[2020-01-26-WWE-Royal Rumble] Daniel Bryan vs The Fiend

[ShittyLittleBoots]

Even better than their already-excellent SurSer meeting. A "psychological thriller" in a pro-wrestling ring of sorts, and the kind of a match that I feel like not many could make work, but you just knew the greatest of all-time had to do it again. ****

[Tetsujin]

I love Bryan and this is a great performance by him, but I gotta give credit to Wyatt for portraying his character perfectly. Extremely dangerous, but not invincible. Hurts a lot, but even he can be hurt. Taking away the stupid four corners gimmick saved this match, and these two gave as a semi-PG dog collar fight very memorable.

[ShittyLittleBoots]

Forgetting about the Fiend gimmick, Bray Wyatt just isn't a very captivating wrestler for most of the time. There's one man who seemingly always makes me forget about that when they face off though, and that's the man he was facing here. This is a great match. They incorporate the strap gimmick wonderfully into the thing, with the punishing shots of it feeling pretty brutal + Bryan greatly using it to his advantage by working/mixing his normal offense into it & also straight-up using it to brutalize The Fiend, for an example with the almost Unified-like spot around the post, but instead of using his opponents hand to repeatedly pull him into that post, he used the strap. The LeBell Lock with the strap later on was awesome as well. As were the usual Yes-Sequence kicks with the strap-shots in-between. The match is largely dominated by The Fiend, who's solid with it, but it really is Bryan's incredible comebacks & overall performance that propel this into greatness, imo. It felt like the timings for Bryan's comebacks, whether those were bigger or quicker ones, were just about perfect. Every time it seemed like the crowd was losing hope as Fiend was suffocating him with his monster work? Boom, here's an awesome, fiery, exciting sequence by D-Bry. Hats off to Bray too though; obviously with the character there's lots of limitations when it comes to how much he will actually sell in a match, but here the amount of no-selling & the selling when Bryan was doing his thing was just about perfect. He came off as an unbeatable horror monster perfectly, while also looking the right amount of vulnerable at the same time. Terrific match. Something about that Daniel Bryan vs. Bray Wyatt match-up at them Royal Rumble PPV's, I tell ya! ****

[Boss Rock]

Bryan absolutely busted his ass in this match. Great selling and really tried to work in unique ways to use the strap.

[Makai Club #1]

I didn't really get the hype around this. It was a Fiend match that wasn't the worst match of the year so it was better than expected but I don't see a quality match in this other than that. The match was essentially a boring beatdown followed up a fun comeback. And I think the Survivor Series match followed that formula much better than this. There isn't much flaws to pick out as it's not a terrible match, rather an unexciting one. Bryan getting a slightly average match out of a terrible wrestler is cause for praise but the match itself doesn't warrant it, imo.