NotJayTabb

Same here. I've already booked the Monday off work so I can stay up and watch Mania. I'll be watching it at Rileys at 1am onwards with some friends and a few drinks. One of my friends loves Ziggler and hates Reigns, I hate Ziggler and like Reigns, so there'll be some fun rivalry there. I'll wear my Brie Mode t-shirt because it'll be one of the few times it's socially acceptable to do so, then I'll drunkenly catch the first tram home in the wee hours. Even if the card is terrible (and most of the matches should actually be decent), I'll have fun

Asuka's aura is incredible when you think about it. She's not the biggest lady in NXT, and she's not got the build of a Dana Brooke. Her multi-coloured ring attire looks like a hyperactive kid designing his first CAW, and yet she can be terrifying with just one look. I'd honestly sooner have to fight tall, grumpy, werewolf-biker Baron Corbin than Asuka.

Going to try and keep this thread going. First, went to see HOPE Wrestling in Mansfield (19/2/15). HOPE started as an off-shoot of HoP Wrestling, and use a few local guys mixed with bigger UK names and the odd import. Since the end of last year, the company have booked a lot of shows around the heel stable Se7en. Se7en consist of one excellent worker, a handful of decent workers, and The Worst Wrestler I’ve Ever Seen. The first half of the show was based around them, with Chris Tyler’s victory over Lionheart being the best of their matches. MVP-lookalike Money Benjamin actually had the best match I’ve seen him in against El Ligero, including taking a superplex from the top rope onto the other stable members on the floor, but his defeat saw him kicked out of the group. Thankfully, “Rough House” Stevie Mitchell didn’t have a match. Elsewhere, Jack Jester beat Chris Dickenson in a decent bout (Jester is the HOPE champion, and has this magnetic aura that’s made him the leading face in the company) and Jigsaw beat Joseph Connors in a fun main event. The next week (28/02/16) I went to another House Of Pain show in Calverton. This was another decent show, and a few guys I’d written off surprised me with some good matches. Barricade is a guy I’ve found hit-or-miss over the years, but he had a fun semi-comedy match with Brett Ryans here. HoP champion Alton Thorne is someone who had never impressed me, and he was taking on the decent-but-spotty Ritmo, so my expectations were low, but they ended up having a great match. Thorne has always been a second-rate knock-off Barricade in my eyes, but they worked a giant heel/high-flying face match that really worked. Nice to have my expectations confounded. It was actually better than the main event between Juken and Alex Gracie, which surprised me as I’m quite high on both guys. The match they had was perfectly fine (after some excellent mic work from Gracie), but I preferred the Thorne/Ritmo match. Finally, I popped back to the lovely city of Coventry for Mother’s Day, and took advantage of being home to check out an AMP Wrestling show for the first time. AMP is the family-friendly offshoot of my favourite Brit promotion, the sadly-on-hiatus Triple X Wrestling. They seem to use a lot of the same wrestlers as TXW, but with some of the antics toned down (for example, Chris Brookes isn’t billed here as “a bit of a c**t” like he is in TXW). What heartened me is how full the venue was, easily 400+, and for a card with no imports and no real big UK names (the most well-known on a national level being arguably Brookes and Mike Bird), and how loudly the crowd reacted for everything. The matches were all super-enjoyable too. Bird had a fun match with local wrestler Rayador in the opener, the Henchmen took on Mike Peace and Chase Alexander in a really well-worked tag match that apparently paid off a year of storyline and sent the crowd wild, and Brookes had a short-but-good title match against 300lb champion Scott Grimm. The show finished with a Rumble that featured mainly local trainees I’d not heard off, but was still lots of fun. It ended up with Mike Bird teaming up with the Henchmen to try and eliminate Bison Brody. Both of the Henchmen and Brody are massive, massive guys, so the storyline saw the smaller Bird trying to get the Henchmen to do his bidding, until they got fed up of his orders and threw him out. This left them distracted and Brody managed to recover and throw both of them out to a huge pop. Honestly, I loved this show, and seeing a swarm of kids crowding round a victorious Brody like he was a member of One Direction was the most/best Pro-Wrestling thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Putting Lemmy in with Bossman, Roberts and Gordy would make this a very depressing HoF year

Rey is about 20 places higher than Eddie on mine.

There is a large gap between how much I enjoyed face Rick Steiner and how much I hated his presence as a heel. His late 90's run as heel TV champion in WCW was really bad TV

The video package did a really good job of putting forward her case for the HoF. Sadly, Booker did his best to downplay that by saying "She's the reason we call them divas"

I've no idea how Los Matadores didn't get more over. Really fun gimmick, especially with El Torito running awesome midget-bull highspot interference, easy crowd interaction with the Ole chant, and two really fun workers as the main team. It's kinda goofy, but I thought it was going to get over bigtime. Now, Primo and Epico aren't even making the C-shows. No idea what's happened to them

Doug is nominated. I've currently got him nestled in the 80's on my list

From a BritWres point of view (and not that any of them would make any lists), but the likes of Kris Travis, Mark Andrews and Dave Mastiff have resumes as good, if not better, than some other Brit indy guys named. Also Robbie Brookside feels like a notable omission.

Oh man, JBL was horrible there. I was watching it at 2am, chugging back a can of Monster to try and stay awake, and JBL's repeated braying made me feel like I was having some fever dream

Absolutely Dolph Ziggler. He's just terrible. Horrific overbumping that takes all the attention away from the guy giving the move, offence that either looks weak as shit or is a superkick, the dirt worst smarmy unlikable promo in the entire WWE...everything about him makes me want to cheer his opponent to beat his stupid faux-hair metal, Pot Noodle haired face in. Watching him in the Rusev feud was absolutely unbearable, the guy had no concept on how to come across as a likable human being. All this AND his Twitter handle is @heelziggler, which just makes him look like a tit

I watched a handful of Haku matches over the weekend, after JvK asked if I'd be voting for him in the Barbarian thread, and I realised he was a guy I'd not even considered. After watching 6-7 matches, I think it's unlikely he'll make the cut, though I'll try a few Meng bouts tonight just to make sure. I think Haku was a much better tag wrestler than singles, and I thought some of the Islanders stuff was really fun. Loved the match where they turned heel on the Can-Am Connection, as Tama and Haku just up the intensity the moment they stab the Can-Am's in the back. The Faces of Fear were a super-enjoyable tag team too, their match against Wrath & Mortis at Fall Brawl 97 was a really fun "big lads" match, probably the best bout of Bryan Clarke's career. What I did find was that, for a guy who often played the role of gatekeeper, he wasn't particularly intimidating (though I remember him being more so as Meng). There's a tag match I watched where him and Barbie took on Kato and Mr Fuji(!) and Haku ends up as face-in-peril to one of the least intimidating combos possible at that time. I also watched him (co-managed by Ted DiBiase) taking on Virgil and though he takes most of the match, I never thought "Oh, Virgil's in trouble here". His offence doesn't look particularly interesting, though his thrust/superkick looks more deadly than the Usos or Ziggler would do. Considering I was asked if I'd pick him in response to my selecting Barbarian, he's less imposing, has worse offence and is a less-interesting seller than his FoF partner. In the end, I left the Haku path on YouTube and let it take me to more Barb matches, including a really fun WCW match vs Vader.

Just in case anyone thought Ambrose might win the title, Michael Cole made sure to yell "Dean Ambrose has just proved he can pin the WWE champion" to totally drain the drama from the last 5 mins of the match.

Sami is great at working as an underdog face, but that match proved he shouldn't do it vs just anybody

It's really nice having a big show on a Saturday so that those of us in Blighty can stay up to watch it without having to book the next day off work (or show up ludicrously tired)

I've had a couple of watching projects I've slowed down on as I've been narrowing down my list, so I'm going to catch up with those. 1994 Raws, CHIKARA from the beginning, and I've been thinking about going through the Main Events and Superstars on the Network for some nice 5-10 minute TV matches. I've also got 2-3 months worth of Coronation St to catch up on, my girlfriend is getting annoyed at it filling up our SkyBox

I've got both guys in my top 10, but Bryan is on the bubble of dropping into the teens, whilst Rey was a #1 contender at one point, and will be top 3. Rey had an elite career, and was a weekly guaranteed good TV match for at least 10 years.

You know what, I'd not even considered Haku for my list. I'd always considered him the lesser Face of Fear, I don't find his offence as impressive as Barbarian (who I think is pretty agile and quick for his size) and he's not as generous a seller. I suppose I should give him another look for the interest of fairness, but he's pretty unlikely to. I'll revisit 5-6 Haku matches over the weekend to be accurate.

I worry about opening a can of worms here, but having watched a load of Barb's NJPW work in the last week, he's gone from the bubble to being a lock for my list. Only in the 90-100 bracket, but he's going to be in. I've reviewed a load of them for my blog (link in signature - cheap plug), but to sum up: Barbarian in Japan is so much fun to watch - he rampages through the crowd like a mad man, scattering the audience in all directions as he passes through. He's a fantastic offensive wrestler. Great legdrop, nice looking strikes, sudden diving headbutts and real brute strength - him casually doing reps with Kengo Kimura over his head looks great. He's also not adverse to sneaking in something unexpected when the moment calls for it - him countering an Inoki leg lock to one of his own was a pleasant surprise, and looked great. Defensively, he was much better than I expected/remembered. Having the character he does means that he's not a guy to be pinballing about, but his selling manner makes his opponents look great for how they wear him down. I mentioned above the way he sold a quick Inoki chop, but there's many examples - how he sold Fujinami's repeated chinlocks by taking longer and longer to gather his bearings after each one, how he sold Inoki kicking him down to the mat like a big redwood being felled, earning a big pop when he falls to the mat. A lot of his matches don't have satisfying endings, as often he get's DQ'd for using a chain, but that's on the booking rather than Barbarian. There's enough meat in his bouts with Inoki, Fujinami, Steve Williams etc to show Barbarian as a great wrestler.

I don't think you should rank him. If your instinctive reaction to watching a wrestler is so visceral, then there must be some factor that stops him being one of the 100 greatest of all time. As you said, no-one should be ranking a wrestler "because I'm supposed to" and I think everyone will have at least one omission that'll seem like heresy to others (apparently JvK isn't voting for the Barbarian!), so I think you stick with your instincts here.

Waltman is in my 55-60 section, think he's just been too reliably good not to be

So based on the "Bubble Watch", Henry is just above the relegation zone? That's pretty cool, esp as I seem to recall you weren't big on Henry.

This is something I've noticed going through 94 Raw, and comparing squash matches he had 2-3 weeks apart (and with the 94 Rumble in between). As a face, he was flashy, slightly vulnerable and made one of the lumpiest, most useless jobbers look quite competent. Flash forward to the heel squash, and he's a different guy, nailing his jobber with sharp back elbows and nasty looking uppercuts - you don't get that sense that Owen is having to learn to play heel the way some long-time faces do. First heel squash match, and he's turned into a vicious arsehole. I was really impressed with that.

Have you rated Mark Henry, or are you intending to? Just strikes me as a guy who'd probably score well on the BIGLAV metrics