El McKell

A match that truly abandons all logic and having a narrative and only focuses on being exciting ***3/4

I love the absolute chaos factor of this, it's Muta Muta-ing to the true best of his ability when it comes to making the thing feel violent and unique. But also fuck Muta for just casually getting up and walking off like nothing happened and he's fine after getting pinned

Hansen completely fucks up here and they can all just improvise perfectly and nobody misses a beat at all, I really appreciate that a lot.

A take that aged like a fine milk

This is absolutely how I've felt every single time I saw him live, there's something special about seeing him do this crazy stuff both so gracefully & impactfully that I don't think other wrestlers I've seen in person match.

Excluding the 2 pre-NJPW matches Control gave when they nominated him I could give you: w/KENTA vs. Naomichi Marufuji & Ricky Marvin 27/09/08 w/Jun Akiyama vs Kensuke Sasaki & Kota Ibushi 11/02/09 vs Kotaro Suzuki 21/03/11 vs Daisuke Harada 08/03/14 vs Hajime Ohara 07/01/17

A rare instance of someone who I think has made his case worse since 2016. The cool babyface new japan junior stuff is so long since faded in my memory replaced with complete mediocrity in WWE despite being given so much opportunity while there to stand out and be something.

He said in his rant that if they have any issues with him his door is open to talk about it, they brought a HR person and went to his locker room. I don't see them doing this as wrong at all

There's like 10 people I've done a little look at while watching stuff for this project who are not nominated. And I'm gonna nominate 4 of 'em, although it's unlikely I'll vote for any of 'em Michel Saulnier A tiny man, a technical wizard, more fun for me to watch than any of the old French heavyweights. I like that he can be this kind of base or whatever in the matches against Le Petit Prince where he grounds his opponent but he also gets to show one of the most athletic wrestlers in his place and time in other matches. Michel Saulnier vs Jo Marconville (1959/12/11) Michel Saulnier vs Jean Rabut (1965/06/20) Michel Saulnier vs Le Petit Prince (1967/09/30) & (1969/04/10) Pentagon Jr Shocked nobody has nominated him yet and someone's gotta want to vote for him. Got himself super over in Lucha Underground with his personality and aura. Always carries himself like he's a star even when he's mired in mediocre booking. Not as spectacular as his brother, but still pretty adept at doing cool shit. In his best bloody/violent stuff he comes across really dangerous. vs Kairi Hojo, Mayu Iwatani & Io Shiari Lucha Underground - Season 3 Episode 13 vs Kenny Omega All In 2019 w/Fenix vs Young Bucks All Out 2021 vs Villano IV Mas vs Mask in 2022 TJ Perkins Someone with a sneaky good long career, pretty good in early PWG, Evolve, peak early 2010s PWG, probably the 2nd best guy in the cruiserweight classic (which for my money is one of the best things WWE ever produced), quite a few sporadic really good Impact matches, and then a really good Best of the Super Juniors this year. vs Kyle O'Reilly 2013/08/09 vs Kota Ibushi Cruiserweight Classic vs Gran Metalik Cruiserweight Classic vs Josh Alexander Iron Man 2021/06/03 vs Hiromu Takahashi 2023/05/19 Lance Archer He's better at presenting himself as a monster than really any other big man going today. He made his AEW dark squashes entertaining, he's good at making his opponents look good, and it's funny as hell that way back in 2005 he was super over in the Impact Zone because he went out drinking with the fans. vs AJ Styles 2014/08/03 vs Will Ospreay 2019/07/06 vs Adam Page 2022/02/10 vs Warlow 2022/04/27 I have also looked at Hikaru Shida, Dave Bond, Skayde, Sumie Sakai, Taz & Yuko Miyamoto. But I'm not gonna nominate any of them unless someone wants to see them in the nominees and doesn't want to bother doing the little write up

I really don't agree with this sentiment, seeing all but one of his OTT matches live i can say i think ***3/4 might have been the floor with the Osprey match being a ****1/2 star affair. There's no lack of focus with these for me with a clear booking plan in place for him, being the 1st person to pin Devlin in 2 years, winning the belt, beating Starr, losing it back to Devlin & being a key part of the reason for Starr's turn on Devlin. Expertly booked stuff with Walter playing his role perfectly and having several great matches (devlin's best matches), shame that it included a pair of guys who abused women but that's not WALTER's fault

well, I guess I've gotta watch that 1982 match & try to find that Chief Big Heart match

I included Buddy Rogers on my 2016 ballot but I've changed my mind on how many matches I need to see to rank someone and there's legit just not enough Nature Boy matches out there for me to include him. He's so so good in everything I've seen, but I'm setting an absolute 10 match minimum for myself, which isn't a high bar but there's not enough there for him to clear it.

I love that that match vs Akito is just thrown into the match recommendation list without any context or explanation, I hope someone watches it not know what they're getting into. In fact here's the embed for anyone who wants to:

There's something sad for me about someone like Alex Shelley who I've always had a positive opinion of, who watching more of them for this has only improved my opinion of but I know that there is no way I can put them in my top 100

After really enjoying the MITB main event, my god was the Roman-Jey match on this show really really bad

I dunno if 'sex pest' is the word I'd use for someone who threw a bunch of punches into the thighs of someone he had some kinda friends with benefits situation with.

That pin attempt does rule & that match was my favourite Solar match that I watched. My problem is less in the fact that the actual moves don't look plausible (neither does something as basic running the ropes, wrestling is full of that kind of thing) but especially in the Solar-Negro Navarro matches but in plenty of other stuff too, I'll see a weird submission and rather than any kind of escape attempt or anything the guy applying it just lets his opponent go. I can't turn my brain off for that I'm sorry to say because it just creates the impression that nobody's seriously trying to win; this is a similar problem to what I have with a lot of ladder matches from the past 15 years or so.

Having looked into some Solar, I cannot imagine a world where he comes close to making my ballot. I really think having a sense of escalation is so important for my enjoyment of a match and I really find that lacking in Solar matches, and the wacky submission holds and letting your opponent out of them stuff really doesn't impress me.

I went **1/2 on this, your typical Regal tv match where he does the little things all right but it never clicks for me as anything exciting, less than the sum of it's parts. I simply do not get Regal the way his fans do Anyway Tommy Dreamer isn't any good and wouldn't have been nominated if Sandman caned him less hard in 1994, but somebody's gotta wanna vote for him so we bump the thread.

A pillar of consistency for years and years, unlike a lot of the old school Dragon Gate boys he shines more in singles than the multi mans where he can fade into the background. Alan's post above is a good selection of recommendations but we could and should add the 2017-11-03 match against Mochizuki which hadn't happened yet at the time of the last post in this thread

I think it's really cool when he does an arm drag but with his leg, that's all.

Sabu is surprisingly the MVP of this match

I think with Bockwinkel we don't have to give any credit whatsoever to him for the earlier parts of his career we're missing because with just what we do have is someone being one of the best performers of the 1980s and that's worth a heck of a lot of credit for this project, I can pretend that his career starts in 1980 and he's done enough to make my top 50 easily. When making this comparison I think it's worth thinking about that if all we had of Bock was his best single performance (the Hennig match from 21st November 1986) we'd have more ring time of Bockwinkel wrestling than Megumi Fujii worked in her whole career.

They said in the discord server on July 1st "I will get this updated in the next week" so it's not forgotten totally even if they haven't followed through on that statement

I love reading stuff like this that is just so alien to my own opinions. I see Fujiwara as someone who has all the tools to be great in theory but has hardly any "all time great level stuff" to show for it, to me Bryan so thoroughly blows Fujiwara away in terms of volume of really great stuff that there's probably 200-300 people between them.