Matt Hardy vs Christian

[Graham Crackers]

Both have similar careers in the same places, and seem like natural comparisons

[NotJayTabb]

Christian is more consistent, has higher highs and also higher lows. Hardy is probably a better tag worker, but Christian worked well as an undercard guy, in the midcard and as the ace carrying the brand/promotion in WWECW and TNA. Even now, in their advanced years, Christian feels like one of the better workers in AEW whereas Hardy feels like a relic. I definitely can't imagine Hardy dragging a decent match out of Omega like Christian did the other week

[Kadaveri]

8 hours ago, Graham Crackers said:

Both have similar careers in the same places, and seem like natural comparisons

I think it's fair to say 2021 Christian is a million times better than 2021 Matt Hardy.

[DMJ]

Maybe there was a brief time in the early 00s when this would've been a contest, but Christian pretty much left all of his TLC compadres - Edge, Matt Hardy, Jeff Hardy - in the dust once he came back to the WWE in 2010. From that ECW run on, Christian was arguably in the top 5 of the WWE's sizable roster up until his retirement even if the company never got behind him.

And that's not even really a knock against Matt Hardy who, from 05' through maybe 07', I think was one of the most consistently good in-ring workers in the WWE. I used to say/write that Matt Hardy wasn't a guy who was going to steal the show very often, but he would never stink out the joint - which is something you can't say about lots of bigger stars (Taker, HHH, Orton, etc.). His match against Orange Cassidy from Dynamite was a good recent example of that as its not exactly a pairing that anybody was dying to see but it ended up being a good fun TV match - something that became so rare on RAW, for example, that I almost forgot that something so simple could exist.

But Christian is just the better, smoother worker, with the better resume in singles competition, and I don't think its very close if you look across their full careers. I guess one could argue that Matt Hardy's Broken Universe could prove he's more creative or a better wrestling mind (though I'm not 100% sure that's accurate either), but if that's the conversation then Raven and Jake Roberts would probably be in way more top 10s...

[Tetsujin]

Gotta give credit to Matt, who I think always managed to reinvent himself and is a great pro wrestler... When it comes to character work outside the ring. When the bell rings, Matt is pretty solid but he almost always wrestles the same, he doesn't portray those gimmicks in his actual ringwork.

Christian is the better worker, no doubt. His consistency is crazy, and he also have more elite-level matches than Matt (Matt has The Final Deletion though, that's a fucking 5* to me).

[Boss Rock]

I think Matt's best singles match (Edge-Unforgiven) is better than any Christian singles match I've seen. But I think Christian has more volume, so I'll go with him.

[DylanZero]

On 9/4/2021 at 10:32 PM, Boss Rock said:

I think Matt's best singles match (Edge-Unforgiven) is better than any Christian singles match I've seen. But I think Christian has more volume, so I'll go with him.

Agree with this, and that whole angle I remember fondly as something WWE or really any company hasn't had at the time or since in terms of an energy, obviously because of the real life implications of everything. On top of it Edge was basically a negative IMO from his neck surgery on in the ring, Matt made that series in terms of wrestling to me. He's not been great the last decade though as a worker, Christian is still going strong to this day and I would rank him as one of AEW's best. Matt just runs out of matches compared to Christian.