Kadaveri

By post-WWE do you mean post-2005 or have you seen his 2016-17 run?

I think the Goldberg vs. Undertaker match is pretty enjoyable if you just watch is as two prideful old guys having an ugly fight and don't go in with any nostalgia/wanting it to look like 1998. It's one of the least artificial feeling WWE matches of recent years.

I love this match so much. As great as their cage match was, it's something special that they were able to produce a match this good without having to rely on weapons or shocking violence like their last big match. Not that this wasn't pretty violent itself. The pacing is very slow in terms of momentum shifts. Aja takes control early on blasting Bull in the head and leaving her with a cut above the eye after a beatdown on the outside. Bull sells this all the way through to the post-match constantly holding her head. It's a full eight minutes into the match before Bull manages to regain control of the match, and then we get another 6 minutes of Bull in control. 14 minutes in a 90s Joshi match and only ONE momentum shift is very strange stylistically and makes me wonder if they did this deliberately and what the thought process was. The biggest wtf moment of the whole match has to be this move off the top rope though: What the hell was that. Bull also has one of the best versions of the "I can't believe they kicked out of that!" face in wrestling history here. Aja kicking out was actually a genuine shocker, she wasn't just going through the motions of reacting to a nearfall. Plus she followed it up by hitting a rarer finisher, adding to the gravity of it all. From watching AJW chronologically, this feels like the real moment Aja Kong became established as a top star.

I agree the "too much lengthy epics in RoH" criticism isn't really based on that many matches. But Bryan's a strong #1 contender now so people are going to overly focus on his flaws to see if his case really holds up, and that's fine and proper.

Worth noting that Bryan hasn't had a normal (I mean I'm not including gauntlets, Royal Rumbles etc) match go 30+ minutes since 2009. I think he's learned the right lessons from being in some excessively long stuff in the 00s and became a greater wrestler.

I don't hold those endless mediocre tags against him, but it does greatly limit how high I can rank the guy when his case consists of lots of 25+ min mid-tempo 50/50 singles matches worked in exactly the same style and... really not a whole lot else. Plus I get the feeling sometimes that he just isn't that good as wrestling different types of matches. The funniest example is the 2018 All In show where he was wrestling Marty Scurll in a match that was supposed to go 15 minutes, but he went 30 anyway as he had to get all his big nearfalls in and the main event had to be cut short as a result. Or there's the Gedo match which was right after Gedo disgracefully betrayed him in storyline yet Okada just wrestles it like any other match with no hate at all. The Smackdown 03/15/01 match where Austin just beats the life out of Kurt Angle for putting Debra in the ankle lock was a better match than that.

I think Joshi was better represented in 2006 partly because there were a lot of British voters and Joshi was bizarrely more accessable on UK TV in the mid-00s than WWE TV. The Wrestling Channel showed GAEA every week but Raw & Smackdown was on Sky Sports only and you have to pay specifically for those. People used to literally just stumble on it in a way that was near impossible in 2016. 2016 was probably the worst possible year for Joshi to run a poll as you're now 20 years after it was last in vogue in Western fandom, but right before Stardom started to get big and women got pushed as main-eventers in WWE (which has increased interest in women's wrestling in general).

We talk about all the moves that were copied from 80s Joshi, but what about all the moves that weren't copied from 80s Joshi.

Mariko Yoshida vs. Hiromi Yagi - 02/18/99 Mariko Yoshida vs. Mikiko Futagami - 04/14/99 Mariko Yoshida vs. Yumi Fukawa - 05/04/99 Mariko Yoshida vs. Aja Kong - 08/06/99 Some other Mariko matches I have marked as great last time I watched this stuff.

Even if it is necessarily better, I also want a list of wrestlers who consistently connected the first 5-10 minutes of their matches all the way to the finish while regularly going 25+ minutes. It seems like something that only Nick Bockwinkel and the 90s All Japan guys pulled off more than very rarely. It's the kind of flaw that may separate your Top 10 from candidates just below, but I can't see it being that much more damaging to someone's case.

I have similar thoughts on this. To me Dump Matsumoto isn't another wrestling heel and she's not a TV show character either. She's more something out of folklore, a mythological monster who just hates girls being happy and upsetting them is literally her only motivation for existing. AJW doesn't treat her like she's an official member of the roster; arenas full of schoolgirls enjoying seeing their heroes wrestle just somehow summons her to come and ruin their day. She's like an evil Tom Bombadil spirit creature.

I also really love Liger vs. Taichi 05/31/17. It's Liger's last ever Best Of Super Juniors match and it's such a wonderful individual performance I can't recommend enough for something I acknowledge probably isn't a "great match" in a vacuum.

If he's in that camp I still think he's at the very very top. We know Flair never thought things through, he always just depended on instincts to do whatever feels right in the moment. Maybe that's not 'smart', but the end product virtually always worked out fine. There are so many Kurt Angle matches that he ruins by doing totally stupid things, like how he doesn't seem to know any way to escalate other than spamming finishers, and if he's done that already then hitting finishers OFF THE TOP ROPE or something. I can't think of a single Ric Flair match that he ruins by making stupid decisions (I can think of bad Flair matches, but not because of that).

You should watch the Ronda match. That's the closest she's ever got to wrestling like that.

I split assessing a wrestlers performances/output into four parts, I'm not sure what to call them but here goes: 1. Top Output - What is the ceiling of quality a wrestler can produce? For example, look at their very best 10 matches and compare with another wrestler. This where someone like Mitsuharu Misawa is going to excel and deserves some extra kudos for, but someone like William Regal comes short and I think that means something. 2. Volume of Output - How many solidly good matches (like, over 3 Stars) has a wrestler had. This is good to measure a wrestlers consistency, commitment to giving the audience a good show and their adaptability (realistically you have to be having good matches with lots of different opponents in different settings if you've got a huge number of them). Rey Mysterio and Meiko Satomura are very high here. 3. External Input - Basically how much do they elevate their opponents, give people better matches than others do. Or for the best, how many wrestlers have had their best ever matches with them? Bayley does really well here even if she's weak (for a Top 100 candidate) elsewhere as she's regularly had decent-to-good matches with wrestlers who generally don't get anywhere near that. Triple H gets nowhere. 4. Individualistic Input - Not sure what to call this... but what I mean is how some wrestlers are just entertaining by what they do. It doesn't necessarily make a great 'match' and it doesn't necessarily elevate their opponents in any real way. But it's good, and it counts. Goldberg does this for me for example. In the previous thread a poster mentioned just liking "the way Stan Hansen approaches wrestling" and that's also what I'm talking about here. How much weight do I give to all 4? 25% each? Should some have a bit more weight? I'm goign to give them all some weight, but to what extent I think it depends on the candidate and where their strengths lie. I think to be a great wrestler, it's more useful to be great at 1 or 2 aspects of wrestling than it is to just be good at everything but not great at anything. That's not ALL I'm looking at for GWE, that's just where I'm at with assessing the micro of wrestlers performers with individual matches. Stuff like charisma, character work, longevity and excelling in different roles all matter to me as well.

I don't think he stayed 'good' as a whole in his later career really. He was still capable of good performances, but there's a lot more crap in his TNA run at least.

I think she's better as an interview/manager type character than a wrestler really. The only matches in her career I'd say are 'very good' are: 1. Alexa vs. Bayley - NXT TV 11/18/15 2. Alexa vs. Sasha Banks - Great Balls of Fire 07/09/17 Not really much of a portfolio, especially when it's arguably the #1 and #2 workers in the division at elevating lesser talent. I'm also not a fan of how she wrestles like she's 7ft tall despite being one of the smallest in the division. Her match at Survivor Series 2017 where she's physically dominating Charlotte Flair and throwing her around just looked stupid.

I find her to be the ultimate attrition candidate. She doesn't have as many classics as you might expect from someone of her reputation, but the amount of really good matches over a 25+ year period now is colossal, and she's still adding more having just started an NXT run. Plus she seems to somehow never get injured. By 2026 she may have had more good matches than anyone in wrestling history. I have seen her live a few times in the UK, since 2016 she's really added to her case by touring the European indies fairly regularly. I'm going to try watch as many of those matches as there's a lot of fresh opponents in there. Also as we seem to have just missed it last time around, her match against Io Shirai on 12/23/15 was (along with the Kairi matches) important to introducing her to a new generation of fans.

Another match from this run people should watch is the 02/10/16 title defense against Carmella. Again it's just 'good', but I struggle to think of a single above-average singles match Carmella had had in her whole career at that point and for a good few years afterwards as well. Asuka and Charlotte in 2018 couldn't get anything decent out of her. That whole 2015-16 title run was Bayley facing limited/green workers and getting career matches out of them.

You really saw a horrible vision of the future here. Unless he digs himself out of this hole pretty quickly I can't vote for Gargano. My usual way of thinking for this is every wrestler I'm considering for this has a timespan where they make their case, and at some point I draw a line. I'll give them a bit of a bonus if they continue having some great performances after they're old, but I won't penalise them for not being very good when they're past their prime. With Gargano though, as far as I'm concerned this still is his prime, he's just filling it with terrible matches. I'm gonna have to take that into account as much as I disqualify Triple H for having so many bad matches in the 00s even if there were some great ones in there too. It's a shame because the Takeover: Toronto match with the Revival and the Andrade match in Philadelphia are two of my favourite WWE matches ever. I don't take those away from him. They're just dragged down by all the horrible matches since where he seems to have learned all the wrong lessons. He's been the centrepiece of NXT's change of style which killed the show for me, a show I used to watch every week in 2014-17.

JoeG is talking about the April match, Kawada is talking about the July match. Both awesome finishes.

I know 'Ric Flair' is a boring answer at this point, but he really does have a match on tape with the majority of non-Lucha candidates right from the 1970s to the early 00s, and you know his opponent will be bringing their A Game most of the time because they're wrestling the NWA World Champ or at least a legend in a big match. I also think there's more variety in his matches than a lot of people think. Some of them are his 'formula' match, but that also usually tells you that his opponent wasn't a top worker at the time (or at least Flair didn't consider them to be), but then there's matches like the Ricky Morton or Wahoo McDaniel matches which are completely different and are essentially showcases. In a lot of ways Daniel Bryan is the spiritual successor to Ric Flair, he covers this ground from the early 00s onwards (including the lack of Lucha opponents...) A less obvious candidate for this I'd say would be Roderick Strong, who I'm gonna be pushing as a Top 100 guy later on. He's not as good a wrestler as Bryan or Flair but he has consistently been having very good-great matches in numerous promotions for about 15 years now. A similar guy to Kenta Kobashi but for a later time period is Jun Akiyama. He's right there through most of 90s All Japan but he's also a (though never the) top guy in NOAH throughout the 90s and most recently has had recent runs in All Japan and DDT as well. The fact that he's never been anything less than 'good' pretty much his entire career is a bonus too Mick Foley will get you across 90s WCW, ECW and WWE plus a bit of Japan as well. He has a nice habit of turning up in promotions just as their in-ring was getting better. These are some more names if you're looking at a specific promotion/era. Post-2005 WWE men - John Cena or Rey Mysterio 2000-2005 WWE (weird transitional time) - Eddie Guerrero 1996-00 WWE - Mick Foley WWE "Women's Revolution" era - Sasha Banks 1995-01 WCW - Diamond Dallas Page 1991-95 WCW - Dustin Rhodes ECW - Sabu 2002-2013 TNA - AJ Styles 2002-09 RoH - Bryan Danielson 2010-17 US Indies - Chris Hero 2001-10 US Indies - Low Ki 2010s UK & Ireland Indies - Will Ospreay Post-2007 New Japan - Hiroshi Tanahashi 90s New Japan - Hiroshi Hase 90s All Japan - Kenta Kobashi 1974-91 All Japan - Jumbo Tsuruta WOS - Steve Grey Stardom - Mayu Iwatani 2001-2018 Joshi - Meiko Satomura 1993 - 2001 Joshi - Aja Kong 1980 - 1993 Joshi - Devil Masami

The Northern Ireland vs. Ukraine game today had the most absurd foul in the history of soccer.

I think with Austin it's easier because he was punished by the justice system for what he did, has shown contrition when talking about it and (afaik) hasn't done anything bad for almost twenty years now. There's a sense of closure to it; whereas the main purpose of Speaking Out etc is to deliver consequences for unrepentent abusers where official channels have failed.

With great regret, from what I've seen Mayumi Ozaki may be the worst wrestler of the last decade who's regularly pushed as a main event act. Truly dreadful stuff. Best to consider her career over by 2003 honestly.