WINC Watchlist: Ricochet’s Best Matches

Ricochet is the present AEW National Champion and remains to be pulling off incredible feats of athleticism after greater than 20 years within the wrestling business. Debuting back in 2005, Ricochet would evolve from being a long-haired kid with loads of spring in his step, to being certainly one of the influential high flyers the wrestling business has ever seen. He might get under people’s skin on social media, but there is a reason why Ricochet talks so highly of himself and it’s because he can back up all the pieces he says.

To place it simply, the best way some people wrestle today simply would not be possible without Ricochet. He took the athleticism reserved for Olympic level gymnasts, the aerial assault of the “flippiest” Luchadors from Mexico, the raw physicality of the Japanese style, and combined all of it to create a personality unlike anything the business had ever seen. Until Ricochet got here along, moves which are now commonplace due to him only existed throughout the confines of a video game or someone’s imagination, but not only did he bring those moves to life, he made them look effortless as well. Through the years, he has toned down his aerial offense in favor of just annoying everyone in AEW to the purpose where people will consistently ridicule him for being bald. Nevertheless, he can still take to the skies when needed, reminding fans that while gravity can have forgotten someone like PAC, gravity never even met Ricochet to start with.

Throughout Black History Month, we have highlighted a number of the finest black wrestlers and gave you some recommendations on what matches of theirs to look at, and now it is time for “The One and Only” to get the highlight. Ricochet has wrestled everywhere in the world over the past 20 years which gave us a novel opportunity when putting this list together, let’s have some variety. This watchlist will showcase five matches from five different promotions with one common goal, to prove that Ricochet is pretty much as good and influential as he claims to be. 

Honorable mentions go to his wars with Zack Sabre Jr. in WSW, EVOLVE, and wXw, certainly one of his earliest encounters with Claudio Castagnoli in CHIKARA, and the three-way match from AEW WrestleDream 2024 that saw Ricochet, Will Ospreay, and Konosuke Takeshita go to war over the AEW International Championship. With all of that out of the best way, listed here are five of the best matches from the entertaining profession of Ricochet!

It’s infrequently that an organization like Dragon Gate gets coverage on a site like this, which is a shame at times because it remains to be some of the consistently entertaining firms on the planet. Born out of the ashes of Ultimo Dragon’s Toryumon promotion in 2004, Dragon Gate has quietly been some of the influential firms in your entire world because of the emphasis on quick, junior heavyweight wrestling that offers high flyers and smaller performers a likelihood to take the highlight. So what higher promotion to platform someone like Ricochet than Dragon Gate?

By the summer of 2013, Ricochet had been a gaijin fixture of the Dragon Gate roster as each a face and heel, but he was known globally as the one best high flyer in all of wrestling on the time and this was on full display on this match from the Kobe Pro-Wrestling Festival. As a part of World-1 International, Ricochet and Naruki Doi looked to take the Open The Twin Gate Championships (Dragon Gate’s version of tag team titles) away from BxB Hulk and Akira Tozawa of MAD BLANKEY, two men who had held each tag and trios gold together up to now. Ricochet and Doi weren’t regular partners which gave Hulk and Tozawa the advantage heading into it, however the champions knew what they were up against of their first defense of the straps.

The heels have one gameplan, keep the challengers grounded, especially Ricochet. They take every low-cost shortcut that they’ll consider with the intention to stay on top of the challengers, even bringing steel chairs into motion while the referee is distracted. Hulk and Tozawa know that Doi is a dynamo within the ring that may and can run off the ropes as fast and hard as he possibly can, a feat only topped by Masato Yoshino, and the indisputable fact that Ricochet will fly far and wide when given the prospect, and when they can not keep the foreigner down for long enough, he makes the recent tag and all hell breaks loose.

The second half of this match is absurdly good, kicking off with Ricochet doing a Springboard Shooting Star Press to the skin to take out all of MAD BLANKEY and it just doesn’t stop. There may be a growing sense of escalation as every move just gets greater and more spectacular, you sit there and wonder what’s going to actually put these guys down for the count? Ultimately, it’s Ricochet hitting a Double Moonsault with absolute precision to get the win and grow to be recent champions with Doi in the method. For those who’ve never watched Dragon Gate, that is an ideal entry point because when these guys get going, they really get going. Ricochet was the perfect high flyer on the earth, and truthfully there won’t be anyone who has come near this version of him since. Incredible stuff.

Irrespective of what some people might need you suspect, Ricochet was in reality Prince Puma (I do know, I didn’t consider it at first either). Due to his work in Japan in addition to the assorted independent promotions around america, Ricochet not only signed on to be a part of the inaugural Lucha Underground forged, but was also made the highest babyface and arguably the face of the promotion during its formative stage. 

Puma was put through his paces throughout the primary season of Lucha Underground. He won the first-ever Aztec Warfare match, which had a likelihood of creating this list, to grow to be the inaugural Lucha Underground Champion. He needed to cope with behemoths like Big Ryck, Cage, and Hernandez, and had virtually all the Lucha Underground roster coming after him as Dario Cueto naturally let his money do the talking by promising loads of money to whoever ruled The Temple. Johnny Mundo was certainly one of Puma’s essential rivals as they essential evented the pilot episode with Mundo getting the victory, so when he went to Cueto with the thought of a title match against Puma, Cueto proposed the first-ever “All Night Long” match.

In brief, this was 45 minute Iron Man match with no disqualifications and no count outs. Whoever ended the episode with probably the most falls would depart The Temple because the Lucha Underground Champion, virtually assuring themselves a spot within the essential event of certainly one of the Ultima Lucha shows at the top of the season. Due to the structure of Lucha Underground’s episodes, matches like this and things like two-out-of-three falls matches really work perfectly. Puma gets the fast rollup to get an early lead after which there is a business. The motion spills to the skin where Mundo uses a crowbar to not only even things up, take a break for commercials. Mundo hit Puma so hard with the crowbar that he can follow up with the Moonlight Landing, a Springboard Dropkick, and the End of the World to get three more falls for a commanding lead, after which one other break.

It is a classic Iron Man arrange where the babyface must do something truly spectacular to get back into the match, and he does this by plummeting himself and Mundo through 4 tables from the band stage to chop the lead in half. Puma follows up with one other fall which causes Mundo to panic and check out keep his distance, but this prompts Alberto El Patron to force Mundo back into the match which we could have refrained from to be honest, however it is sensible in storyline. Things are whilst three minutes are left on the clock, and after a frantic final sequence, Puma hits the 630 within the dying seconds to retain his title. Among the best modern Iron Man matches to happen in america, and one other classic Lucha Underground spectacular.

The P in PWG really should just stand for party because that’s what this promotion was. Pro Wrestling Guerrilla began life as just one other independent promotion for guys on the west coast to not only have one other place to work, but to also get monetary savings on cross country flights to all the essential indie firms that ran on the opposite side of the country. It will eventually turn right into a melting pot of a number of the most hilarious comedy matches you’ve got ever seen, a glimpse into wrestling’s future with the quantity of stars who passed through the doors of the American Legion Post #308, and above all, probably the most insane displays of athleticism you would find in america.

By the mid-2010s, PWG had established itself because the indie company everyone desired to work for. Despite independent wrestling experiencing a boom period presently, PWG simply couldn’t be topped and matches like this are a primary example as to why. Ricochet was already established as the person with springs for legs because of his work in Japan and Lucha Underground. Matt Sydal was arguably probably the most well-known because of his time as Evan Bourne in WWE and had been forming quite a partnership with Ricochet in NJPW. Will Ospreay was still in his childhood as a wrestler, but “The Aerial Assassin” was already carving out a giant name for himself internationally and was riding high off the back of winning the NJPW Better of the Super Juniors tournament within the spring.

They were taking over Adam Cole and The Young Bucks, higher referred to as the Superkliq, who were household names in PWG at this point, and were riding the Bullet Club wave of momentum and were proving that you just didn’t need WWE to make a living in wrestling in the event you put enough effort into your craft. With these six guys, you already know what you are getting yourself into, but even then it really does exceed expectations.

Outside of a small botch at the beginning, that is certainly one of the quintessential PWG matches and some of the picture-perfect spot-fests you’ll ever see. It’s a celebration match. There is no real story aside from you boo the Superkliq for being heels and also you cheer their opponents because they’re babyfaces. That is it, that is all it’s worthwhile to know. All you do once you’ve got got that down is sit back and marvel at what these guys do over the following 20 minutes. The closing stretch really is something to behold because it has the place jumping up and right down to the purpose where the camera starts shaking. Ospreay cuts off a Meltzer Driver (who’s within the front row by the best way) with a Springboard Cutter, Ricochet and Sydal hit their very own Shooting Star variant of it, before all three faces hit simultaneous Shooting Stars for the win. The final word party match.

Latest Japan Pro Wrestling through the 2010s was arguably the most popular wrestling promotion in your entire world and it wasn’t simply because of what was happening within the essential event scene. NJPW has all the time prided itself on having a top notch junior heavyweight division, a lot in order that the Better of the Super Juniors tournament has grow to be a serious highlight of the Latest Japan calendar each yr. Nevertheless, there was one match in 2016 that broke out of the conventional viewing circles and divided your entire business.

Ricochet and Will Ospreay had a match that some people viewed as being the most effective matches in recent memory, after which there have been those that absolutely despised it to the purpose where they thought the wrestling business itself would die overnight. The individuals who liked it appreciated the raw athletic ability of each men and having the ability to create such a highwire act within a wrestling ring, and the individuals who hated it thought it was only a choreographed gymnastics routine that exposed the indisputable fact that wrestling, contrary to popular belief, is definitely pre-determined. 

One yr on from that infamous match within the 2016 Better of the Super Juniors tournament, Ricochet and Ospreay were once more drawn in the identical block for the 2017 tournament, meaning that the match that had the wrestling world talking would indeed be getting a sequel. It’s infrequently that wrestling firms can capture lightning in a bottle twice, and in fairness to NJPW, the corporate wasn’t trying to try this with this one. As a substitute, this match is more of a “essential event” version of the match that happened 12 months ago.

Due to the indisputable fact that the unique bout went viral, Ospreay and Ricochet ended up wrestling one another rather a lot between then and this match, leading to a level of chemistry that was second-to-none. They begin off slow with some chain wrestling and attempting to keep one another down, each knowing what they’re able to after they get a bit little bit of momentum behind them. After a couple of stand-offs, Ricochet and Ospreay think then is the perfect time to kick things up a notch, and after redoing the sequence that made them famous a yr earlier, things only get more intense from there.

I fully understand the folks that don’t love this match, and yes it’s incredibly obvious that every one of their stuff is planned ahead of time. Nevertheless, I fall into the camp of people that can sit back, chill out, and permit my jaw to fall off my face by watching these two guys do a number of the most amazing things which have ever taken place inside a wrestling ring. It is the closest thing you may get to a real-life battle that you just’d see on an episode of “Dragonball Z” or in a video game and it’s wonderful. Of all of the matches these two had together, that is the closest they got to perfection.

After flying through the Japanese skies, dominating temples, and flipping his way through every major indie promotion on the earth, there was only ever one place that Ricochet would find yourself by 2018, WWE. For years he was considered to be the most effective wrestlers on the earth to never wrestle for WWE, but that every one modified when he put pen-to-paper on a contract that will give him the prospect to indicate the largest audience conceivable what all of the fuss was about. 

While not technically his “WWE NXT” debut as he wrestled against the likes of Buddy Murphy, Fabian Aichner, and Riddick Moss in dark matches and at live events between January and March, the six-man Ladder Match to find out the inaugural NXT North American Champion at NXT TakeOver: Latest Orleans can be the primary time that the WWE Universe would get to see “The One and Only.” There was one problem for Ricochet, or should I say five problems as the remainder of the sphere was filled with “NXT” names who were firing on all cylinders on the time. 

Adam Cole was the person who knew best within the match and was on the cusp of dominating “NXT” because the leader of The Undisputed Era. Lars Sullivan was being built up as an unstoppable beast with no known weaknesses. The Velveteen Dream was some of the charismatic performers within the business on the time and had the flexibility within the ring to back it up. Killian Dain was the muscle of SAnitY and was becoming the surprise breakout star of the unhinged stable, and EC3 might need also been making his WWE return on this match, but he was riding the wave of momentum he created for himself by being certainly one of the largest modern stars for Impact Wrestling, now once more referred to as TNA.

Before I rewatched this match, I remembered it as being a showcase for Ricochet first and a multi-man Ladder Match second, and while Ricochet does exhibit greater than most on this one, everyone does an exceptional job. Dain and Sullivan are the brutes who can provide as much as they’ll take, Cole and EC3 are the egotistical jerks who also get their moments within the sun, Dream is the wildcard who swans his way through this match, and all five men produce genuinely awe-inspiring moments throughout.

With that said, Ricochet really is the star of the show. In any case, the primary move he performs is a Springboard Shooting Star Press to the skin, he isn’t in WWE to be one other name on the roster, he’s there to be a show-stealer. The Moonsault to the skin whilst being tipped off the ladder is incredible, each time he goes to the highest rope you might be on the sting of your seat, and even the bumps he takes are nasty enough to think there is not any way he can stand up. It’s Cole who walks away with the win, but Ricochet was the person everyone was talking about after this contemporary classic.