WINC Watchlist: Willow Nightingale’s Biggest Matches

Willow Nightingale is one in all those rare skilled athletes where irrespective of what you have been going through in your day-to-day life, each time she pops up in your screen, she’s going to at all times make you smile.

Probably the most positive performers within the history of the business, Nightingale is the dictionary definition of a babyface. Her “Smile Anyway Because Nothing Matters” attitude has made her one of the vital popular wrestlers not only in AEW, but in all of wrestling over the past few years. On top of that, she is not only a reasonably face with a giant smile, she will be able to go toe-to-toe with virtually anyone, male or female, with a devastating offense that harkens back to the All Japan Women’s heyday of the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, with the influence of stars like Aja Kong and Bull Nakano evident in the way in which she outmuscles and outperforms the AEW women’s division on a weekly basis.

On the time of writing, Nightingale is one half of the AEW Women’s World Tag Team Champions alongside Harley Cameron as a part of The Babes of Wrath, and is having fun with her second reign because the AEW TBS Champion. She is the primary woman in AEW history to carry two championships concurrently, the primary woman to win the TBS Championship twice, and if she ever goes on to win the AEW Women’s World Championship (which she should by the way in which), she’s going to develop into the primary woman to carry the feminine Triple Crown in All Elite Wrestling. In case all of that wasn’t impressive enough, she can be a former winner of the Owen Hart Foundation Tournament, and with Nightingale putting pen-to-paper on a brand new contract with AEW in 2025, she has loads of time to realize much more in All Elite Wrestling.

Over the past few weeks, we have put together a series of watchlists for a few of the finest black wrestlers to have fun Black History Month. We rolled back the clock to have fun The Rock’s profession, detailed the perfect matches within the profession of Swerve Strickland, and now it is time for the babe with essentially the most wrath in AEW to have the highlight. She’s one of the vital impressive female wrestlers on the planet right away, and already has a list of quality matches, so without further ado, let’s look back on a few of the perfect matches of Willow Nightingale’s super blissful, super positive profession!

Throughout the seven years that All Elite Wrestling has been in existence, one query that has routinely popped up is when will the ladies’s division primary event a pay-per-view? Toni Storm and Mariah May must have absolutely headlined AEW Revolution 2025, but as a consequence of May leaving to go to WWE, their feud ender was placed in the course of that card. Had Storm’s match with Mercedes Mone at AEW All In Texas 2025 happened at another pay-per-view, that might have probably headlined the show. Nonetheless, in Ring of Honor, the ladies’s division has headlined multiple pay-per-views since Tony Khan bought the corporate back in 2022, and this was the primary.

Everyone knows Athena lately because the “Ceaselessly Champion” in ROH. She has held the ROH Women’s World Championship because the Final Battle 2022 event and has shown no signs of letting her title leave her sight, but during her first 12 months as champion, she needed to cope with Willow Nightingale in a trilogy of wonderful matches. Their first got here in February 2023 where “The Fallen Goddess” needed to fight hard with a view to retain her title.

Five months later, the 2 women met within the semi-finals of the Owen Hart Foundation Tournament, and by this point Nightingale had already develop into the first-ever NJPW STRONG Women’s Champion, meaning that she had rather a lot more experience and rather a lot more fire under her which allowed her to get her win back over Athena. Nightingale would win the tournament, and just six days later, she was given the prospect to finish the trilogy with Athena in what is well the perfect match of their series.

What makes this match so great is that it is a natural escalation from their previous encounters. The primary match was where Athena didn’t take Nightingale seriously but still managed to get the win, while the second match she arrived with the identical attitude, just for that to come back back to haunt her. It’s here where Athena arrives with the look of somebody who’s possessed by the thought of ending this rivalry for good. Nightingale arrives with all the arrogance on the planet and is firing on all cylinders, wrestling more aggressively and on the front foot versus the opposite bouts where she needed Athena to make mistakes.

Each women commemorate the occasion by paying tribute to the ladies of the independent scene that paved the way in which for them to primary event such a show, nevertheless it’s when Nightingale kicks out of the O-Face when the group loses their minds. There’s an actual belief that that is Nightingale’s time, especially when she follows it up with the Babe With The Powerbomb, but Athena kicks out. Ultimately, Athena hits the O-Face and puts the exclamation point on things by forcing Nightingale to pass out in a Crossface. One in all the best match recommendations I’ll ever make.

While they probably aren’t at the identical level as them, Willow Nightingale and Kris Statlander share a whole lot of similarities with the stories of Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn in WWE. They’re each incredibly close outside of the ring, have amazing chemistry as partners contained in the ring, and even higher chemistry after they find yourself being opponents. By the spring of 2024, each women had firmly established themselves as two of the largest names within the AEW women’s division, but after Stokely Hathaway got in Statlander’s head, she turned heel at AEW Double or Nothing 2024 by attacking Nightingale after she had just lost her AEW TBS Championship to Mercedes Mone.

Things would escalate throughout the summer as Nightingale would get tag team victories on pay-per-view over Statlander, and even knocked Statlander out of the 2024 Owen Hart Foundation Tournament. Nonetheless, after Nightingale didn’t go back-to-back and lost to Mariah May in the ultimate, Statlander would also get her win back over her former friend in a CMLL World Women’s Championship Eliminator Match. By the top of summer, these two needed to settle their rating and Nightingale suggested a Street Fight at AEW All Out which Statlander accepted, but in doing so she forfeited her shot on the CMLL World Women’s Championship since the Mexican promotion didn’t want their title defended in such a violent match.

Given how this match actually went, it’s secure to say that Statlander probably didn’t care about any championships going into this one. Each women weren’t just out for one another’s blood, but they were out to prove some extent to the audience as that they had the unenviable task of getting to follow Will Ospreay’s match of the 12 months candidate with PAC. How do you follow a match like that? By beating absolutely the snot out of one another.

Street Fights and any stipulation matches with little to no rules are at all times best after they are rough around the perimeters, and this match is as rough because it gets. Every bump within the opening moments looks incredibly nasty, from Nightingale going through the Spanish announce table, to each women going through the barricade, to Statlander missing a Senton Bomb from the highest to the surface, just for her legs to catch Nightingale who was attempting to move out of the way in which, which if anything made it look much more gruesome. 

These two don’t waste any moment on this match as light tubes are smashed, they dive off the stage, Statlander takes a thumbtack bump that can make every woman on earth cross their legs, it just never stopped. The one way this match was going to finish was through exhaustion and Statlander managed to wrap a dog collar around Nightingale’s face for the referee stoppage in one of the vital chaotic Street Fights you’ll ever see. All Out 2024 is an throughout great show, and this match is a giant reason for that.

That is the kind of match where you might want to smoke a cigarette afterwards simply to calm yourself down (don’t smoke by the way in which, it isn’t good for you). Anarchy In The Arena has develop into one in all AEW’s signature stipulations together with the Casino Gauntlet, and just while you think that the corporate cannot raise the bar any higher on the subject of this type of a match, along comes the 2025 match to be as crazy and as wild as any match that has taken place ever.

The story going into this match may be very easy. The Death Riders had a vice-like grip over the AEW World Championship and everybody in the corporate had develop into sick of it. Just when Swerve Strickland looked like he may be the one to avoid wasting the day, here got here The Young Bucks back from an prolonged break to side with the Death Riders and make life even tougher for everybody. This created the bizarre alliance of Strickland, The Opps, and Kenny Omega to cope with the Death Riders and The Young Bucks, but someone needed to cope with Marina Shafir, the true wildcard within the situation. Enter Willow Nightingale, who had been at odds with Shafir and the Death Riders for a lot of months. Nightingale and Shafir were included within the Anarchy In The Arena line ups, all we would have liked now was the appropriate soundtrack.

For what it’s value, I do not think any Anarchy In The Arena match has ever come near capturing the raw energy of how naturally unhinged the primary one was in 2022. That was a match that was filled with hatred and spite, which the 2 bouts that followed in 2023 and 2024 didn’t quite capture as they only felt like everyone sat around and went “What is the craziest thing we will do?” This match nonetheless is the closest to the 2022 match as it is a showcase of a bunch of heels getting what has been coming to them.

It’s unimaginable to list all of the perfect moments for this match, but since it is a Willow watchlist, her and Shafir get a whole lot of the highlight and it’s wonderful to see. They’re fully integrated into the motion as they get their licks in on the fellows, with Nightingale taking a Cutter from Moxley and Shafir takes a Snap Dragon Suplex from Omega. There’s an incredible big brother/little sister moment with Nightingale and Powerhouse Hobbs wearing matching shirts and kicking all of the ass on the planet, and nearly all the motion in the primary half of the match is performed to the sound of “Bodies” by Drowning Pool because why would not or not it’s? I could be very interested to see what an all-female Anarchy In The Arena match looks like based off of what Nightingale and Shafir did on this one because they gave it their all right until the very end. The definition of the word fun.

The AEW women’s division has sometimes felt like an afterthought on the subject of the corporate’s booking, but 2025 saw strides taken in making the feminine members of the roster feel as essential to AEW as their male counterparts. Not only were Willow Nightingale and Marina Shafir involved in Anarchy In The Arena, they were also involved within the tournament to crown the first-ever AEW Women’s World Tag Team Champions, a tournament that saw so many alternative rivalries formed that there was just one match that would settle so many scores, Blood and Guts.

Up until 2025, only the lads had competed contained in the double-ringed structure, however the November 12, 2025 episode of “AEW Dynamite” opened with 12 of AEW’s finest women’s wrestlers putting their careers and livelihoods on the road within the first-ever women’s Blood and Guts match, and what a match it was. As a strategy to differentiate itself from the WarGames matches repeatedly seen in WWE, Blood and Guts takes the violence level to such a ridiculous length that some fans are actively postpone by the sight of ladies bleeding all over and hitting one another with weapons. We here at Wrestling Inc. aren’t those people, and thought this match was absolutely improbable.

We have seen the ladies of AEW beat the life out of one another and do some horrendous things to one another in hardcore settings (just take a look at the All Out Street Fight for instance), but they didn’t hold back on this one. Nightingale opens the match for her team and busts Skye Blue open to the purpose where I’m genuinely surprised Skye didn’t need a blood transfusion after every little thing had finished. It does start off slightly slow as a consequence of the business breaks interrupting the momentum of things, especially in the primary 10 to quarter-hour, however the motion quickly ramps up when more women and more weapons are introduced.

Nightingale does develop into a little bit of a background character because the match goes on as people Marina Shafir, Megan Bayne and “Timeless” Toni Storm develop into more essential to the general bout, but everyone plays their part splendidly. The Triangle of Madness slipping out of the cage to offer their team an excellent greater number advantage by getting half of their opponents on the surface. Kris Statlander taking a bump on a bed of nails, and delivering a Samoan Drop to Mercedes Mone off the cage through a table and Mone’s belts, and Storm surrendering for her team to forestall Mina Shirakawa from taking any more punishment as she is surrounded by broken glass. A beautifully haunting visual.

We have said it before and we’ll say it again, the WarGames stipulation is a quite simple one to master, and these 12 women nailed it on the primary time of asking. Now let’s have a look at what they will to top themselves when the second women’s Blood and Guts match happens.

Willow Nightingale has taken quite the beating across this watchlist so it’s only right that we close this out on a high note with a history making moment for the happiest member of the AEW roster.

Three weeks after winning the inaugural AEW Women’s World Tag Team Championships with Harley Cameron, Nightingale got the prospect to win back the title she only held for a number of weeks in 2024, the AEW TBS Championship. Her opponent was Mercedes Mone, a lady she has known for some time and, very similar to the story with Athena, had faced off with “The CEO” on two previous occasions, making this the trilogy match. Nightingale won the primary match back in 2023 when she beat Mone to develop into the first-ever NJPW STRONG Women’s Champion, but that match was overshadowed by Mone suffering a career-threatening ankle injury. The second bout saw Mone dethroned Nightingale in her in-ring debut for AEW at Double or Nothing 2024 to develop into the brand new AEW TBS Champion, but Nightingale was more focused with what Kris Statlander did after the bout. 

Between that match and this one, rather a lot had modified. Mone had develop into “Ultimo Mone” by winning 13 different belts and holding them concurrently, but her quest to develop into the AEW Women’s World Champion had dented her unstoppable aura, which resulted in her losing the ROH Women’s World Television and RevPro Undisputed British Women’s Championships within the span of a number of weeks. So as to add insult to injury, she couldn’t get the job done alongside Athena of all people when attempting to dethrone The Babes of Wrath for his or her newly won tag straps at Worlds End 2025, with Nightingale even getting the pin on “The CEO.”

All of that results in this match which shares a whole lot of similarities to the Death Before Dishonor battle with Athena. The champion enters with a deranged level of determination while the challenger may be very much on the attack from the opening bell. Nightingale is on the offensive to begin things off but Mone is capable of weather the storm and take control of the match for the primary half. It’s because the match goes on you may see Mone get increasingly more annoyed on the proven fact that Nightingale just is not going to go down, but she is sensible enough to permit Nightingale to attempt to escalate the motion by countering a Babe With The Powerbomb on the announce table right into a Suplex of her own, and moving out of the way in which of a rare Nightingale Moonsault.

Ultimately, too many slams and power moves from the challenger signifies that Mone cannot hit the Mone Maker, she will be able to’t get a superb grip on the Statement Maker, and Nightingale finds barely enough of a gap to hit the Babe With The Powerbomb for the texture good victory. Now it’s as much as AEW to book her just like the top champion she has the potential of being.