lock Pi and the win. This one is ugly, in an entirely different, but no less compelling, way to the Demus/Connelly match that proceeds it. The more matches that feel as technically excellent but struggle-filled and sloppy as this, the better…but thank god that I don’t have to be in there. Seriously, I don’t want Thatcher and his forearms anywhere near my face.

18. KO-D Openweight Championship: HARASHIMA vs Shinya Aoki(c) (DDT God Bless DDT) (20/10)

Nobody on Earth was operating at the level Shinya Aoki reached between the months of April and October. This is his first appearance in this top 100, but it will very much not be his last. If god invented a pro wrestler specifically for me, it’d be him, with his MMA-style grappling, constant focus on tiny details, and willingness to just obliterate lesser wrestlers to himself. Against HARASHIMA, DDT’s ace, he’s happy to be at his absolute cruellest to a man more than capable of getting as much sympathy out of the mess he’s gotten himself into as possible.

HARASHIMA, realistically, actually does have the tools to combat Aoki. He isn’t as gung-ho as younger wrestlers had been with Aoki in the past, visibly coming across as trepidatious from the beginning of the match, going into their initial meeting on the defensive, not rushing his man. His llave style holds give him something to work with, something Aoki isn’t used to dealing with, but he’s never treated as an equal in terms of grappling, constantly getting muscled around by Aoki. One of his best traits is the way he's constantly looking for the win, in contrast to most wrestlers, who don’t really seem like they’re trying to win until it’s time to start unloading the clip. Aoki, on the other hand, is instantly going in for a series of pins the moment they first lock up, forcing HARASHIMA to barely cling on to survival for the first minute of the match. It sets the mood instantly – Aoki’s victory can come with a long stretch of technical domination, but it can also just come from him grabbing you and pinning you. This would go on to be very important.

I could watch Aoki counter shit all day, he’s the best in the world at it. He’s fast of course, but he goes through his escapes in stages. At one point it feels like you’re watching a step by step guide of how to not get locked in a knee bar, dropping to his knees then mounting, then using the position to try to force a couple of shoot style pins. The strength HARASHIMA brings to this is a sheer stubbornness and refusal to just go along with Aoki’s holds and counter-holds. In some more technically minded matches, there can be a feeling of cooperation, but not here. In the knee bar example, HARASHIMA simply will not stop holding the leg in that tripping position, never giving up hope that he can get it even as he’s being countered into pins. This match is such a goddamn struggle, to the point that there are moments where Aoki is trying to get holds on HARASHIMA and it really looks like he’s being blocked and not cooperated with, forcing him to adapt on the fly to try wackier shit.

Aoki is a man dedicated to trying shit. Note that he isn’t necessarily succeeding, but, similarly to Daniel Makabe, if Aoki is in a hold, he’s attempting escapes, failing at them, and trying to come up with some other way out. His fighting style feels real, because it is real (he was an MMA fighter first and takes that mindset into his wrestling). I have never had to suspend my disbelief for Aoki because he wrestles completely sensibly without compromising on the excitement of his matches.

But the best thing about this match? The best thing is how MEAN Aoki is. There’s a smugness to him in how he controls all of the technical exchanges, yes, but it feels like the switch inside of him flips when HARASHIMA manages to land a poisonrana on him – a moment that feels both earned after the amount of shit HARASHIMA took in this match, and logical as a move Aoki wouldn’t see coming because they aren’t exactly throwing that one in MMA. There’s this perfect shot of HARASHIMA selling on the mat that’s interrupted by Aoki’s foot coming from out of nowhere, punting him directly in the face, and, fuck, it looks EVIL man. Ultimately, this meanness is what causes Aoki to finally lose control of the match, right near the end, when he overcommits to an armbar, gets his head stomped in, and then, fuck, the kick HARASHIMA hits on him is brutal, but the meteora that comes after is among the absolute best meteoras ever thrown. He looks like he fucking kills him, and Aoki never really recovers…fortunately, he doesn’t really have to.

This finish is pure genius, and it’s all in the way its set up. Very early in the match, we see Aoki attempt a full nelson pin, only to not get HARASHIMA down and switch to a cravat instead. It’s brief, just a small part of a deep and intricate grappling struggle between the two, but it lets you know that he’s got that hold in mind, but it’s not relevant until the very end of the match. More notable and obvious is when HARASHIMA finally gets control, briefly, only to turn to the crowd to get them on side, which sets him up for Aoki’s charmingly shit tope suicida thanks to him having stopped looking at his opponent. That sets up that HARASHIMA can get distracted by crowd work and, again, it doesn’t matter until the very end of the match. HARASHIMA dives to his feet to celebrate with the fans once he hits the meteora, no doubt preparing one last move to finish Aoki off…but he turned his back on him again, and up stumbles Aoki to desperately force him into a full nelson, drag him to the ground, and barely, barely keep him down for three. It’s an amazing finish, the logic and plausibility of it being established earlier in the match, playing off of legitimate weaknesses in HARASHIMA’s game which aren’t just stated, but are established in the text of the fight beforehand. When the match ends, Aoki is lifeless. He did just take two absolutely brutal shots from HARASHIMA after all, but sheer desperation let him just about outwrestle him. The finish really sums up the whole match: beautifully detailed and cleverly planned out, with the personality of its wrestlers both making it more enjoyable to watch and contributing to why the match plays out the way it did. A masterclass…and yet, somehow, not Shinya Aoki at his absolute best this year.

17. Zap-T, DASH Chisako, Chikayo Nagashima & Drake Morimatsu vs Riko Kawahata, Maria, Mio Momono & Takumi Iroha (Netflix Produce Gokuaku Joo Release Commemorative Event ~ Very Evil Pro Wrestling) (12/09)

This is a match that really had one job: capture the spirit of Dump Matsumoto. A wrestler who essentially defined what a heel joshi is, a model that continues to be used up to this very day, contesting stories of honest good versus evil, being celebrated after the release of her very good Netflix biopic. I think they fucking nailed it.

First of all, who did they get for this match? The four most obvious heels they could find vs the four most obvious babyfaces. It could not be more simplistic, dynamics-wise, but that’s what it needed to be. Of course, managing to get Mio Momono – both the best babyface and the best tag wrestler in the world – certainly helped, but everybody does the job wonderfully here. Secondly, the aesthetic. Korakuen Hall has honestly never looked better than it does here, and all it took was an old school camera filter and some really innovative camerawork and angles that make the whole place seem absolutely massive yet intimate at the same time. It really feels like you’re in the kind of packed arena Dump would’ve rampaged through back in the day, and seeing her and Chigusa Nagayo, her famous career rival, right there in the front row looking happier and prouder than they ever have before really adds so much extra emotion to proceedings. When Dump decides to get up and start beating the shit out of Mio with a kendo stick, it just feels right. Like, that is exactly what should be happening between these two people: wrestling’s biggest bully just torturing its most sympathetic face. The vibes are staggeringly immaculate. Hell, she even hits Chigusa! God it just feels so good, so right.

As much as this is probably the best vibes match of the year, a match cannot survive purely on good vibes alone. As much as a Dump tribute like this naturally has to have an air of chaos about it, the structure of the match is fairly standard. The heat segment – done, obviously, on Mio so that she can sell her heart out as she is so good at – is fantastic. They beat the FUCK out of her with weapons and everything, just getting across classic heel joshi stuff. Zap-T wandering over to the face corner to smack everybody with her kendo stick is fantastic, as is DASH, probably the best wrestler on the heel team, casually lobbing her chair at people’s heads. Mio’s mini fightbacks and roars of defiance are all perfectly timed, building up to her eventually getting to her corner to unleash a wonderful hot tag, which leads the match into pure chaos. Dump’s actor from the biopic yelling ‘CHAIN!!!’ upon said chain getting used because it was Dump’s signature weapon is just lovely shit – once again, incredible vibes to this one. Mio takes a fucking crazy bump off of her opponent getting her legs up on a splash, literally flying off-screen. That kind of manic energy is all over this match, making what is actually a really long bout breeze by.

As far as achieving this match’s goal goes, this was a total success. It carried the old spirit of Dump Matsumoto and her wars with the Crush Gals ‘n’ friends excellently. Moreover, it’s just really, really fucking fun. Y’know, now that Netflix is presenting a whole lot more wrestling thanks to their WWE deal, I would appreciate it if they lent them the production team that did this show. Maybe that’d make the fed’s shows watchable at last.

16. Bryan Danielson vs Blue Panther (CMLL Viernes Espectacular) (05/04)

The sad truth of intergenerational dream-matches is that it is next to impossible for them to be as good as they are on paper. You imagine the prime version of both wrestlers going against each other, but depending on when they happen somebody is either gonna be older or younger than they would ideally be. That is obviously the case with Bryan Danielson’s match with his favourite luchadore, Blue Panther – Panther is quite literally in his 60s. Yet, this match isn’t as good as it looks on paper, it’s better. It doesn’t matter that Blue Panther came into this match at 64 years old, because – with admittedly more research needing to be done on this topic – Blue Panther is probably the best 60+ wrestler in the entire history of the sport.

Danielson and Panther intentionally didn’t quite give the crowd what they wanted out of their encounter during the previously discussed BCC vs CMLL tag match. They get some early grappling in, and it is outstanding, but the match mostly revolves around Bryan dodging Panther, hiding behind his partners, robbing both the wrestler and the crowd of what they really want. This match serves to pay off the audience’s patience, and it does so beautifully. This isn’t the lightning fast exchange of holds that, say, Bryan vs ZSJ is, instead focusing on how painful any submission is to actually be in them, and the difficulty of escaping. Neither guy gives the other anything resembling a break to take in the crowd (not that they need to give the Arena Mexico audience time to cheer), both just constantly looking for the win, with everything from a headlock to a Lebell lock made to look like agony to escape. Panther always looks to free himself from holds using either his brain – seeking out an escape into a submission of his own – or his heart – powering himself to the ropes to put an end to potentially match-ending moves. The struggle to escape the Lebell lock is a perfect demonstration of how much of a fight they make these submissions, with Bryan trying to hold Panther’s free arm and twist him into the double wrist-lock he famously tapped Okada out with, only for Panther to just writhe his way free, dragging himself to his feet but barely able to stand as the crowd absolutely roar him on. It’s a selling tour de force and what Panther does best. Bryan, meanwhile, doesn’t care if the way he gets out of holds looks impressive or is honourable. Sure, he loves an escape, but if he has to shock and horrify the partisan crowd by stomping on Panther to get out of a kneebar, he’s happy to do it.

Beyond the purely technical elements of this match, the heart and soul of it all comes from the way Panther and Bryan get their personalities across. Panther, even when deep in holds, is always trying to get the crowd going, make them louder and bolder in the face of the heel invader, waving his arms to encourage them to will him through the pain, suffering for them, and fighting with their energy when he takes back control. When he manages to hit his biggest moves, like his springboard crossbody or his rolling senton off the apron (two things which, quite simply, should be physically impossible for a 64 year old man to be doing), as much joy comes from simply seeing him pull them off, I think the real genius of it is how he reacts, looking out into the crowd in awe, genuine delight on his face that, yes, at his age, he can still do that. It’s legitimately inspirational, and the way the crowd explodes every time he goes all out shows how much these rare, spread out displays of ridiculous athleticism mean to them. Bryan, meanwhile, is simply the smuggest man to ever live. It’s not just the physical acts – flexing while holding Panther in a headscissors, doing yes chants while in the middle of arching himself up to escape a hold – but the simple fact that he knows how to look like an asshole. For somebody who can be so loveable, god, this guy knows how to look like an arrogant little fucker when he needs to, wearing the world’s most obnoxious smile to make sure that the crowd are that little bit more on Panther’s side. That expression to start out lets Bryan sell facially. As the match goes on, the smirk fades because Panther is taking more and more control.

Bryan’s excellent performance in this match can’t be looked at fully without appreciating the sincerity of the Arena Mexico crowd, loudly getting behind their man and rejecting the bigger global star. The greats know to play to how the crowd is behaving, to work with them as an actual element of the match rather than just onlookers, and few are greater than Bryan Danielson. Him panicking when the crowd starts chanting for Panther in the middle of his heat segment is awesome. Panther won’t fight back, not yet, but Bryan gives the crowd something to enjoy by getting petulant about it, taking a mini-loss without fully giving up control, completely off the cuff. It’s living in the moment and that will always be more affecting than what’s clearly pre-planned. It’s the audience getting on his back that causes Bryan to turn up the aggression, turning from submissions to striking so that he can beat down their guy and shut them up. Reacting to the whims of an audience just makes things feel more real, and contribute to this being one of Bryan’s best showcases of the year.

For this match to have happened at all is a truly wonderful thing. Five years ago, Bryan Danielson vs Blue Panther in a CMLL ring would’ve felt like an absolute impossibility, but it was real, it happened. That fact alone would’ve made this match a delight to see, but that it was as excellent as it was makes it something truly special. Real, actual dream matches don’t often come true, but they really couldn’t have done this any better than they did.

15. VENY & Chihiro Hashimoto vs Mayu Iwatani & Sareee (Sareee-ISM Chapter V) (02/09)

A great all-star tag is not as easy to put together as it looks. In theory, putting a bunch of big names together in the ring should combine the star power, talent and wow factor of all involved to create something special. In practice, all-star tags can devolve into people doing big moves without a lot of thought, with distinct and defined wrestlers losing the personality that sets them apart from one another. This match was comfortably the best tag of its kind in 2024 specifically for how it avoids that problem, with every wrestler retaining their uniqueness, their motivations and their attitudes, all while absolutely kicking each other’s asses at the same time.

For Sareee, her uniqueness comes here from her motivation. Last time she was in a big tag match with Chihiro Hashimoto, she ended up getting pinned by her. Here, she’s desperate to get revenge, targeting her throughout the match. Their encounters, as always, are absolutely electric, but I think the best work they do together in this one might just be the very beginning of the match, their grappling feeling out process which establishes their dynamics for the rest of the encounter. Sareee is trying complicated holds to push her advantage, but she can barely even budge big Hash, leading to a test of strength that she easily loses, before Hash just fucking rugby tackles her to the ground and slaps her in the face. All it takes is 30 seconds to establish that Sareee is inferior in terms of power than Hashimoto, but that she simply refuses to back down, embodying the ace role that, even if inverted in MARIGOLD, has been her position all year.

Mayu, meanwhile, puts on her best performance in a long while. She still has all of the natural and genuine charm that makes her such an effective babyface, but what’s impressive is how she makes that work in a tag team environment. Watching Sareee and Mayu flow together, working together far more effectively as a unit than the bigger, stronger women, is a joyous experience, really feeling like the superhero team-up that it should. Her big bumps and sympathetic selling remain her greatest strength, really milking as much as she can out of the many, many beatings that she takes, with the wheelbarrow german that Hash gets on her probably being the highlight – she KILLS her with that shit – but she gives as much as she gets, hitting so damn hard just to stand up to her stiffer opponents.

As much as she might not be the biggest star in the match, though, the glue holding this whole thing together is VENY’s performance. Hashimoto might be the major obstacle of the match, but she’s not really a heel, so VENY takes it upon herself to be as hateable as humanly possible. Everything she does is done with meanness and contempt. She’s slapping Sareee in the face while she’s down just to be an asshole about it, forcing her up from a pin so that Mayu accidentally dropkicks her in the face while trying to break it up, or just kicking Mayu around on the mat and poking her in the eye with this vindictive grin that makes it feel so damn good when she’s getting her just desserts. One of my favourite little heel moments of the entire year came from VENY trapping Sareee in the corner, putting her full weight on top of her, and then spitting at Mayu. It’s douchebag shit like that which heels should be focusing on. Nothing about it is cool or funny, it’s just detestable, because villains should be aiming to be hated! Oh, and she also casually hits the best spin heel kick I’ve ever seen in this match on Mayu, just an absolutely flawless version of a usually ugly move. Is there nothing she can’t do?

The action in this match really is great, but it’s the personalities of the wrestlers that make it stand out so much. It’s long but it really doesn’t feel its length at all, and it comes to its natural conclusion with the villain getting dropped on her head over and over again by the hero, a perfect ending for exactly the kind of bout all-star tags should aim to be.

14. Jon Moxley vs Josh Barnett (Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport Bushido) (21/06)

2024 was a weird old year for Jon Moxley. He spent much of the first half of the year with the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship, in a reign which was incredibly confused and half-baked story-wise and extremely weak in terms of match quality (aside from his one truly great defence against EVIL). From there he entered the Death Riders angle, which, while starting hot, quickly became critically panned, sometimes for good reason, other times simply because the world cannot handle a real heel anymore. Certainly, then, this has been a difficult year for Mox, one where his credentials were questioned and his work was quite often not up to standard.

Naturally, in between these two panned runs, Jon Moxley put on quite possibly the best performance of his entire career.

It is a damn shame that there’s no BattlARTS-style promotion around nowadays that’s big enough to have a star like Mox, because it’s so fucking obvious that this is where he belongs, where he’s most fitting and most motivated. He’s exactly the kind of gritty, rugged fighter who should be grappling and striking with the violence that only shoot-style-lite can provide. In Josh Barnett, this big, smothering bear of a man who acts and behaves like pro wrestling is real and, being a former UFC champion, has the credentials to back it up, he has his perfect opponent. The way they roll around on the mat is so captivating. Somehow, it’s smooth and yet uncooperative at the same time, often ending with neither guy having a real advantage. It really feels like both guys are looking for an edge, a chance to make serious progress towards winning, and that make the suspension of disbelief so much easier to maintain.

This is no mirror match, though. As much as their work combines together beautifully, Barnett and Mox have totally different approaches to their grappling. Barnett, again being a former UFC champion, is largely able to smother and control Mox, while constantly searching for highly technical counters, using his size and girth to keep Mox where he wants him while his superior technique guides him towards the win. Mox, while adept at shoot style, is no Josh Barnett, and he knows it. When he tries using the more technical way to escape a hold, trying to tie up Barnett’s limbs, he ends up getting caught and working himself into a ground octopus which he damn near loses to. Instead, Mox finds success when he leans into his street brawler background, escaping holds by stomping directly on Barnett’s head, pawing and striking to free himself from the more talented shooter’s grasp. It’s Mox’s violence that makes this match feel increasingly heated, helped along by the fact that these are two guys who take their craft 100% seriously, and give off exactly that energy.

Another element of this match that I adore is how they use their environment. Bloodsport matches tend to either completely ignore the fact that they’re in a ropeless ring, or use it in contrived looking ways. This match finds the middle ground, using the lack of ropes for spots that look cool but never lose their logical place in the match. Mox baiting Barnett out of the ring, then running back in to not dive, but just throw himself onto his man is probably the highlight, that shit is so rough and ugly that it fits the whole aesthetic perfectly, but I also love Barnett front suplexing Mox from the outside back into the ring, and then Mox using the rings that the ropes would normally be tied around to prevent himself from getting locked in an armbar. This shit is just so creative and fun, while never taking away from the feeling that these guys would happily kill one another to win this match.

And that feeling really comes into effect when this match’s biggest moment happens. Josh Barnett finally gets sick of Mox’s scrappy, desperate survival of his smothering, grabs him by the legs, and fucking giant swings his head directly into the post. It looks GNARLY, and the blood that Mox comes up with is maybe the best in a long, long career of bleeding. It’s fucking pissing down the side of his head, drenching his body, but it’s not just the amazing visual that makes it, it’s Mox’s selling of the blood. He gets super desperate, no longer bothering to try to work holds against the man who just caved his skull in, throwing constant strikes, punches, elbows, like he knows that he’s on borrowed time and needs to do some damage just to stand a chance.

The whole match is great, but the overtime period is absolutely perfect wrestling. The moment the bell rings, Mox just throws himself at Barnett with his knee up like he’s not even thinking anymore, flailing out strikes as his lifeforce literally pours out of his head, kicking him square in the head like he knows that, if this guy gets up, it’s fucking over. It’s a perfect desperate babyface performance, an unbelievable show of bravery in the face of impossible odds, all peaking with what I can only describe as a fucking insane shoot style tiger driver. I didn’t even know that was something that could fix in shoot style, but, goddammit, Mox can do anything. He follows it up by doing a big fuck you double stomp right at Barnett’s head, as if the only thing going through his mind is violence, thoughts abandoning him as he bleeds. He has nothing left, so he’s just throwing himself at Barnett, and, miraculously, it actually works. Barnett is wonderful in this match, but this is pure violent artistry from Mox. They could never make me hate you, king. Not when you can have matches like that.

13. Sareee & Mio Momono vs Chihiro Hashimoto & Mika Iwata (Sendai Girls) (07/01)

The best traditional tag match of 2024 came just 7 days into the year, as the preview tag to a far bigger singles main event booked for a week later. It might not have been positioned as a major match, but that really doesn’t matter when they nailed it as perfectly as they did here, with several of the best wrestlers of the year putting on close to their best performance, ultimately rendering the preview tag even better than the already great match that it was leading up to.

The mission of this match is to lead up to Sareee’s singles with Chihiro Hashimoto later in the month, and their way of doing that is to make it seem like, on her own, Sareee can do absolutely nothing against this fucking monster of a woman. She gets fuck all out of grappling against her, and even picking up the pace eventually just leaves her flat out on the mat. Whenever it’s straight up just Sareee vs big Hash, Hashimoto always ends up on top, up to and including the ending of the match itself, and that’s vital to the building of the singles match, giving Sareee an absolute wall to try to crash through, but putting doubt in the mind that she can do it after she is comfortably dealt with here.

But you know who does manage to do damage to Hashimoto? That’s right, the best tag team wrestler in the world, Mio Momono. This is Mio’s best showing of the entire year, which is impressive because of the sheer number of great showings she’s had this year, but also because she, the number one face in the business, spends a lot of it as the asshole heel. Mio is in what I consider the 90s Mayumi Ozaki role, sneaking into the ring to cause problems whenever she can. Usually her constant activity on the apron and loud support of her partner is charming, but here, she’s directing traffic and working with Sareee constantly to maintain an advantage. It’s Mio, not Sareee, who creates a weakness in the impenetrable Hashimoto by targeting her arm, because she’s always a strategist when it comes to wrestling her! It’s a consistent character thread of Mio’s that she has a plan when it comes to big Hash! Mio makes sure that her attacks on the arm come either from her speed – dodging hammers to trick her into a Fujiwara armbar – or her tag team excellency. Would it be insane of me to say that Mio callously kicking Hashimoto’s arm out while she’s pushing up to try to get out of Sareee’s Boston crab the spot of the year? Probably, but I fucking love it. It’s so smart but such a fucking shitty, deflating thing for her to do. Hashimoto spends the rest of the match selling that bad arm too, using it as a reason why she can’t do some of her big power spots, because throwing people around with one arm, I’m led to believe, is actually really hard.

The way they manage to so naturally shift the dynamics in this match when it’s time to go right back to making Hashimoto feel absolutely unstoppable again is excellent. It feels completely reasonable and not difficult to understand when Sareee and Mio transition from heels by necessity of the match back into their more natural babyface, Hashimoto’s sheer beastliness making them sympathetic, and their excellent towing the line of being their strategy being fairly heelish without ever going all the way into behaving heelishly ensures that it’s more than possible for the crowd to return to their side. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how far Sareee was willing to go to beat Hashimoto. She’s a fucking killer, and fucked up arm or no, she’ll German suplex a bitch on her fucking head. This match is a brilliant, evolving, dynamic battle, that perfectly serves up the story of the match it was designed to build. It really couldn’t have gone much better than this.

12. Daniel Makabe vs Nicole Matthews (Dusk Pro The Year Daniel Makabe Broke: Stage 14) (06/07)

I’ve spoken plenty in this review about how much of a make or break the atmosphere of a wrestling match can be. Whether it’s the screaming teenage fandom of Kaisei Takechi’s fans, or the sheer passion of an Arena Mexico crowd, or WWE’s dead audiences, a good crowd can make a good match great, and a bad crowd and ruin a perfectly fine fight. Yet, for me, one of the most gripping atmospheres of the year was created by there being no crowd at all. Daniel Makabe and Nicole Matthews fight in the Lion’s Gate Dojo, which is a really kind way of describing a warehouse on the side of the road. Their audience? One referee, and one cameraman. That was all they needed to create something magical.

The most glaringly obvious example of wrestling in front of nobody would be the pandemic, and that was obviously a miserable time. These shows were eerie as fuck, largely because they were trying to disguise the fact that nobody was cheering. The Thunderdome was a dystopian nightmare, AEW’s use of wrestlers in the crowd, while better, still felt fake (because it was), and while the Japanese promotions did have crowds, about 3 months into the clap crowd nightmare, I swear to god, I never wanted to hear two hands meeting ever again. It was rare that they’d really lean into their atmosphere, and here, fortunately, that’s exactly what Matthews and Makabe do. The feel of this match is essentially ‘what if wrestling was real, and two friends had a sparring session that got out of hand?’. That is a super unique idea, and one that you can only really do in this environment. They start this out as a friendly competition, practicing their holds and counters more so than anything else, but as their competitive spirit flares up, it gets angrier and meaner, until the little quips and smiles are gone, replaced with as pure a desire to win as would be there if they were wrestling in front of 10,000 people. Beyond the pure concept only working in the environment they’re in, they make the most of the lack of crowd noise in how closely they’re being filmed, how every noise, every grunt, groan, even every individual laboured breath is captured. It really, intimately, captures the struggle that they’re going through, the growing battle for control and supremacy that emerges from what was meant to just be a sparring session.

Once again, it’s much easier to watch pure hold-for-hold wrestling than it is to describe it, but rest assured that Daniel Makabe and Nicole Matthews are fucking brilliant at impressing you with their counters while also looking like they’re actively trying to win, refusing to give up holds at the first time of asking. Stuff like Makabe countering an Indian deathlock by jolting the leg out of place and turning it seamlessly into a headlock is just crazy business, as is Matthews failing to use the arm to escape a waistlock, causing her to be caught into an abdominal stretch, which she escapes by wrapping her arms around Makabe’s leg and spinning around, somehow turning it directly into a Regal stretch. They sort of break this match up into three unofficial stages, with the pair breaking from one another twice. The first time, there’s an air of mild irritation from both that they hadn’t beaten the other yet, which sees the match escalate into something harsher, meaner, than the pure technical battle it had been. It’s Matthews, who had gotten the worse of the purely hold-for-hold affair, who makes the move towards aggression, driving her elbow into the back of Makabe’s head, shoving her boot into his face, stomping on his leg, eventually throwing the first standing strike of the match, and all of it feels natural, earned, like frustration has just gotten the best of her and that deep desire to win pushes past any friendly pretences of what this match was meant to be. The match’s counters become more blunt and less technically impressive in the process, fitting the changing mood of the match, but they’re no less creative. As much as I love something based purely on a wrestler’s control of their own body, I fucking adore watching Makabe do something as simple as resting his own body weight on Matthews’ stomach to escape an armbar, or, in what is probably my favourite counter of the entire year, he’s so desperate to escape Matthews’ crossface cravat finishing hold that he just headbutts her in the thigh, successfully breaking the hold thanks to the damage he’d done to it earlier. It’s pure panic, a need to escape but no limbs to do it with, so he just fucking headbutts her thigh. Nobody else in wrestling is doing this!

I’ve talked about Makabe’s selling before, and as always it’s on point, with his loudness really being amplified by the lack of a crowd and close filming, but what I really love here is how he sells not just moves himself, but the fear of them. The second Nicole gets anywhere near his neck, Makabe immediately enters panic mode. The first time she tries for the cravat crossface, he quite literally says ‘woah, nope’, and throws his head to the mat to avoid getting locked in, putting over the sheer danger of the hold, treating it not as something to be countered but as something to be avoided at all costs. It’s brilliant, and is continued late into the match when Matthews goes for it again. Here, he wraps his arm around his own neck to protect himself, verbalising his worry as she gets closer and closer, grimacing and squirming to desperately get out, and immediately displaying as much frustration as he does pain once it’s locked in. It doesn’t just put over the hold as deadly without him actually needing to tap out to it, it uses the lack of fans to its full potential, making the sounds and speech of the wrestlers serve as the audible escalation that an audience usually would. Matthews’ selling of the psychological effects of the match are great too, her air of friendliness having vanished by the end, once it’s clear that this isn’t a sparring session anymore, it’s just a fight, and one that she’s doing everything in her power, even if it’s dirty, to avoid losing. When she ends up caught in the Makabe Lock Pi, she sells that desperation in the face of certain defeat brilliantly, throwing hammering blows over Makabe’s back despite probably knowing that there’s no getting out of it, before finally, reluctantly, giving up.

As easy as it would be to write off empty arena matches forever in a post-pandemic world, I think everything can be used effectively if done properly in wrestling, and, here, Makabe and Matthews make the most of their environment in a way that stuck with me from the moment that I watched it until now. A real one of a kind type of match that cannot be separated from the empty warehouse it’s taking place in, with two of the best in the business telling a story that takes advantage of the lack of fans perfectly.

11. Hechicero vs Blue Panther (CMLL Martes Populares) (11/06)

Panther’s impossible year hit its peak in June. On the momentum of his brilliant performance in the CMLL vs BCC tag, followed by his even better showing against Bryan Danielson one-on-one. As great as those matches were, Danielson can’t be Panther’s perfect opponent because his perfect opponent is Hechicero. The two of them simply get one another on as deep a level as they possibly could, their ideas of what wrestling should be matching so wonderfully that I literally cannot imagine them having a bad match. But this? This is pretty much the perfect version of what they can do with one another.

This match, as with most CMLL singles bouts, is 2/3 falls, and I’d like to talk about it in those terms, because I think that the way they structured this match using the falls was genuinely brilliant. The first fall is largely extremely technical llave shit, exactly the kind of thing you’d expect when seeing Blue Panther vs Hechicero on paper. It’s wonderful, because of cause it is, unique, clever and logical without being smooth in the slightest. Rather than feeling rehearsed, it reads as two masters of the craft coming up with counters on the spot, like with Panther putting the weight of his foot down on his other foot to press Hechicero’s arm into the mat, allowing to escape a submission, or doing a handstand (at 64 years old!!) to counter an ankle lock, letting gravity drag him to the ground while he wraps his legs around Hechicero’s knee to bring him down to the mat straight into another hold. Llave is basically the most beautiful shit in the world when it’s done right, and few people do it better than Panther and Hechicero. Panther in particular is wonderful at keeping the Arena Mexico audience into their complicated hold exchange, looking out at the crowd pumping his fist to get the noise going. That works as both  a method of controlling the crowd, and an excuse for Hechicero to counter him because he’s not paying full attention. As the fall escalates, eventually Panther decides to casually lift his entire bodyweight using only his back before hitting a Tijeras. Again, 64 years old!!! Eventually, Hechicero wins the fall on his speed and aggression. Panther is a technical master but he is slower, so when Hechicero rushes him, he can’t counter fast enough, allowing him to get caught.

What makes this match’s structure work so well is the fact that the falls don’t just build in intensity from one to the next, it feels like the wrestlers actively change strategy based on what happened in the previous fall. The second fall is the perfect example of this. Panther found that he couldn’t just out-llave Hechicero, he was beaten on a technical level, so, instead of just re-engaging in a failing strategy, he decides to catch Hechicero off guard, rushing him with lariats before suddenly and instantly dragging him down into a Fujiwara armbar, and, just like that, the fall is over. Completely and suddenly changing the entire pace and style of the match to catch his opponent off guard feels not like something preplanned by Panther, but like a reaction to the last fall, and the danger that, should he try the same thing again, he could easily end up going 0-2 and losing.

The third fall carries on with the same logical progression. Panther, having found a winning strategy, tries to go for basically the exact same thing, but now that Hechicero has already fallen victim to the fast start, he’s ready for it this time, and, with the pace of the match being pushed and the danger that one more lost fall means losing the match entirely, starts throwing bigger and more impressive moves. Most matches end with bomb-throwing, but few feel as earned as this, like it’s a perfectly natural progression from what’s come before, exactly the right response to Blue Panther’s initial tactic, and exactly the right defence to Hechicero’s own escalations, keeping up the pace with him. Here, we get to see Panther’s athletic hits, be it his insane second rope rana, his rolling senton off the apron, his tope to the outside, a dive off the ramp, I mean come on, he’s just fucking insane, and watching him move the way he does at his age is one of the most joyous things in wrestling today. Ultimately, it’s throwing everything he has that costs Panther, as his body finally gives out on him, his knees being done and allowing Hechicero to punish them for the win, having thrown all of his favourite big match moves to get to this point. My particular favourite is his elbow drop from the apron to his opponent while they’re draped across the barricade. It’s incredibly low risk when you actually think about it, but it looks fucking killer when you see it.

The action in this match is amazing as it is, but the way they perfectly use the 2/3 falls structure to their advantage, telling a story of escalation that makes total sense from beginning to end, is what’s really impressive. Anybody who wants to put on a 2/3 falls match should really be watching this as inspiration, as a reminder of the connective tissue that’s needed, the logic and focus that goes into each fall playing off of the last. This match set the bar, and it’s gonna take a hell of an effort to clear it.

10. MARIGOLD World Championship: Nanae Takahashi vs Sareee(c) (MARIGOLD Winter Wonderful Fight) (13/12)

Fucking hate. That’s what pro wrestling is all about. Grizzly, ugly, angry, violent hate. It’s what the best feuds and the best matches are built on, and, comfortably, the best of MARIGOLD in its run thus far has come from by far its most heated, hate-fuelled rivalry. Nanae Takahashi, who attached herself to the mast of MARIGOLD from the very beginning as perhaps its single strongest soldier, had reason instantly to hate Sareee, who seemed to wrestle their out of spite, became their world champion to make a mockery of the organisation, and ruled over them with an iron fist, but that tension boiled over even further when Sareee legitimately injured the veteran with her Uranage, and, rather than backing away from that, they leaned all the way in, building successfully to the single most heated match in the company’s short history.

The way this match threatens to completely lose control literally the moment that it starts is just wonderful. They establish that they cannot stand one another right away, not wrestling, just grabbing at each other’s hair and refusing to let go because that’d mean letting the other person win something. Sareee throwing a shitty little asshole slap at Nanae triggers her to lariat her to the floor and start throwing punches at her head, and, god, it feels like they’re just desperate to hurt one another as much as possible. There’s none of the usual main event joshi structure, just violence and anger dictating the match, and I absolutely fucking love that.

Sareee’s heel work in MARIGOLD had been phenomenal from the beginning of the company, but this was her magnum opus in the role. Obviously she’s stiff, even stiffer than usual in how she beats the living fuck out of Nanae whenever given the opportunity, but it’s the pettiness of her and cowardice that really makes this a special performance. In the early goings of the match, that translates to her throwing nasty knees directly at Nanae’s head, or screaming at her as she forces her way to the ropes to escape an Indian deathlock, or escaping an armbar by biting Nanae’s fucking wrists. That particular spot is a wonderful bit of set-up and comeuppance as the very moment that Nanae gets the opportunity, she bites Sareee’s arm right back, the camera capturing Sareee’s skin trapped in Nanae’s mouth in this amazingly disturbing visual. Nanae isn’t the one to escalate it there, it’s simply the heel getting a taste of her own medicine and it’s brilliant. In the late stages, where Sareee really starts to dominate, her heelish cowardice continues to be a major factor in the match. Whenever Nanae rallies, Sareee, despite her state aim of punishing her for as long as possible, rushes for chokes to try to avoid damage. It’s a smart way to win a match, yes, but it’s also absolute pussy shit, robbing the audience of the satisfaction of seeing her get hers. There’s a moment where, just for a second, Sareee teases hitting the same Uranage that injured Nanae before, and the audience gasp…man, that’s wrestling right there. They don’t even have to actually do the move to get the reaction, it’s just the fear, the knowledge that breaking Nanae’s neck is still on Sareee’s mind even now. Beyond her cowardice, there’s still that killer in there, and it comes out in the most violent way at the end of the match, with Sareee launching a fucking HORRIFIC headbutt directly into Nanae’s nose, before eventually locking in the match-winning sleeper like a serial killer, dragging her down, shaking her around, throwing everything into it until there’s just no way Nanae is getting out.

And as for Nanae? God, this is fucking brilliant from her. She makes life as difficult for Sareee as possible, forcing her to work extra hard to get anything on her. Watching Nanae lock in a headlock and just refuse to let go of it, forcing Sareee to try and fail and experiment on route to a way out is a truly beautiful thing, but what she does best here is bring a ridiculous level of passion to the match. It might sound cliché to say, considering it’s literally her catchphrase, but this is one of the fieriest performances of the entire year, Nanae throwing all of her hate at Sareee while seeking revenge for her injury and to prove the value of the company she decided to spend her last year in the business backing. She doesn’t win, but you could still say she achieves her goals in the moment where she manages to hit an Uranage of her own on Sareee, giving her the taste of her own medicine than all heels need to experience.

Hate is the fuel on which wrestling runs, and this is probably the single most hateful match of the entire list. It’s sloppy, disorganised and flawed – I really do wish that Sareee sold the beating her leg takes in this a little better – but that energy of two women who legitimately do not like and want to hurt each other cannot be beat. This was the last truly notable match of Nanae’s career, but as far as finales go, only a few have been better than this.

9. KO-D Openweight Championship: Shinya Aoki vs Yuki Ueno(c) (DDT Summer Vacation Memories) (25/08)

When it comes to wrestling, I feel like I have a pretty firm grasp on what I like, and what I don’t like. I like a serious, physical struggle where it feels like wrestlers are exerting their entire souls to try to beat their opponents. I like my wrestling to not be ‘realistic’, that is pretty much impossible, but to avoid breaking my suspension of disbelief by forcing wrestlers into inorganic positions. I like my wrestling to avoid falling into the traps of just throwing big moves between wrestlers in lieu of anything with actual substance. Yuki Ueno is…not exactly my ideal of what a wrestler should be. More often than not, he’s a pure movement porn guy – an impressive athlete with no real ideas beyond just do everything in every match. That’s most main event guys in the modern day, and it’s a serious turnoff to me. Naturally, then, the best match I’ve ever seen him have was against a man  who is basically exactly what I want a wrestler to be, in which he gets absolutely, thoroughly owned in what amounts to a 20 minute squash match. This felt like a win for my wrestling, my philosophy, over the prevailing style of the time, and it was absolutely fucking glorious.

Yuki Ueno, the arrogant fuck that he is, decides that, as champion, he has to try beating Shinya Aoki at his own game, going in to grapple with the former MMA fighter, and, in the process, setting himself up to be dominated for about 90% of the match. Too often in matches where wrestlers challenge themselves to match another guy’s style, they’re presented as something close to equals. That could not be further from the case here. They fully recognise that there is absolutely no universe in which Yuki Ueno should be capable of competing on the mat with Shinya Aoki, so it's a complete massacre, with Aoki spending as much time as he wants tying his younger, prettier opponent in as many knots as he can think of. That’s not to say that Ueno is just a ragdoll; the whole match feels like it takes effort for Aoki, even if he’s completely dominating it. When Shinya tries to force Ueno’s shoulders down, for example, Ueno bridges to try to avoid the pin attempt, but not in the pretty, perfect way he usually would. He makes it feel like he’s making an almighty effort, and, eventually, that effort falters, his body slowly folding in on itself because, again, he simply cannot compete in this field. Everything Aoki hits, as always, happens in stages, making each bit of pain more impactful than if it were smooth. Even something as simple as him working Ueno into a crucifix pin, trapping the arm and then shoving Ueno’s neck to get his shoulders on the mat, this is the kind of thing that would be rushed through by most, including Ueno himself, but not Aoki. He wants everything to seem like a struggle, an honest battle, to the point that what would usually be quick, time-filling pinfall attempts elicit actual screams from women in the crowd, fully buying that something he’s worked so hard for could beat their hero.

This is the coldest and most merciless I’ve ever seen Aoki be. You get the feeling that he doesn’t care at all about the pain of his opponents as he slowly struggles them into agonising holds. Him climbing up Ueno’s back while he’s standing and, trapping his leg around Ueno’s, and forcing him down onto his stomach is the kind of beautiful technique that I’ve never seen before, and he basically just uses it to get into raking and grabbing Ueno’s face. This is a mean bastard taking full advantage of the fact that he is quite simply the better wrestler in this match, taking advantage of a man who just can’t compete.

That’s not to say that Ueno gets absolutely nothing, it’s just to say that, when it comes to wrestling…yeah, he does get nothing. Obviously you can’t really run a world title match as a full on, straight up squash, and the way they get Ueno offence in this match is logical and smart. Aoki might be the superior wrestler in ring, but he isn’t anywhere near as experienced in brawling on the outside. Ueno might not be able to do much with a flying sleeper besides irritate his opponent, but he can at least get some damage by throwing him into rows of chairs. It doesn’t get him far when, once they get back into the ring, Aoki happily no sells Ueno’s weak little forearms and then damn near knocks him out using exactly one of his own, but it exposes that, in an alternate universe, maybe there was a route to victory here. Aoki’s other weakness in this match is his own arrogance. There’s a point where he obviously has Ueno pinned off of a punt to the face, but he pulls his shoulders off the mat, opening the door for Ueno to explode into life, trying to throw all of his bigger offence all at once, and, for a short burst, it’s actually effective…until Aoki decides he’s sick of this shit. The way he takes Ueno down into his match-winning submission is just immaculate. He does it with such frantic energy and speed, wrapping and tying Ueno’s limbs up so fast while throwing elbows at him that you barely have time to breathe by the time he’s got his match-winning triangle hold in. It’s a total diversion from the slower, more grinding submission work Aoki does for most of the match, and I read it as him having had his fun, and now officially being finished with this little shit. It’s fucking beautiful wrestling man.

This was a match made specifically for the freaks like me, the people who don’t vibe with the moves-centric wrestling that dominates today, where a details-oriented shooter fucking destroys one of the faces of that movement. It’s kayfabe proof that I’m right, and that just delighted me. May Shinya Aoki continue to destroy geeks and losers who think that being able to do flips is a good substitute for a personality for many years to come.

8. DPW National Championship: LaBron Kozone vs Adam Priest(c) (DPW 3rd Anniversary) (08/12)

After their wonderful, intentionally deflating first match of the year against one another, this match both had a hell of a lot to live up to, and a hell of a lot that it needed to accomplish. Adam Priest’s downfall needed to be as satisfying as his rise was infuriating, to make his cowardice and series of lucky breaks feel worth it. LaBron Kozone needed to give him the mother of all beatings, while still leaving enough doubt that, when Priest inevitably caught him in another half crab or STF, it inspires the fear that the bastard could get away with it again. Not only did they manage to achieve that, they delivered what could easily be the best pure heel vs babyface match of the entire year in the process.

The closest comparison that I can make to this match is the way Bruno Sammartino would end his feuds, with the heel taking an ungodly and richly deserved beating inside of a cage. There’s no cage here, but Adam Priest still feels trapped, an effect achieved by Priest spending so much of this match desperately fleeing from Kozone, quite literally running and hiding, to the point of, after spending so much of the first act of this bout getting utterly fucking owned, he literally just hides under the ring to attempt to stop him. Adam Priest is a wrestler of almost exclusively strengths, but perhaps the biggest is his willingness to have no redeemable qualities. In purely kayfabe terms, he is simply not a good professional wrestler, he’s a coward and a cheat. From the very beginning of the match, where Kozone fakes a lunge towards him in the corner, and all of his fake confidence disappears from his face, that’s something that Priest works damn hard to ensure remains. It’s almost his signature at this point to refuse to ever gain the advantage in a match by means that will impress you. Here, he’s using his shitty little rakes, eye pokes and sneaky chop blocks, chatting shit to Kozone and the fans while in control, while reverting instantly to pure fear and cowardice whenever Kozone fights back. I cannot stress to you enough that he literally RIPS ONE OF KOZONE’S DREADS OUT. This is a fucking masterpiece of a heel performance, full of just despicable shit that serves to make the most unlikable man in wrestling even more so, and that is a huge compliment to him.

After a year of Adam Priest, somehow, having things go his way by hook or by crook (well, pretty much exclusively by crook), there’s so much satisfaction to be taken in a match where basically everything that could go wrong for him does. He makes his humiliations so satisfying, and keeps them going throughout the match, from being spooked by a fake lunge at the beginning, to being busted open badly midway through the match. Even when he has full control, having nearly tapped Kozone out with a figure four, he manages to take another massive loss by attempting to get himself disqualified, only for the referee to outright refuse to give him the easy way out, telling him ‘we’re not doing this shit anymore’. God, that felt good, showing that Priest has pissed everyone off, and the refs are wise to his tricks. What’s truly impressive is that, when you just put it into words: Adam Priest is trying to win while pissing blood out of his forehead, with a referee who is openly sick of his shit, that sounds like a babyface! But it isn’t, the sympathy that should logically be elicited isn’t there, and it’s because Priest is just such a whiny bitch about everything. His stumble-selling from blood loss isn’t worthy of empathy, it’s humiliating and deserved. Everything goes wrong for him because he deserves it, and it’s just amazing to see the joy that inspires in everybody but him.

As usual with Adam Priest, it’s easy to ignore the performance of the other guy in the ring because he’s so good, but this is LaBron Kozone’s best ever performance. Everything is timed to perfection with him, his offence feeling powerful, impressive, eye-catching, and well earned from putting in the hard work to take control of Priest without the need for his opponent’s constant cheating. When he fights back, it’s with exactly the right level of force for the situation, and his selling is brilliant, constantly keeping the damage to his leg in mind. That all comes to a head with the brilliant final act of the match, designed specifically to trick you into thinking that, somehow, Adam Priest was gonna get away with it again. The ref goes down, and Priest’s very first instinct is to punch Kozone directly in his dick and balls, before smashing a chair into the back of his knee. This is exactly the kind of setup that has signalled so many of his wins before, and the horror of the crowd is obvious, especially once the crab is in, but ESPECIALLY once the STF is in. This all comes after Kozone overcame so much, managed to land his lariat, and only didn’t win because the second ref needed time to make it to the ring. It feels like a robbery, but, miraculously, and with so much heart on display, Kozone survives. Again, Priest makes his downfall as satisfying as possible, letting himself get murdered by Kozone’s lariat to make his defeat as absolute as possible. He tried everything, and it didn’t work, because assholes like him aren’t supposed to win in the end.

The most important decider in whether a heel’s run was successful or not is how satisfying their downfall feels, and this is a masterpiece in that genre. Adam Priest got his own way for a year, to the point that it was bound to frustrate some audiences, but this made it more than worth it, the wait finally ending for the shit-eating grin to be wiped off of his face. DPW deserves credit for their patience in letting this run on for exactly as long as it needed to, but it’s the wrestlers who milked every bit of satisfaction out of Priest’s failure that they could. His punishment was fitting and his defeat was absolute, and that should be the fate of all heels in the end.

7. Shinya Aoki vs Chihiro Hashimoto (DDT April Fool 2024) (07/04)

You may be able to gather through this top 10 that I spent my 2024 becoming a gigantic fan of Shinya Aoki. He’s just the best, man. The way he completely wrecks his opponents with pure technical superiority, giving up nothing until they fucking earn it, while making everything he does matter as much as possible…it’s exactly what I want from pro wrestling. Yet, for as much as I enjoy his domination of matches, his best work of the year came in the only bout he had where he was absolutely, comfortably presented as not the best technical wrestler in it. It’d be a stretch to call this the anti-Shinya Aoki vs Yuki Ueno – this is no squash – but it is comfortably the most shit Aoki has had to eat this year, and he eats it beautifully.

Aoki’s technical superiority is absolutely key to the structuring of his matches, setting him as a puzzle that’s near-impossible to solve. All it takes is one mistake, and he’s tying you in knots. This match’s brilliance comes from flipping that concept on its head, because, here, he’s wrestling Big Hash, and he hasn’t dealt with anything quite like her. Simply put, not only is Hashimoto just as technically adept as him, she’s simply way stronger than him, and that’s not something he really had to deal with for his other big matches this year. A near shoot-style hold-for-hold encounter is the absolute ideal environment for Hashimoto in my book. I discovered her while she was doing UWF rules matches in GLEAT, and I still think that’s what she’s best at. She’s outstanding at getting over her strength not with big power moves, but by forcing her opponents around on the mat with sudden, easy takedowns while completely resisting everything they do. That’s shown in Hashimoto bursting out of a full nelson with the sheer strength of her arms alone, before catching Aoki in one of her own, which the technical master just can’t escape on his own, all thanks to that massive power difference.

The fact that he can’t just bully Hashimoto brings out a rarely seen version of Aoki: the coward who’ll steal any advantage he can get. His usual tricks and traps are far less likely to work on somebody just as good at this shit as he is, so he resorts to stomping on her foot to escape holds, throwing desperate little strikes to get into his own, and, in a total change of pace for him, actively avoiding lockups, stalling and avoiding more than he does against anybody else. The whole dynamic of Aoki having to deal with being essentially worse in every physical attribute than Hashimoto is best demonstrated by their cobra twist duel. It’s pretty fucking rare to hear a crowd gasp in awe at the sight of an abdominal stretch being applied, but this is masterful work. Hashimoto aims for a German suplex but when Aoki tries to counter, he gives up his body and she switches strategies to the cobra twist. Aoki manages to escape this, but only by throwing desperate elbows to stun her and break her grip and catch his own cobra twist, giving up the idea of technical superiority to find some way, any way, to beat her. Hashimoto then proceeds to counter right back through her raw power, managing to re-apply the hold. It is as clear a way of demonstrating that Aoki cannot win this match without giving up his own philosophy as anything, and the way they milk the holds feels as exhilarating as it gets to me, really putting over the importance of what would otherwise just be a brief section of the bout.

Beyond just the clash of technical and power levels in this match, obviously the standard of wrestling itself is just insanely high. As you’d expect from these two, they make sure to get the most out of every hold they go for, making a demonstration of each submission and the danger they cause. I really feel the intricacy and struggle it takes to escape a double chicken-wing, eventually turning it into a wristlock, when they make it look like they’re both fighting to either keep or counter the hold. The sense of struggle is really heightened by the excellent selling of the pain and fear of what a fully applied submission can do to a person. They make each wrench of a hold matter, force the crowd to view any submission as a potential match ender, and create an atmosphere of tension wonderfully as a result. The highlight of that is the way Hashimoto suddenly starts screaming as her arm is dragged down to the mat, sending a wave of panic through the audience. She frantically kicks her legs towards the ropes, acting so manic in her efforts to free herself that she literally boots the camera in her escape attempt. Sure, it’s probably an accident, but a very happy one that makes her desperation and pain so much more visceral. Something as simple as an armbar leading to a rope break probably wouldn’t mean much to an audience, but Hashimoto’s reaction to it draws their fear that Aoki had just won it, and demonstrates her mastery of selling in this environment.

It's important to note here that this match has a 15 minute time limit, and once the last few minutes hit, the way both wrestlers turn from slow and intricate to fast and frantic perfectly reflects the idea that they’re both desperately seeking a win. Aoki, somebody so usually technically proficient, throws that all away to throw kicks and eventually just try to choke Hash out with his foot, while Hash tackles him to the floor to try to pin him. It’s raw, sloppy, and brilliant, all leading to the tense last couple of minutes of the match, where Aoki, no matter what Hash does, refuses to give up on a sleeper hold, surviving her crushing him by dropping down hard, forcing her to reach the ropes and leading to both falling out of the ring. Here, Hashimoto forces Aoki back into the ring, refusing to take the win in such a cheap way as the last minute hits. That moment is designed flawlessly to act as a contrast to what happens next: Aoki, realising he cannot beat Hashimoto, decides that he can instead rob her of victory, spending a full 60 seconds just fleeing all contact with the better wrestler to eventually force a draw. It’s an unsatisfying end, done entirely intentionally, that both establishes that Hashimoto is superior, but makes you desperate for a rematch, so that she can put him away properly this time. This was an absolute delight, technically beautiful but perfectly character-based and wholly unique, both in Aoki and Hashimoto’s respective catalogues for the year, and in 2024 as a whole. The 15 minute time limit may end, but I would happily watch Aoki try and fail to outwit and outwrestle Hashimoto for hours.

6. Ryohei Oiwa vs Kaito Kiyomiya (NOAH N-1 Victory) (09/08)

Through reading this review, you should know that I love when wrestlers are able to get a lot out of a little. I adore the milking of holds, making what so many use as filler to get to big, flashy spots into something so much more, turning the basics into devastating traps and agonising mazes to escape from. There is no match that manages to do that better in 2024 than this one, and no wrestler who better embodies the approach of making the smallest things dramatic and vitally important than Ryohei Oiwa. The way he forces his opponents to try and try and try to get out of his shit because he doesn’t give up on anything is just pure art. He grinds his opponents down with basic holds, forcing them to trial and error their way through escape attempts until they finally find a way out to a big reaction. It’s a battle and a struggle rather than just moves being a vehicle to get to more moves.

The entire first 15 minutes of this 30-minute match can be summarised by the statement ‘Ryohei Oiwa locks Kaito Kiyomiya in an armbar, then in a headlock’. As basic and simple as this might sound, it’s what happens in those holds that turns what are 99% of the time transitional holds into two absolute mountains for Kiyomiya to climb, getting as much agony as humanly possible out of him trying and failing over and over again to escape until finally finding a way. There’s no way the audience could’ve known what was coming when that armbar is first locked in that it’d be lasting for as long as it does, nor how fucking incredible it would be. Kaito does absolutely everything to try to escape, trying and failing counters of different styles and philosophies, only for Oiwa to have an answer to each and every one of them. Kaito tries running the ropes to escape? Oiwa just drags him to the floor into hammerlock hell. Kaito tries to apply a headlock from the ground? Oiwa simply neck-bridges, flips over Kiyomiya’s body, and rolls seamlessly back into the hammerlock in a way I have legitimately never seen done before (and then proceeds to do it several more times simply to style on his man). It just keeps going with Kaito trying to grab a leg and drop an elbow, only to be slipped past and kept in the hold, or him actually managing to turn the hold into an Indian deathlock, only to make the crucial mistake of breaking his own submission for a headlock, and being grabbed instantly into a hammerlock again, punishing him for doing something stupid, showing his lack of experience in Oiwa’s world of miserable grinding submissions and pain. Oiwa, beyond his amazing array of ways to just refuse to give up the hold, makes sure to keep things interesting by transitioning between various armlocks. It’s a shoulder hold, a hammerlock, a keylock, a double wristlock, all adapted because of Kaito finding counters to the previous holds that nearly freed him but didn’t quite.

Maybe the best moment of the match comes from Kaito finally escaping the hold that he’s been tortured by for so long, landing his big dropkick and appearing ready to go into a typical NOAH stretch of big bombs…then Oiwa just grabs him in a headlock and, once again, refuses to let go for a full five minutes. Oiwa’s commitment to this strategy is amazing, and the damage it ends up doing is beautiful. Credit to Kiyomiya’s selling here, by the time that he does manage to get out of this headlock, he’s almost unconscious, looking like he’s been through an absolute war despite only really having dealt with one hold. Again, the art of this comes from the trial and error of Kiyomiya’s escape attempts and Oiwa’s adaptations. Again, there’s the rope run and the refusal to release, Kaito attempting to strike his way out to no avail, using a rollup to force the break only for Oiwa to catch him instantly again, landing a backdrop which again briefly breaks the hold, only for Kaito to be too pained from the headlock to move out of range, getting caught while still on the ground. Finally, Kaito manages to vault over the ropes and attempt a shoulder tackle back in…and Oiwa catches it into a fucking headlock! Kaito escapes and goes for a crossbody? HEADLOCK CITY MOTHERFUCKER! At this point I was just cackling, truly praying that this was going to be 30 minutes of Kaito Kiyomiya falling back into a headlock over and over again. The way he visibly gets more and more frustrated, throwing petty little punches at Oiwa’s ribs, is so fucking funny. He has been completely outwitted and outworked, and it is a glorious thing.

If this match was just its first 20 minutes or so, there’s a reasonable chance it would’ve made the top five matches of the year for just how much they manage to get out of doing so little, how deeply the crowd are willing to buy into an armlock and a headlock being the best, most effective heat segment of the entire year. That’s not to say that the last ten minutes are bad, far from it, they’re just less unique. The match evolves into something more familiar to the NOAH style, but it is snugger and more intense than modern NOAH tends to manage. Even if it interests me less than what came before, it feels earned and like a fairly natural evolution. For Oiwa, he’s got as much damage out of two holds as he possibly could’ve, he has a barely conscious opponent to polish off. For Kaito, he needs to attack with the speed of sound because there’s a 30-minute time limit and he’s done essentially no damage at all for the first 20. It largely remains submission focused, with Kaito, for once, actually targeting the leg substantially before going for his figure four, rather than it feeling as if he’s doing it by obligation. There’s a great urgency to it all which all matches that approach the time limit should have, with Oiwa frantically going back to the arm, or launching Kaito around with his awesome suplexes, ultimately ending up hitting his fucking brutal Doctor Bomb, only for the time to expire because he couldn’t get the pin thanks to the damage done to his leg. It’s a wonderful ending to yet another brilliant 30 minute draw from Oiwa, and proof that there is another way, a way of getting a crowd going without being pure movement porn. This crowd is entranced by a headlock and an armbar. If Ryohei Oiwa can do it, there’s no reason that others shouldn’t try.

5. Templario vs Mistico (RevPro/CMLL Fantastica Mania UK) (19/05)

There’s nothing in the world quite like live wrestling. When I’m watching wrestling live, a bad match becomes good, and a good match becomes great. In my experience, there’s just no way to have a bad time at a wrestling show. The only show (well, shows, technically) that I managed to see this year was RevPro and CMLL’s Fantastica Mania, and it was a blast. Given that I’d spent the last year becoming convinced that CMLL is the single best promotion in the world, I knew that I had to see this, because who knew when I’d next get the chance to watch some honest to god lucha libre?

The show itself was fun but flawed. Like I said, I find it basically impossible to not have a great time at a wrestling show, but there’s little doubt in my mind that I would’ve enjoyed a CMLL show a lot more without them falling into the trap of thinking that I also wanted to see a bunch of mediocre British guys up and down the card. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the card was at its best when it was CMLL vs CMLL, without a Brit in sight, and obviously the best of the best was Mistico.

I’ll be completely honest with you off the bat: this match would not be one of the ten best of the year had I not been there. If I had only watched this match on tape, it realistically would’ve probably made the top 50, but it wouldn’t have gotten that high. This is true wrestlers with excellent chemistry putting on a match that they’re more than comfortable with working. Essentially, this was an Arena Mexico main event, but in London, featuring Mistico taking an absolute beating from Templario, falling victim to a long beatdown in which Templario combines traditional rudo offence with his unique power-based work that isn’t common for luchadores of his build, before, eventually, the hero fights back, hits his Spanish fly, locks in La Mistica, and wins. The Mistico singles formula isn’t exactly revolutionary, but it’s extremely fun and highly watchable, and Templario is one of his best opponents nowadays, wonderful both at giving him a serious beating, and then getting his just desserts as the match goes on.

No, the reason that this match is the fifth best of the year is because I was there, and, let me tell you, Mistico live is a different beast entirely. This is probably a weird comparison to make, but he reminds me of Hulk Hogan in that he has this uncanny ability to make the fans a part of a match. He spends every waking moment, on offence of selling, playing to the audience, giving them encouragement and invitation to clap, chant, and invest themselves in him. When Hulk Hogan wrestled, it was always essentially Hulk Hogan and the entire audience vs whatever villain of the week he faced, and Mistico is the same. The way he times his comebacks to match with the peaks of fan support make it feel as if you’re powering him, like you’re the one getting him back into the match. It’s a lost art for most babyfaces at this point, but Mistico is the best in the world at it, and that’s what makes him the perfect ace: he needs you as much as you need him, and that makes rooting for him so goddamn easy.

For my money, the greatest feeling in wrestling is supporting your guy as if it’s a real sport, forgetting all about the scripted nature of the artform and the implications of winning and losing within it not really mattering. Fuck that, I want my guy to win, and I want the other guy to lose. I’ve only had a few experiences like that live: cheering for Sheamus at Clash at the Castle so hard that I lost my voice, being both CM Punk and Sting’s strongest soldier at All In, and now this, desperately willing on Mistico like he wasn’t a performer doing his job, but like he was my football team, and watching him lose would completely ruin my evening. That made his beatdown agonising and his comeback absolutely euphoric. Deep down, obviously I knew Mistico was gonna win – he’s literally Mistico – but in the moment, when wrestling really gets you, you can forget about that and live and die by his every action. This isn’t just me losing my mind, either, it’s exactly what Mistico’s greatest strength is. He will never waste an opportunity to signal to the crowd, to get them behind him. Whether it’s encouraging us to do a fake count-out because the referee was going too slow for his liking, calling to the crowd before his biggest and most impressive moves, or, while getting his arm tortured by Templario, reaching out to us. It’s a special connection with the audience, and, on that night, I completely, entirely brought in. When a wrestler can make you feel like that, there’s truly nothing else in the world like it.

4. Mask vs Mask: Valiente vs Euforia vs Hechicero vs Esfinge (CMLL 91. Aniversario) (13/09)

In a way, this is kind of a weird match to rank. For those who don’t know, this is an elimination-style four way, in which masks are only on the line once it’s down to one-on-one, which means that the majority of the drama comes once the match reaches that point. In short, Valiente and Esfinge should count themselves as very lucky to have made it this high on the list. That’s not to say that they do badly here – in fact, I think it’s pretty comfortably both men’s best performances of the year. I particularly love the frantic energy of the four-way section of the match, with each pairing – Valiente & Esfinge and Hechicero & Euforia – trying to get the other pair out of the match so that they can go after their rival’s mask, reluctantly working as loose units in sort of a pseudo tag match to earn the right to take the most important thing from their nemesis. Everybody is moving at a hundred miles per hour hitting cool shit. Euforia is a particular highlight for the multiman section of this match because he decides to remind everybody of how ridiculously strong he is. Hechicero is not a small man, and yet Euforia easily catches an attempt at a springboard dropkick into a tiltawhirl backbreaker, which truly just doesn’t make sense physically, but he can still do it! Then, as if solely to prove that he can, Euforia catches Valiente’s entire weight (and he’s probably heavier than Hechicero) on ONE SHOULDER. I don’t know how he does it, but he does, and in these moments, he demonstrates that, once this match really begins, he’ll be putting on the performance of his life.

The reason that this match is the fourth best of the year comes entirely down to what happens when Valiente and Esfinge are out of the way, bringing us to Hechicero vs Euforia, mask vs mask. Titles mean essentially nothing in CMLL, with a wrestler’s mask instead being the single biggest thing they can win or lose. The loss of a mask, especially one that’s been around for a long time, is an incredibly emotional thing, and here is no different. There was no better bomb-fest in 2024 than Hechicero vs Euforia. They throw EVERYTHING that they have at one another, and it is glorious. These kinds of matches can easily miss when it feels like none of the shit being done matters or have any long-term impact, but here? Man, it’s incredible, and it makes perfect sense too. In a mask vs mask match, their identities are on the line, and they want to make absolutely sure that they don’t lose. As such, they throw everything they have, plenty of which feels like genuine match-winning shit, but they’re powered by the cause. They’re after the biggest win they could possibly get, with losing being the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, so the fact that they’re able to survive much more than they usually could is totally sensible.

It helps, of course, when the bombs are so incredibly cool. Hechicero of course has to use his barricade elbow, but immediately after, he decides to take the single most fucked up bump of the year. After landing the elbow, he instead decides to go for a barricade legdrop, which he promptly misses and takes ALL on his hips. I don’t know how he didn’t injure himself on that one, and I’m sure it hurt like hell the next day, but this is the match of his life, so it’s entirely worth it. Euforia is actively trying to kill Hechicero, hitting top rope powerbombs and constantly aiming for his signature backbreaker/chinlock hold. The fact that he’d already tapped Esfinge out with it gives it added weight, and when he manages to apply it, there’s sheer terror in the audience. Speaking of the crowd, this is the single best crowd of the entire year. This match feels gigantic, like the most important thing in the world, and that’s because everybody treats it like it is, the crowd most of all. They are with them every step of the way, loud as hell, and entirely biased in favour of their guy. They want Hechicero to win so fucking badly, and the panic whenever Euforia looks like he’s gonna win (and he looks like he’s gonna win a LOT), is absolutely delightful.

Hechicero got most of the plaudits for this match when it happened, what with him both winning and being the better known wrestler outside of Mexico, and that’s fair enough. He’s brilliant here, wrestling with a desperation that he rarely ever does, clinging on and playing the unfamiliar role of a tecnico wonderfully, while selling his bad arm and making it part of the story without it becoming the dominant focus. Still, this is Euforia’s masterpiece first and foremost. The way he sells the sheer exhaustion of going 36 minutes at this pace, working this hard, against a guy who just refuses to stay down, is amazing. It’s not the big bombs that make his performance magical, it’s how he reacts to landing them. He doesn’t cleanly hit top rope powerbombs, he manages to land them, he COLLAPSES into pins, falling down in stages like his body literally cannot support him anymore. That is how you sell the effects of a fight this hard. There’s nothing left, but he can’t give up. The second time he lands a powerbomb, he has to prop himself up on the ropes before falling into the pin, not only showing the growing impact of the immense pain and exhaustion he’s feeling, but giving a reason as to just how the fuck Hechicero survived that one. He’s the rudo of the match, but by the time he's given literally everything, being locked in the finishing submission, the crowd are chanting his name and the commentary team are pleading for him not to tap, but he has no choice. It’s a beautiful warrior’s death, genuine in its emotional impact with a post-match that’s just as powerful, with a tearful Soberano Jr. (Euforia’s son) embracing him as he gives up his mask to Hechicero and soaks in the crowd. After all of this, poor old Mistico and Chris Jericho truly never stood a chance in hell.

3. Drew McIntyre vs CM Punk (WWE Bad Blood) (05/10)

Rarely has a match needed to be good quite as much as this one did. WWE hit on something great, raw, and real-feeling with the early stages of Drew McIntyre and CM Punk’s feud, with Punk suffering a legitimate injury at McIntyre’s hands and McIntyre having grievances which felt real, but were heelish simply because of how whiny and obnoxious he was about it. Then WWE WWE’d all over it, overcomplicated things, threw Freakin into the mix to try to pretend that he could ever participate in anything that could illicit the word ‘real’, and truly appeared to have fucked it all up. Beyond the story itself, the Hell in a Cell match itself probably needed a win too. Despite being probably WWE’s most famous gimmick match not named the Royal Rumble, they kinda fucking suck at making Hell in a Cell matches feel worthy of taking place in this dangerous environments that was designed to bring big feuds to a close. Like, really, what are the great Hell in a Cells? The ones that live long in the memory? The first two, then maybe Rollins/Rhodes if you’re feeling kind. That’s a shockingly bad track record for a gimmick as famous as this one. Thank god, then, that this match is not only probably the best HIAC ever, but the perfect conclusion to a messy but compelling feud.

The best thing that I can say about this match is that you can absolutely feel the hate. It’s not just about verbalising that – this match largely skips out on WWE monologuing – but in terms of the body language, the manic energy that both guys have when it comes to hurting the other, and the way that they will just do whatever they can to quickly inflict as much pain as they possibly can. WWE’s no DQ matches are usually incredibly contrived, but this match’s strength comes from circumventing that. Every new way to cause pain feels off the cuff and improvised. When a table breaks and Punk grabs its leg to try to drive it into his eye, that’s not a man doing an agreed upon spot, it’s pure fucking spite towards somebody he absolutely despises, and the same is true of Drew driving a wrench into Punk’s open wound, or lawndarting his bloody face right into the cell. Speaking of that wound, the blood in this match is glorious, and once again sets it apart from the WWE’s edgeless norm. Blood feuds should have blood! This shouldn’t need stating but in WWE it really does. Punk is one of the sport’s best bleeders, but McIntyre is excellent here too, his cut coming from a toolbox shot directly to the head and leaving him just dripping with crimson. Even better than your normal, typical wrestling blood from the forehead is the incidental blood, clearly unplanned and unprepared, that ends up coming from Punk’s back. I love shit like that, it aids massively in making this feel like a totally off the cuff fight, where the whole body is under threat of bleeding rather than just the face.

Credit should also be given for how dangerous they make the cell itself feel. The WWE often talk about the Hell in a Cell itself being a weapon, but usually that just means occasionally being shoved into it. WWE’s no blood policy probably didn’t help, preventing the wrestlers from wearing physical evidence of the damage the cell does to them, but here, we have all the red necessary for that, and both wrestlers make sure that the chainlink actually looks dangerous. There’s a brilliant shot of Drew smashing the back of Punk’s head into the cell, directly towards the camera, that really makes it look and sound brutal. Speaking of sound, Punk screaming upon first being thrown into the cell only adds to the sense of danger. Physical selling is one thing, but this is a full package performance from Punk in particular, where he puts his body, voice and mind into a state of agony to get across the threat he’s facing.

One of my favourite elements of this match is the way Punk and Drew get across the panic and paranoia that being in the cell with your arch nemesis inspires. That’s conveyed in something as small as the way they take control whenever given the tiniest opportunity, knowing that they can’t afford prolonged beatdowns. Whether it’s Drew frantically chopping Punk in the throat when he starts to fight back, or Punk going low and smashing Drew’s leg with a table leg. There’s no big, dramatic setup to make this shit feel like more of a WWE Moment, it’s pure, violent and desperate. For me, that’s what wrestling should be all about. There’s nothing pretty, only two guys trying to give one another absolutely nothing. Even when not talking specifically about offence, the desperation is always there. Punk hopelessly reaching his hand out to Drew as he falls out of the ring following a GTS is a masterstroke, demonstrating how badly he needed to win right there, putting over the fear of having to go any longer with this psychopath.

On the topic of that psychopath, I want to give special credit to Drew for this match. Punk obviously is brilliant, putting forth a classic wounded animal performance as someone who knows he’s running out of time thanks both to his wound and his age, making him more violent and aggressive than he has been during any other point of his WWE run, but he already has a catalogue of classics to his name. McIntyre does not, which can be explained with the fact that he’s rarely been put into the position to have a match as good as this one, but he rises to the occasion. Both men have to be incredibly violent to make this match work, but Drew goes above and beyond to feel like a total sadist, having lost his mind from his own hatred, often actually losing control of the match because he’s enjoying hurting Punk just a little too much. There’s a gleeful evil as he stomps on Punk’s ear while he’s trapped against the steel steps, or when he's driving a wrench directly into his open wound, or when he simply lobs Punk over the top rope, that feels wonderfully into him getting what he deserves for his actions, first by having Punk basically cave his face in with the same wrench that had tortured him, but then with what I think has a serious shot at being the most fucking insanely horrible looking bump of the year. Drew’s missed claymore where he half-lands back-first on the edge of the steps? It’s ugly in a way that no WWE bump I can think of is, not clean but from high up or through tables, but genuinely just looking HORRIFYING. That, as much as the beads in the mouth and the GTS onto Punk’s chained knee, is as much a perfect punishment for Drew’s actions as anything else.

What makes this match feels so special, so wonderful, is how unlike anything else the WWE has done…really ever it is. It’s ugly, unprofessional, sloppy, gross and violent. There’s no big preplanned spots to speak of, nothing designed to be a Moment, and it all feels so much more real than anything they’ve done in so long as a result. Punk and Drew have set a ridiculously high new bar for Hell in a Cell, and I doubt that anybody will ever be able to top it. A near-masterpiece of a match.

2. AEW World Championship: Bryan Danielson vs Swerve Strickland(c) (AEW All In London) (25/08)

Art at is core is all about emotion. The way a truly great art piece can make you feel is unmatched by just about anything else in the human experience, and I think that can sum up all of my three favourite matches of the year. Where CM Punk vs Drew McIntyre is a tour de force in the hatred between two people, Bryan Danielson’s career vs title match against Swerve Strickland is about love. The love of the entire wrestling world towards one of the best in the artform’s history willing him toward what is likely the last big in-ring achievement of his career, yes, but, more importantly than that, the love of a husband to his wife, and a father to his kids.

Everything about Bryan Danielson’s performance here is designed to be fucking emotional. Every bit of offence he manages is treated like a miracle, a fight against impossible odds, and the beating he takes is flat out traumatising. Dragon has mastered the art of using the audience’s knowledge of his history to his advantage. He knows that this crowd watched him retire in 2016 thanks to a buildup of head and neck injuries, so what does the cruel bastard do? Take as brutal a beating to his head and neck as he possibly can, selling as if he’s experiencing the seizures that he literally, genuinely has before thanks to the damage he’s taken in the ring. As many of Bryan’s best performances over 2024, be it against Blue Panther, ZSJ, Eddie Kingston or Yuji Nagata, have been as a heel, this is probably the single best babyface showing of the entire year. He just drags himself around, barely surviving, barely getting his shots in, but, when he does, he has the crowd in the palm of his hands. There’s a nothingness behind his eyes when he’s getting beaten up that makes you think it’s hopeless, but then, through seemingly willpower alone, he’ll lock in a Regal Stretch, or land a fucking Stan Hansen lariat, and he’ll be completely full of life again, still staggering with the energy of somebody who’s barely standing, but simply refuses to go down.

Swerve Strickland is a…different performer for me. He’s regularly doing way more than he really needs to, wasting movement and taking away the impact of his own shit through unnecessary additions to perfectly good offensive moves, which makes it hard for me to love him. Yet, his star power is undeniable, his charisma is incredible, and, in the absolute biggest matches of his career, he not only does his job, but thrives. He’s the definition of a big match player: forgettable largely on the week-to-week, but built for the largest stage. I hesitate to call this his best showing ever – that Texas death match with Hangman truly is something to behold – but it’s fucking masterful regardless. The strength of Swerve in this match is that, while he has the love of the crowd, he never really ceases to be a complete piece of shit. He’s a heel at heart, which makes him easily slot back into that role against Bryan, who 100% of the crowd wants to see beat him and continue his career. Swerve seems constantly aware of that, and spiteful of it, eager to prove Bryan to be a fraud, to not just beat him but to humiliate him. He’s cold and cruel in the ring, basically dissecting him for as long as he wants, but when his true sadism comes out is when he takes Bryan outside, in front of his family. Swerve canonically enjoys traumatising children, it’s one of his main character traits, and the real, genuine emotion of Bryan’s children crying while seeing him dripping blood, Brie Bella covering their eyes while he stomps over and over again on his head…there’s just about nothing in wrestling this year that’s as horrific as that, and it’s absolutely magical.

The beating Bryan takes, peaking with a vertebreaker directly onto that famously destroyed neck, all builds up to the most emotionally cathartic moment of the year. For full disclosure, I did my rewatch of this match to write notes for this review on May 23^rd. The night before, my dad died after an 8-year battle against cancer. He was given just a 30% chance of surviving 2017, the year of his diagnosis, but he did. He went through the worst that life can give you, a heart attack, several strokes, and the physical and mental anguish that both cancer and the treatments cause. He could’ve given up any number of times, but he didn’t, because he insisted that he wanted to see his children make it to a point where they were self-sustaining. Only after I finished university and my sister started studying at Oxford was his mission finally complete, letting him rest at last. He suffered for us, because he loved us. I watched Bryan Danielson force his way to stand through strike after strike from Swerve, screaming that he loved his kids, that he loved them so much, with tears pouring down my face, because that was my dad too. He fought for his children, just like how Bryan fought for his.

The rest of a match is just a beautiful blur to me, Swerve’s no-sell of the busaiku knee, Bryan surviving every kick, stomp and neck drop imaginable, Hangman’s interference, and then finally, finally, Bryan tapping him out. I don’t mind at all that Bryan had to win through interference either. Bryan won because of the people he loves the most, Swerve lost because of the person he hates the most. It’s beautiful, really. This match was already a magical experience before my rewatch, before I lost my dad, but now, it takes on a whole other meaning for me. Bryan fought because he’s a father who loves his kids, just like mine. I love you, dad.

1. AEW World Tag Team Championships: Matthew Jackson & Nicolas Jackson vs Darby Allin & Sting(c) (AEW Revolution) (03/03)

This was never in doubt for even a second. If the only worthwhile thing AEW had done in their entire history was give Sting a worthy retirement run, then it would’ve justified their whole existence. Of course, it isn’t the only good they’ve done, far from it, but the justice that they’ve done him is their single greatest accomplishment. Without AEW, Sting’s end in wrestling would’ve come from a truly abysmal WWE run and a terrible injury. With them, one of the best wrestlers to ever live got a sending off more than worthy of his legacy. Retirement matches have a rich history in this sport (even if most of them don’t actually end up leading to retirements at all), but, and this might be a bold claim, I do actually think that this was probably the best retirement match of all time.

It'd be wrong to talk about the match without the context of the pomp and circumstance that surrounds it. Firstly, the video package beforehand, showing Sting in a theatre watching career highlights before announcing that it’s showtime, for the last time, is magical. How the fuck AEW’s production team managed to make a complete-feeling package about the career of Sting without having the rights to any WCW footage at all is beyond me, but the crazy bastards did it. Then there’s Sting’s entrance, which is just so beautiful man. His little Stingers, all grown up, coming out in the surfer and wolfpack paint and gear, before he emerges between them…it really couldn’t have been any better than that.

The entire opening act of the match is just designed to be an absolute party, and it succeeds in every way. Watching Darby, Sting, and both of Sting’s giant sons throw themselves into splashes on the Bucks is beautiful to see, and the Bucks just eat absolute shit. Credit to them for how much they take here, how they’re so clearly swept up in the wave of Sting euphoria and don’t have an answer for anything. It’s an extremely giving performance on their part, as it should be. Their destruction is a celebration of the Icon, and it’s joy distilled. If you’re not hooting and hollering at Sting getting a double Scorpion Deathlock in right at the beginning of the match on those little nerds, then I truly do not get your mindset at all. Even when they do fight back, Sting happily no-sells, something which he has quite simply been the best in the world at since 1988, and is still a master at now. The joy is seeing the ultimate babyface completely shrug off a heel’s shoots was effective when it was Ric Flair getting punked out by the Stinger in the 80s, and it’s just as effective when it's the Bucks now.

Once the Bucks do get the advantage (naturally through cheap shots and eye pokes), we get to see the version of Sting that he embodied throughout his perfect AEW run: Sting the stuntman. Seeing him take big bumps off the stage through tables at 64 will never not be awe-inspiring, even if it spells the end of the party period of this match, setting up a serious challenge for him to overcome, because, once he’s taken out by his table bump, Darby Allin proceeds to take the single craziest bump of his entire career. The risk of performing like Darby Allin, where you take insane, brutal falls in basically all of your matches, is that, when it’s time to take the most important bump in the most important match you will ever have, it may not shine above your usual body of work. That isn’t a problem here, not on this magical night, where Darby dives from a ladder through a glass pane, and looks like he has fucking died in the process. It’s not the impact that’s the most horrifying part, it’s the blood, man. The way hundreds of little cuts open up across his back all at once, each contributing to his body becoming this twisted, gory work of art…it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Darby didn’t just pass the test of surpassing his normal big bumps, he obliterated them.

From here, we enter the heat segment of the match, the Bucks putting an unholy beating on our hero while he desperately hangs on. I feel it’s important to say that I am not a fan of the Bucks at all, they do not work for me most of the time, but this is the best work they have ever done and likely will ever do. They milk their beating so much, taking it slow and steady, letting everything they’re doing sink in while making sure to constantly cheat to maintain their advantage, using their numbers game in a way that, while not technically against the rules of a no DQ match, sure doesn’t feel just. Wrestling a 64 year old man slows them down considerably and it does wonders for their work, letting them focus not on the moves but on their impact, getting the most out of the pain they’re putting everybody’s hero through, taking joy in ruining a man’s retirement as they beat the fuck out of him, only to grow more and more furious as Sting simply refuses to stay down from each and every thing that they try.

Still, as great as the Bucks are here, this is Sting’s match. As much as his stuntman work caught the eye throughout his AEW run, it’s Sting the professional wrestler, the fundamental style, that makes him an all time great, that rightfully takes centre stage from here on out. He’s old, but that’s a neutral statement, and he turns it into a strength with his performance. He lets himself feel all of his 64 rotations around the sun in a way he never has before in AEW, and it makes him feel so scarily beatable. The veil of invincibility is gone, he’s slower to get up than he used to be, and there’s a real feeling that he could lose this. As ridiculous as it might seem now, watching this live, I thought the Bucks would win, and Sting made me completely believe that with his wonderful dying on his shield showing. Sting never lets the crowd feel that he’s completely finished, hulking up, throwing in small spikes of offence, dodging moves, choking the Bucks, no-selling one last table bump just to teach them a fucking lesson.

It’d be wrong not to mention the closest thing to a flaw that this match has: the involvement of Ric Flair. With Sting nearly down and out, he and the far less objectionable Ricky Steamboat try to come to his aid, only to both be taken out by the Bucks. If you find it impossible to watch Ric Flair in the modern day, I completely get it. I understand why AEW brought him in for Sting’s last run, but I obviously would’ve rather they didn’t. When you’ve done the things he’s done, there’s too much baggage. But, hey, at least we got to watch him get kicked in his stupid fucking face. For just one moment, the Bucks were worthy of cheers, but that quickly disappears for Sting’s finale.

It's only right that the saving grace of this, as much as Sting survives and hangs on through immeasurable pain, comes from Darby. Sting didn’t lose to anybody during his AEW run, but he put over Darby to an incredible degree, and this was his last act of doing so, letting him be the one to turn the tides in his big match, before he finally caught the Deathlock, and got the most joyous victory of the year. Again, I didn’t see this coming, I thought he was losing, so when Matthew Jackson tapped, I was on my fucking feet. It’s Sting. It’s victory. It’s relief. It’s joy. It’s what pro wrestling is all about. As good as wrestling got in 2024, and it wasn’t even close.

Unfortunately, due to the length of this review, I've had to split it into three separate parts. Click here to view the top 20 wrestlers of 2024!!