2015 Awards: Best Major Show
This is always a big one.
We’ll start up north with Takeover: Brooklyn which had one of the best one-two main events I’ve ever seen, though Bayley vs. Sasha still should have gone on last. The crowd helped this one a lot as everyone was losing their minds over what they were seeing. It’s a great show and the real main event is probably the match of the year.
There’s also Wrestle Kingdom IX which was the usual stacked New Japan card with one great match after another. The problem here though, as usual, is how long the show is. I really liked the action but they could have cut at least half an hour off. The show was shorter than usual but it still felt long, which isn’t a good thing. This is way up there for the action alone.
Speaking of action we have Ultima Lucha, which combined to go three hours and had some great culminations to some awesome feuds and stories. Believe it or not it was probably the Vampiro match that stole the show with the old retired Vampiro going full on insane one last time before revealing that he had been Pentagon’s master the whole time. The rest of the card is (mostly) awesome and it was a great cap to one of the biggest surprises I’ve ever seen with Lucha Underground.
Now we have one of the usual suspects in Wrestlemania. You can’t have a discussion of major shows without looking at the biggest show of the year and Wrestlemania was a shocking surprise. The thing is, people said that it probably wouldn’t hold up as well on a second viewing and that wound up being the case as the redo dropped a little bit. The thing with Wrestlemania XXXI was how low people’s expectations were coming in. Most people, including myself, thought the show looked like a disaster on paper but it wound up being a really strong outing.
Finally though, there’s Takeover: London. I think the subtitle I used for this show sums it up better than anything else: what a great night of wrestling matches. The worst match on the card was totally fine (Crews vs. Corbin) and the next worse match received a strong B. NXT is the it promotion for a strong card with well built stories that pay off in the end and London might have been the strongest. Anytime you get a Sting vs. Vader story like they had in Bayley vs. Jax, you know you’re in for a good night. This was my favorite big show of the year and I’m almost certain it’s going to have the required staying power.
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I would throw Summerslam in the conversation as well. You had a double Main Event in Taker/Brock and Rollins/Cena that both were built well plus delivered. Kevin Owens/Cesaro,a surprising outing from Stephen Amell,Randy Orton/Sheamus is a decent opener,the Divas Match is solid,etc. The only dud is the IC Match but even that didn’t overstay its welcome. Plus they made it feel like one of the Big 4 adding in an extra hour and the hype it got on ESPN. I would throw in it behind Wrestlemania 31.
I’d probably put Brooklyn second so I have little issue here.
I would say Brooklyn, because beyond the Sasha/Bayley match, the Vaudevillians/Blake & Murphy match was awesome, and Breeze/Liger absolutely delivered as a hot opener.