Timbo Slice

Styles goes to the top for the Spiral Tap sometimes, which would make sense for why he went up top there. I thought this was good too, although I agree people throwing all that snow on it is a bit much. It might make my Top 10 for 2015, but I'm not even sure it was a Top 5 NJPW match of the year to be honest.

The New Day face turn is going to be the best thing ever this year. Big Mike will win the ROH title, drop it to a returning Daniel Bryan by year's end, but will also get a shot at the NJPW IC belt. Dalton Castle will win the ROH TV Title this year. Jeff Cobb will be a standout on Lucha Underground. An NXT match will get a top billing at SummerSlam this year. Bayley will get a call-up offer but refuse it. Same with Balor. Zayn will get called up and face off against Kevin Owens after WM. They'll feud throughout the summer. Cesaro will main event a PPV. Kota Ibushi will win the IWGP title this year. If not him, Tetsuya Naito. La Sombra will debut in NXT but won't be long for the main roster. Rush will sign with NXT, as well. Atlantis will lose his mask at the Anniversary show.

Really can't wait till you get to the Vader match, which is a candidate for best sub-10 minute match ever.

Ohtani always gets overlooked. Was really good as early as 22-23 years old.

Kansai's right there. She did have that crazy match with Kong with the cut hand that was downright uncomfortable at times. Not seeing it.

So 50/50 booking in WWE-speak is guy we push as heel that gets over as face or guy we push as face that gets over as heel...but do nothing in either scenario. Makes sense.

Load up the first six months of the year with as much wrestling as I can before grad school comes and whoops my ass for a year.

That match was fantastic in a lot of ways. First was the fact that there were as many guys in the stands as there were in the ring. Second was that they actually played up the damage right away and made it count. Third was me actually cringing at the headbutts on the outside. Fujiwara wouldn't have taken some of those headbutts. Finish actually worked with Hero basically finding any hole he could and exploiting it. Really great stuff from Rotten, who had some awesome fat guy matwork,

Yep, that's the Sato match. Fucking fantastic stuff.

They booked themselves into a corner with Rollins. Only way he could have cashed in with Lesnar was how it happened, really. Although I really do think The Shield reunion happening as opposed to another Authority schmuck is the right call. The ending made sense, but objectively, the main event shouldn't have a finish like that. Should always be clean, regardless. But hey, Vince has been wanting the ending to WM17 to happen again for almost 15 years now, so.

Judy Martin could go, and looking back at some AJW Classics, it was apparent that there was good women's wrestling from Americans back then. Sherri Martel had good stuff in AWA, too. It is a little bit of both, but Sasha really is turning out to be an outlier. The other women can work with her and she's the one who can really dictate things in a way that nobody else can out of that group. Bayley isn't as natural as Sasha is in the ring, but she's up there in putting things together.

This is a hell of a resource right here.

That's the type of match where from an archetypical standpoint, you think of what a match between those guys could be like and they do basically everything you'd think they'd do. Both guys are nuts, both guys lay it in, both guys have inventive and ridiculous spots, both guys know how to make it seem like a fight as opposed to a wrestling match. Just fucking insane. A feather in both guys' caps.

No chance. Mean Mark had no juice at all. His ability to get something over notwithstanding, generic badass wouldn't have worked.

I think the Bayley/Banks stuff is more amazing when you actually consider the environment it's in that they had those two matches that were that great and did what they did, all inclusively. The last time I remember any match that hit me on a level like that was the Shield/Wyatts EC match. Even Bryan winning the title at WM was a bit anticlimactic, yet they made it awesome with the HHH match and the way they booked the Triple Threat. Even if it was hokey. There's tons of bullshit on a weekly basis nowadays that take away from what you watch, but the really good stuff truly shines through in spite of it. Both matches are that way, but Becky/Sasha is even moreso considering the setting.

Great stuff, guys. The Gordon Solie angle shit was aces.

Dylan's thoughts echo mine in a lot of ways, but I push Brooklyn over the top because it was a unique atmosphere that added something that's hard to quantify to the match. I totally get why people pick that over Brooklyn, though. The first thing I thought about in trying to compare the two matches was the first two Jumbo/Misawa matches, where the first one had something the second one could never, ever duplicate. The second match was phenomenal due to how the character work between the two had been added to in the three months leading up to the rematch, and it led to people thinking the second match was better in many ways (an argument that's got just as much on either side as this one does). Now I can't wait for the Year End Wrestling Culture show because when we do our Top 10 matches, I'm gonna be very interested to see how Dylan and I match up with those four matches.

The subtleties here that end up exploding at the end of the match made this unique. Danielson loved working with Nigel and both of them are receptive to how the other guy wants to lay out the match, which means there's some really great bits throughout that actually make it a lot more than your normal ROH-style main event, which Danielson loved to subvert anyways. First thing here is when Nigel gets himself DQed and they get everyone from the locker room out to force him back into the ring. Wish they had actually had a visual restart instead of having it announced while they were going at it, but it still worked because it made Nigel an obvious heel from the start, which again detracted from the 50/50 stuff. That started the avalanche of heeling to follow, where it was obvious Danielson was whooping up on him and Nigel was going to have to change things up and the only way was for him to do something dastardly. The lariat to the side of the head where it hit Danielson in the surgically repaired eye and the headbutts after Nigel told Danielson he was weary of concussions totally made the match for me. The paradigm shift when Nigel hits the first headbutt because he knows he couldn't beat Danielson straight up and had to take shortcuts was great, as was the opposite when Danielson could have gone to the elbows and it cost him. It seems obvious now, but everything here was done in a way to totally turn the ROH style on its head in a way. Kudos to both guys for extending the feud out logically in a way that made Nigel an even bigger jackass and a top-flight heel.

Prazar had a tendency to get grating at times, though. I can see what Parv's saying there. The color stuff is way better than Prazak's actual call.

What's the date on that, OJ?

Wow. So Shoemaker's actually writing for ESPN, if you can believe it. With a horrible title, of course: http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/14166316/pro-wrestler-survival-guide

Bluetista.

Hope Eric turns in a ballot just to see how high he rates Pain. If he's on an IWA-MS card, you watch the match and enjoy him just brawl with anyone and everyone. Fewer wrestlers for me that are more fun to watch than Bull Pain.

Hashimoto absolutely destroying Masato Tanaka in 2002 is one of my favorite Hash matches ever. Might be the best brainbuster he ever did, too. I watched the Chosyu main from the '97 Dome Show and realized Hash made that match by basically beating the shit out of the old man. Chosyu picked his spots but I thought Hash beating the shit out of him made it at least enjoyable. Not a great match, but one of Hash's strengths was making something that could be mediocre into something that at least had something to it, which he almost did by osmosis anyways by being Hash. Can't remember if Riki was the booker at the time, but if he was, he sure took one hell of an ass whooping.

Figured I'd get this started ahead of RAW. No Nikki, who is injured, depriving us of Queen's Road. Stoked for NXT this week, but that's about it. RAW's gonna have to come out of nowhere again.