Almost 5-Star Match Reviews — page 3

One of the most perplexing things surrounding today’s wrestling scene is why AEW continues to keep ROH alive. Most of the diehard fans who specifically like ROH shifted their attention elsewhere: either to AEW proper, New Japan, PWG, NXT, or even WWE’s main roster. Many commentators have called ROH a zombie promotion, an entity that doesn’t have a proper raison d’être. It isn’t even formally considered ROH’s developmental territory, even though lots of fans consider it as such.

And yet from time to time a surprise appears from this dying fed. In this case it was a match between one of the most tenured and respected wrestlers to ever grace the American independent scene against one of the biggest rising stars from the Land of the Rising sun. And when they clashed for the first time they were praised to the moon…but was that praise genuine or just in-the-moment temporary excitement?

When people talk about the best women’s wrestlers in modern times, two names that tend to come up a lot are Manami Toyota and Akira Hokuto. Both of them have long lists of incredible matches that many fans still go back to. Both of them changed the wrestling landscape. And both of them put their bodies through some of the worst physical punishment one can imagine, all for the sake of this wacky business we call pro-wrestling.

But these two women have only ever faced each other one-on-one a grand total of six times. Given that lack of regular interaction compared to their other opponents, were these two as good in the ring as other famous AJW pairings?

Also, special thanks to Evito#, xXx_420_bLaZiN_420_xXx, Manjiimmortal, and jabroniville for the match suggestion.

2000 was one of the best years in WWF/WWE history. It was a year filled with wild brawls, Dusty finishes, multi-man encounters, and an ‘involve-as-many-people-as-possible’ mentality. Nowhere was that clearer than on the final PPV/PLE of the year, Armageddon. This show featured the first – and so far, only – time that six wrestlers were inside a Cell at the same time. It stands as a microcosm of WWF in 2000 as a whole, but how good is it in hindsight?

The Story

There were multiple overlapping stories going into this match. First, there was the ongoing Austin versus HHH and Rikishi with Austin wanting revenge for Rikishi – at HHH’s command – running Austin over at Survivor Series 1999. Then there was Kurt Angle who feuded with The Undertaker through the summer of 2000 and then moved on to WWF Champion The Rock, whom Angle defeated at No Mercy in October.  The story also included what is quite possibly the best promo The Rock has ever cut, and think about how much ground THAT covers.

Alright, it’s time to return to 1990s All Japan and check out another match from everyone’s favorite overachiever, Kenta Kobashi.

Kobashi’s matches have largely withstood the best of time better than most wrestlers to reach their peak in the 1990s. Many fans still remember his legendary wars with Mitsuharu Misawa, Toshiaki Kawada, Steve Williams, Jun Akiyama, and Stan Hansen. But there’s one opponent of his that doesn’t get all that much recognition by comparison: Jumbo Tsuruta. There’s an unfortunate reason for this: Tsuruta’s main-event career was cut short in late 1992 once he was diagnosed with Hepatitis. This was a crippling blow to an already beleaguered All Japan which was enduring long-term fallout from Tenryu’s SWS exodus two years earlier.

Tsuruta’s illness and unceremonious departure from All Japan’s main-event spot had its own spillover effect on the company: none of the Four Pillars besides Misawa got a critical singles win over him and Misawa’s was perceived as lucky and not decisive. Part of this was by design since Giant Baba was a notoriously conservative booker who took ages to pull the trigger on big decisions. It’s possible that Kobashi knew his chances of winning here were slim, but could he still get even more over with the audience all the same?

Kane and Shane McMahon are two wrestling personalities with…interesting…reputations. When he was fully active in wrestling Kane was considered something of a model employee. He always did whatever was asked of him and never complained or politicked. Even as his character was dragged through the mud and subject to some of the worst angles and stories ever conceived, Kane trudged along and did his best to make chicken salad out of chickenshit. Sadly Kane had to work with worse material more often as he got older, especially since his last non-Rumble appearance was in an awful tag match in Saudi Arabia.

As for Shane, he isn’t seen in as fond a light as he used to be. Over the past seven years or so the once humble and down-to-earth Shane seems to have succumbed to the family illness and fallen into egomania. Ever since returning in 2016 he has bought into this false notion that he’s a huge draw that’s worthy of being built around. He tried building a Royal Rumble match around himself which angered so many people that Shane was “let go” by WWE which, at the time, was still run by his father. The last time anyone saw Shane on WWE programming was at WrestleMania 39 when he tore his quad twenty seconds into an impromptu match with Snoop Dogg.

Both of these guys are prime examples of wrestlers getting worse with age, either due to being stuck working with bad material or sticking around way longer than necessary. As such, when their names come up most fans prefer to revisit their earlier work, which brings us to this match. Though it’s far from a technical marvel there’s still something intriguing in seeing Shane the (mostly) untrained wrestler try and survive WWE’s version of a supernatural slasher film monster. But how does it hold up with more than twenty years’ worth of hindsight?

WrestleMania 21 was a pivotal show for WWE. It marked the coronation of two of the company’s biggest stars of the next decade in John Cena and Batista. It marked the first time that The Undertaker’s Streak became a marketing/storytelling device for the show. It also featured one of the best wrestling matches of all time in Kurt Angle versus Shawn Michaels. And then there was the second match on the card, something new that changed the landscape in WWE forever: Money In The Bank.

What started as an annual gimmick evolved into one of the most repetitive and successful match types in modern times has grown to have its own PPV/PLE. Not only does this match usually lead to plenty of exciting and daredevil stuntwork but the results of each match have wide-reaching implications. The entire course of WWE history has changed thanks to various MITB cash-ins. And while some might argue that the match has become repetitive and watered-down, there remains enough excitement in the match for it to keep coming back year after year.

And today we go back to where it all began.

As of this writing Roman Reigns vs. Cody Rhodes II is the frontrunner for many fans’ Match of the Year for 2024. It isn’t hard to see why: the match had this incredible sense of spectacle with the highest of stakes and had one of the most emotionally moving conclusions in years.

It’s a pretty good match and probably the most outwardly explosive and surprising contest in years…but to call it some kind of top-tier epic comparable to some of the GOATs is tenuous at best.

That’s because this is match had the potential to be a classic but it got bogged down by a serious of dubious decisions that shifted the story in a way that was entertaining in the moment but distracting from the central narrative that people were paying to see in the first place.

The Story

Cody Rhodes won the 2024 Men’s Royal Rumble match fair and square without any shenanigans. It was a predictable win and his choice of title challenge was just as obvious: he was going to avenge his loss from the prior year and “finish the story”. He had much more momentum going into this ‘Mania compared to the previous years, having beaten Brock Lesnar, The Judgment Day, and WWE’s #1 shithead heel in Dominick Mysterio. There was no storyline reason for Rhodes to challenge anyone else or for Roman Reigns to defend his title against anyone else.

But leave it to ego and “business” to throw a monkey wrench into things.

The last time I reviewed WWE Hell in a Cell 2019 it was to revisit an infamous disaster and remind readers how little Vince McMahon thought of them considering what kind of shit he put together for their “entertainment”. HIAC 2019 stands as one of the worst PPVs in modern times because it started off okay with two good matches and then went off a cliff. Then, as the show was in freefall and we got closer to the bottom, we discovered that there were several sharp rocks at the bottom that would only worsen the eventual bad landing.

Circling back, though, apparently HIAC 2019 had at least two good matches on the card, one of which being the opener which was also an eponymous Hell in a Cell match. And while I can wax philosophical about the merits or drawbacks of opening a show with what is supposedly the most ominous and terrifying stipulation in modern wrestling, that’s a discussion for another day. For now, let’s see if this HIAC match between two women still holds up after five years of hindsight.

Ah, Roman Reigns, the poster child for infuriating WrestleMania main-events.

I don’t think there has been any wrestler in modern history to have such a contentious and controversy-riddled rise to superstardom as Reigns. He was once the subject to such intense fan backlash that the media, including those publication that didn’t even cover wrestling to begin with, commented on it. He was despised by vocal pockets of the fandom, pockets that grew in size with each passing year.

Things seemed to change course for the better in 2020 when Reigns returned and changed his tune to be something vastly different from before. He became what many people, myself included, argued he should’ve been as far back 2014: the soft-spoken ass-kicker with a Steve Austin-like neutrality that destroyed whatever was in his path. This new Reigns proceeded to shatter records and over time he was being compared with historic champions of the past. And the best part of this was that he had reached this new level of success and admiration without the creative handicaps that had been put on him before.

But despite turning a new leaf, there was still a noted blemish on Reigns’ career: his dubious WrestleMania record. His first two appearances were in Shield six-mans so those don’t really count. His first singles appearance was at ‘Mania 31 and that was a creative shitshow with the only positive being Seth Rollins’ historic eleventh-hour save. At ‘Mania 32 he was at his worst in terms of McMahon-driven booking and won a match so widely hated that he made histrionic Stephanie McMahon look like Miss Elizabeth. This streak of bad matches continued at WrestleMania 33 when he had a stinker with The Undertaker and then a rematch with Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania 34 that is only remembered for a backstage exclusive featuring Lesnar throwing the title belt at Vince McMahon backstage. Reigns’ match with Drew MxIntyre at ‘Mania 35 was average but forgettable. Things improved for him at WrestleMania 37 thanks to Edge and Daniel Bryan making for suitable dance partners, but when Reigns faced Lesnar for a third time at ‘Mania 38 it was, like before, flat and repetitive.

If there was anyone that could help Reigns have a good WrestleMania match that made up for the at times overpriced ticket to WrestleMania (and all the other insane expenses that went into the event for the consumer) then it could be ultimate babyface Cody Rhodes winning for his beloved deceased father, right? Right?

Stan Hansen is one of the most iconic and recognizable wrestling legends to spend most of his career outside of the WWE umbrella. Many older fans might remember him for his body of work in the US throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but to many younger fans he has another leg to his career across the Pacific.

Simply put, Hansen is the most venerated gaijin/foreigner to wrestle in Japan. Though guys like Hulk Hogan, Freddie Blassie, Bob Sapp, and André the Giant might’ve made more money over there, few men command as much respect as Hansen. He was feared the county over for his toughness and in-ring meanness. He was the ultimate example of using any recklessness or physical handicaps (in his case his poor eyesight) to his advantage. In a medium defined by cooperation, Stan Hansen gave off the impression that he was either going into business for himself or got the stamp of approval to do as he pleased as long as it drew money, which it did.

That said, Hansen’s great match record in All Japan – where he enjoyed immense success – is…a bit checkered. He managed to have some outstanding matches with guys like Kenta Kobashi but he also had some disappointments with others like Mitsuharu Misawa. So how would he do against Toshiaki Kawada, a man who had his own distinct style and seemed to have outstanding chemistry with pretty much everyone?

Any time you see the names ‘Mitsuharu Misawa’ and/or ‘Kenta Kobashi’ together you’re all but guaranteed to have a good time. I’ve seen countless singles, two-on-two, trios, and eight-man tags involving these two men and have yet to see anything that could be considered disappointing, much less bad or underwhelming. There’s a reason these two men are still regarded among diehard wrestling fans as two of the best to ever do it: they had incredibly chemistry the likes of which doesn’t appear all that often. There’s plenty of evidence of this elsewhere: the two were outstanding tag partners and they had amazing singles matches in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2003, many of which top fans’ shortlists of greatest matches of all time. But how were things even earlier than that? How good were they as opponents back in 1993 when they spent 95% of the year on the same side of the ring?

ECW was about more than just crazy hardcore bullshit. Sometimes it featured crazy hardcore bullshit but with LUCHA and FLIPS. And that’s exactly what these two smaller guys pulled off. In fact, these two had one of the better matches from ECW to survive to the present day, which says a lot given that actual ECW matches have by and large aged poorly since they were usually great examples of “great in the moment but not much else”. Let’s see how this one holds up.

The Story

Tajiri and Super Crazy began feuding at the start of 1999. They began trading losses on a weekly and sometimes nightly basis. They fought in singles matches, tag matches, and other multi-man situations. They fought on ECW’s televised shows and house shows, and even took their feud to Puerto Rico and to FMW in Japan. They even tagged together on a few occasions but those situations could be best described as “temporary, uneasy allies” situations.

By the time this match came around Tajiri had 31 wins while Super Crazy had 21, with the rest being either double losses or tag situations. With each passing encounter their matches got more violent and intense. Thus to reach the next level one of their televised matches would be booked as a deathmatch without any rules.

With SummerSlam just around the corner I figured it made sense to look back at one of the best matches to ever come out of that PPV. It’s also fitting since both The Rock and Triple H are so intrinsically tied to the company now. Man…who would’ve thought that, in the span of 26 years, these two guys would go from midcard gimmicks to the two most powerful people in the wrestling business today?

Pro-wrestling is a story of few successes in a sea of failure. Many companies have tried to succeed in this high-risk business only to fail after only a few years. This is more apparent in Japan where stories of promotions starting and failing in short order are more pronounced. Some failures were spectacular like Riki Choshu’s World Japan, Big Mouth Loud, Riki Choshu’s Riki Pro, and Wrestling New Classic. Others lasted a bit longer by either changing their product over time, which is what happened with the company we’re looking at today, RINGS.

Many people consider AJ Styles to be one of the best wrestlers active right now, if not the best. He has wrestled a veritable who’s who of big names over the decades: The Undertaker, John Cena, Randy Orton, Cody Rhodes, Kazuchika Okada, Roman Reigns, Hiroshi Tanahashi, Rey Mysterio, Shinsuke Nakamura, Will Ospreay, Kenny Omega, the list goes on.

But there’s one wrestler that he hadn’t faced before, one who might not be on many people’s shortlist of GOATs but one who has been a mainstay in wrestling for over 25 years. One who was so transformative during his prime that he has countless wrestlers around the world outright stealing from him in one of the biggest examples of ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ in the wrestling business. That wrestler’s name is Naomichi Marufuji, and he was handpicked to face AJ Styles in Styles’ first match for a Japanese wrestling company in ten years.

It’s often said that a good way to judge wrestler’s skill is the ability to wrestle against any opponent. Styles, who is often likened to Ric Flair or Shawn Michaels, is said to be so good at wrestling that he can have an entertaining match with a broomstick. But could Styles live up to this stellar reputation and deliver on a worthwhile main-event in front of an audience that hadn’t seen him in years?

Mark Henry is an interesting example of a guy who gets better with age. Though long retired, there seems to be a renewed focus on his career, especially right now courtesy of the YouTube algorithm. One needn’t look far to find fans of his talking about his Hall of Pain gimmick, his salmon jacket, or that five-star fake retirement promo that made him into an overnight sensation. But on the flipside, Henry has some detractors – or at least, critics – who’ve argued that his fleeting moments of greatness can’t make up for over a decade of mediocrity and underperformance.

Still, there’s something special about Mark Henry. Not only does he still have the real sports acumen that gave him immense credibility as a performer, but he has also served as a good talent scout, at least for WWE. And when CM Punk mentioned all the ‘wisdom’ that existed in AEW’s veterans backstage he mentioned Henry by name. So with all that said, was Henry really that good once he was saddled with a proper gimmick?

One of the many readers here at Blog of Doom said that this match should be put in a time capsule since it’s just that great. This is high praise given the breadth of great matches that’ve taken place over the past 35 years.

Then again, this IS Ric Flair and Vader we’re talking about. They’re two of the most highly-regarded American wrestlers in modern times. Flair is shorthand for greatest of all time in many fans’ eyes and some circles consider Vader to be the greatest big man to ever wrestle. These two men had already faced each other twice in singles competition with Vader coming out on top thanks to shenanigans. But now that WCW was putting on its biggest show of the year, could Flair break the streak and beat the most dominant super-heavyweight in WCW history up to that point?

When he was in his prime Mitsuharu Misawa’s career was the gift that kept on giving. Now, though, his career story has become the tragedy that needs to be repeated so that it doesn’t happen to others.

You’re unlikely to find a bigger fan of 1990s All Japan than me. It’s my favorite style of wrestling and I think so many of the matches that took place during that decade blow most of today’s wrestling out of the water. But the fabled King’s Road style came at a severe cost, one that wouldn’t be seen or felt until years and decades later.

Nowadays there are some people that, admittedly, struggle to look back at those same matches and not wince knowing how Misawa’s life would end. And so, Misawa and his cohorts have attracted some notable detractors who’ve criticized their in-ring style since it was so physical, taxing, and diametrically opposed to one of the core tenets of pro-wrestling: make it look like it hurts without actually hurting one’s self.

Nevertheless, Misawa was passionate about wrestling and kept going long after his physical prime. He was beloved by certain fan circles, to the point that he was given an incredible reception when he came to the United States for the first time in years. But was the match deserving of the reception it got, or was it a case of novelty overshadowing any negatives?

Many wrestling falsely assume that 1990s All Japan was all about the head drops and the excess. The truth is that golden decade featured so much more. The company was built on a style that was simple in premise but was executed flawlessly more often than not. That allowed the wrestlers to excel and create these easily-digestible narratives that, even now, are so universal and easy to follow that any viewer can just watch any random match and both follow along and enjoy it without ever being lost or confused. And what we’re looking at now is one of the better examples of that simplicity in action.

WrestleMania XX is usually remembered for one of three things: 1) The Undertaker’s bone-chilling return as The Deadman; 2) Brock Lesnar and Goldberg having one of the biggest stinkers in modern WWE history; or 3) the main-event triple threat match between Triple H, Shawn Michaels and…a guy that some people are still debating whether he should be mentioned at all (Chris Benoit).

Because those three things were so much more memorable by comparison, everything else on WrestleMania XX’s card tends to be forgotten. This includes a big singles match between two of the best wrestlers the company had at the time which, after twenty years, still holds up incredibly well.