My word, it has been a long and tumultuous time since I last wrote to you here on my blog - last putting proverbial pen to paper over a year ago, last July, to reflect on the passing of Hulk Hogan. A lot has gone on since then, and before I get into today’s piece, I should probably provide a quick update on all of that.
Quite aside from a fair amount of upheaval in my day-to-day life and an increased workload at the day job meaning I haven’t had much time to write to you, there has been rather a lot that I have been working on in the wrestling sphere as well. After a good eighteen months out of the picture, it’s been a pleasure to start finding my feet again, having recently got back behind the commentator’s desk, this time for one of my favourite promotions to work for, Pro Wrestling EAST in Cambridge. In addition, I have become the regular MC/host for Grapple Days, running out of the Playfight training school in Woolwich - it’s a joy to be part of what I hope to be the beginning of a long overdue resurgence of professional wrestling in South-East London, and Grapple Days is a show right up my street; traditional British rounds matches between some of the best modern wrestlers in the country, perfectly bridging the gap between tradition and modernity with the best boutique wrestling show around.
I have updated the About page of this website, where you can now find an updated list of sample matches separated out by the role I played in them, whether as commentator, MC, booker, or referee. I’d spare you having to watch me actually wrestle even if any of that footage had made it on to YouTube. You’ll find my recent work for both PWE and Grapple Days on there, though in the fine tradition of a workman blaming his tools, I will note that the first match on the Pro Wrestling EAST World Cup show is perhaps not indicative of by my best work, given that due to a technical fault I couldn’t hear my co-commentator Chris Hatch through my headset. This was thankfully resolved by match two!
Back in March 2026, my contributions were heard on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds, as the wrestling history expert for the second episode of Jamie Bartlett’s critically acclaimed investigative podcast Everything Is Fake (And Nobody Cares). It was a pleasure to see that show come to fruition many months after I was first contacted about it, and to finally (technically) share a billing with my fellow guest and interviewee Jeff Jarrett.
It was after reflecting on Everything Is Fake that I began work on the project that has been taking up much of my time in the latter half of 2026. At the beginning of the year, I was hoping to enter 2027 putting the finishing touches on a book of essays I’m calling Hackenschmidt’s Ghost: Tales From Wrestling History, and while that book is very much a going concern that I hope to finish and release in the not-too-distant future, it has temporarily taken a backseat to a more pressing project - an as yet untitled work, on the intersections of professional wrestling and politics. We’ve all seen the comparisons, the newspaper think-pieces asserting that to understand WWE is to understand the appeal of Donald Trump, that pro-wrestling is the secret key to understanding our post-truth political landscape - heck, with Everything Is Fake (And Nobody Cares), I actively contributed to that discourse - but I feel strongly that the real story has yet to be accurately told, one that looks beyond the surface level comparisons between kayfabe and dishonest stump speeches, and instead clocks the tangible, financial, and cultural connections that really do tie the current President of the United States of America surprisingly closely to professional wrestling - and, just as importantly, where those connections fall short of providing such simplistic explanations for either end of the equation. It’s heavy-going, and whether it ultimately becomes a book or something else entirely, I hope that it will be complete and that it will find its audience in 2027. I look forward to sharing it with you!
And with that bit of housekeeping out of the way, let’s move on to today’s topic…
Of Blood & Guts & Gimmicks
I began writing this on the evening of Friday 6th November 2026, two days after AEW presented their annual extravaganza of gore, Blood & Guts, and three weeks before WWE present their iteration of the same concept, War Games.
For the uninitiated, War Games was a wrestling match first concocted by the late Dusty Rhodes for Jim Crockett Promotions back in 1987, first styled as War Games: The Match Beyond, and inspired, as so much of late 1980s professional wrestling was, by Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. The format of the match sees two wrestling rings enclosed inside a steel cage, with two opposing teams entering in timed intervals, with “The Match Beyond” only beginning once all wrestlers have entered the ring, at which point the match can be won by “submission or surrender”. War Games quickly became a signature match for Jim Crockett Promotions, and for its successor WCW, with occasional tweaks along the way, and in the years since WCW’s closure popped up on occasion everywhere from MLW to Pro Wrestling EVE, before WWE revived a version of the match in 2017 for their pseudo-developmental brand NXT, and AEW followed suit with Blood & Guts, following a more traditional War Games format in 2019.
The nature of the War Games format had been tweaked a few times over the course of its existence, but WWE’s version was the first to make a concerted effort to transform a staple of 1980s southern rasslin’ into a presentation better suited for the hyper-corporate “sports entertainment” of modern WWE. WWE’s version has replaced the enclosed cage with one where the roof is open, surrounded by platforms to better aid the high spots, dives, stunts and acrobatics that have become a standard fixture of modern wrestling, and replaced the old “submit and surrender” rules with a match that can end via pinfall. AEW, by contrast, has largely retained the original War Games rules for their own “Blood & Guts” variant.
Given that the format is clearly desirable enough that both of the largest wrestling promotions in the world see fit to utilise it within a few weeks of each other, and the name carries enough value for WWE to have resurrected it more than a decade and a half since they shut the doors on WCW, why then did WWE feel the need to start tweaking the formula?
It’s a question of wrestling philosophies, and above all it is a question of heat.
Heat, like so many words in wrestling’s lingua franca, can mean a lot of different things at once. In its simplest term, it refers to the animosity directed by the audience at a heel. Not to get too far behind the wizard’s curtain, but it also refers to a segment of a professional wrestling match. That’s the part that arguably matters most here.
A standard professional wrestling match is broken up, broadly, into a three act structure. There are variations and exceptions to the rule, but, as in most western storytelling, three is generally the magic number. The shine is the first act, and in simple terms is generally described as the period of the match in which the babyface is in control - structurally that’s true, though I prefer to think of it as demonstrating why the babyface is the babyface, and just as importantly why the babyface is the deserving winner - the shine tells us that the babyface is tougher, stronger, faster, more technically adept, or has more heart and resolve than the heel, whichever is most appropriate for the story being told, and for the specific qualities of the wrestlers involved. A cut-off from the heel then transitions us into act two, the heat. The heat is the period of the match in which the heel is in control, and this time it’s their turn to control the pace of the match, and to demonstrate the qualities that could allow them to win the match - they might be sneakier, rougher, more prepared to bend the rules. Structurally, this is often the meat of the match, and where an old adage from British wrestling is most apparent - a face moves forward while the heel moves backward, a face speeds up and the heel slows down. This is all designed to build up the other kind of heat, the audience’s vocal distaste for the heel, and, hand-in-hand for that, their vocal support for the babyface to fight back, get their revenge, and make their comeback, ultimately getting their cathartic victory - this leads into the babyface’s comeback, for the final act, the finish. I could go into detail on the final act, but for our purposes here it is fairly self-explanatory - it’s shine and heat that we’re concerned with today.
Heat has long been the sine qua non of wrestling psychology. We structure our matches so as to generate heat, to make the heel more hated, which in turn makes the audience cheer on and support the babyface even more. Heat is the lifeblood of War Games.
But my assertion today is that heat is no longer the most important factor of most modern professional wrestling. I generally shy away from describing the wrestling of today as “post-kayfabe”, because I have long argued that kayfabe has never died but merely mutated into new forms, but the kind of heat that War Games requires to really work effectively is rarely a feature of today’s wrestling, and is all but unheard of in WWE. Heat is built by building animosity towards a wrestler, through violence, through rule-bending, and above all else through transgression - something I used to say when leading refereeing seminars was that, in wrestling as in life, people aren’t necessarily angered by someone breaking the rules, but they are angered by someone getting away with breaking the rules where somebody else would be punished; that’s as true when a referee disallows a babyface team’s tag that happened behind his back but allows the same from the heels as it is when a politician goes unpunished for a crime that would have put you or I behind bars. A good referee and a good heel work in concert to allow for a performance of rule-breaking from the heel that goes unseen by the referee, in such a way that the blame, the heat, will always sit on the heel for getting away with it, rather than on the referee for missing it.
For that kind of transgression to really generate heat, the rules have to be given primacy. The rules of professional wrestling have perhaps never been treated with such seriousness as during the “golden age” of televised British wrestling, where Admiral Lord Mountevans Rules were the order of the day; what, since the mid-2000s, have been more colloquially known as “World of Sport rules”. The sanctity and respect to which these rules were held, not only by wrestlers, promoters, and by commentator Kent Walton, but by wrestling’s fanbase, resulted in my favourite example of the powers of transgression - Colin Joynson vs. Spiros Arion, from 1979. Arion is a master of generating heat, and through a succession of transgressions, of flagrant disregard for the rules, is able to trigger what risks becoming a full-blown riot from the audience - legend has it that Big Daddy was encouraged to make an unplanned appearance after the match purely to settle the crowd down by suggesting that their hero had things under control.
Such a thing would be almost unthinkable today. The covenant between wrestlers and audience does not hold in the same way that it did in 1979. In WWE, it would be impossible. If you still watch WWE, I apologise that I’m about to point something out that, if you haven’t noticed it before, you will now not fail to notice - WWE’s heels do not cheat. Outside of the finish of a match, even their most dastardly villains stay within the confines of the rules - you will see no low blows, no choking, no eye pokes, no feet on the ropes for additional leverage, unless it’s part of a booked and pre-planned finishing sequence. The official explanation is that WWE don’t want their referees to lose credibility by allowing cheating and rule-breaking to happen, but whatever the reason, the result is that within that three act structure I talked about, WWE’s heat is singularly lacking in heat. Couple that with another long-standing top-down bit of WWE micro-management - WWE’s wrestlers and commentators are forbidden from describing anything as “violent”; Michael Cole will tell you that a match is “disturbing”, that somebody’s actions are “aggressive”, but never violent. So what does that make War Games? It’s a match built on heat, being promoted by a company that abhors heat, and a match that promises violence, by a company that dare not even speak the word.
Perhaps a more useful way of looking at modern wrestling is tension and momentum, rather than heat.
If an audience’s primary way of engaging with a match is no longer to, on some level, earnestly believe that their support can will a babyface on to victory, or to genuinely want to see a dastardly heel get their comeuppance, then what purpose War Games? A recurring criticism I have seen of the match since its revival is that the first phase of the match is “pointless” or “uninteresting”, because the match can’t end, meaning that stretch of the match doesn’t matter. When heat was the guiding principle of the match, there was considerably more value in that first phase - seeing a heel who has been cheating and screwing people over and getting away with it end up trapped inside a cage with nowhere to run, and seeing the cheated and screwed over babyface finally get their hands on that heel, provides a measure of catharsis for the audience just as surely as seeing the babyface trapped in a cage with two heels makes them cry out for justice. But take away heat and what do you have?
Tension is the language of wrestling today. The three act structure is still in play - though the distinction between shine and heat, and the demarcated comeback, may not be quite as obvious as it was in a Hulk Hogan match - but the audience investment really comes into its own during the third act, the stretch leading to the finish. More than ever before, wrestling matches today are built on a steady escalation of false finishes, near falls, and breathtaking moments designed to draw the audience in and convince them that this must be it.
In Lucha Libre in particular, momentum has always played a larger role than heat as we would understand it in other styles of wrestling. The psychology of lucha libre is built around constant movement, and exchanges of momentum - the balance of power in the match is dictated by who is in movement, who is actively carrying and creating the most momentum; a wrestler who deflects an acrobatic move, rolls through and lands on his feet to come back with a counter, has done so by absorbing his opponent’s momentum, putting him in control. That’s increasingly, though less explicitly, a feature of non-Lucha professional wrestling as well.
We’re back to “faces move forward, heels move backwards”. Movement builds excitement, tension builds anticipation. A good match balances the two, with the babyface controlling the movement, and the heel controlling the tension. The supporting cast come into play as well - if both wrestlers in a match are flat on their back, a good referee will become more animated, creating movement where there would otherwise be none. A good manager, second, or tag team partner will know when it falls to them to create movement without distracting from the meat of the match.
So what does all this have to do with War Games? Well, we have to consider the primary source of tension in any wrestling match. That is: the possibility that the match could end. That’s why near-falls work, why false finishes work, why escalation is the order of the day. Whenever two wrestlers are physically separated - one rolling out of the ring to the floor, backing away, turning their back on their opponent to mug to the crowd - you can feel the tension in the room dissipate, because once one wrestler is more than an arm’s reach away from the other, the match can’t end. A great wrestler, particularly a great heel, can play with this release of tension to manipulate the soundwave of a crowd’s reaction and investment in a match, while a sure sign of a poor wrestler is a failure to understand how to work with that tension; an amateurish heel will take the opportunity of their opponent being flat on their back to lord it up, pose, and insult the crowd, generating a smattering of boos that they mistake for heat. But that is an artificial heat, and one that comes at the expense of tension - the audience know, instinctively, that while you’re taking your time to walk away from your opponent so you can argue with a kid in the front row, then the match cannot end. If I’m on commentary for that match, I’m going to be asking why, with your opponent flat on their back, you weren’t going for the pin and trying to win the match - that is, after all, supposed to be the name of the game. In that moment, you’re not manipulating tension or letting it dissipate, eking it out like releasing air from a balloon, you are bursting the balloon altogether.
So where does one find tension during the first phase of War Games? It’s a good question, and one that modern wrestling largely struggles to answer. For a significant stretch of the match, the match cannot end. So you have to find tension elsewhere. Another source of tension is the knowledge that something might happen - the Chekhov’s Gun sense that a gun introduced in the first act must be fired in the third act, just as a table introduced in the first act of a wrestling match must end up with a wrestler put through it in the third. Some of my favourite examples of tension in wrestling come from the deathmatch maximalism of FMW, the likes of Atsushi Onita vs. Terry Funk, where the Barbed Wire Exploding Ring Deathmatch stipulation makes it explicit what we as an audience can expect to see, and the tension comes from Funk and Onita eking out how long they can last before delivering on that promise - the ropes being replaced by barbed wire make even the simplest of movements a source of tension, the risk of explosion heightens that even further, and the way both wrestlers make the audience ride that wave with them is a masterclass. But the first phase of War Games can’t be all tension, nor can they lean too early into big stunts and dangerous spots, because then there’s nowhere to escalate to in the closing stretch. So the wrestlers involved need to find the right balance of tension and momentum; in the recent matches I’ve seen, that momentum and movement is generally provided by treating the entry of each new wrestler as their shine, regardless of whether they are face or heel - like in any Royal Rumble match in recent memory, every new wrestler enters full of energy and hits their signature spots, showing you what makes them worth paying attention to. It’s one approach, but I’m not sure it’s working.
I’m not suggesting that I have an alternative, or a solution to the problem of War Games. I think by tweaking the format, WWE have attempted to mitigate some of these problems, but they fall flat because of the nature of WWE’s style of wrestling - even in a standard WWE match, just as there is little in the way of heat, there is little in the way of tension either. No big match is going to end unexpectedly, without having entered a fairly clear finishing stretch - no WWE main eventer is going to lose to anything but another wrestler’s finisher, and in the case of many of Roman Reigns’ main event matches, nobody is losing before the requisite number of ref bumps and run-ins. So there’s no tension there, and one can only rely on momentum and movement - which in any WWE War Games match I have seen, tends to be provided by dives, acrobatics, and Iyo Sky in a bin.
If you’re a wrestler reading this and relatively young in your career, then I hope you’ve taken some of my theorising on match psychology and structure on board, even if you’re unlikely to ever find yourself in a War Games match. But it’s a lesson worth learning about all gimmick matches.
Because it’s not only War Games that suffers from that disconnect between heat as we once understood it, and tension, momentum, and escalation as they inform wrestling today. The problem, or the puzzle to be solved, with many gimmick matches comes down to the win condition - a pinfall, in a standard wrestling match, is three seconds (there’s the magic number again), and that’s three seconds with which you can play with audience expectations; how well you time your near-falls, how close to the wire you can get your shoulder off the mat (without giving away those big dramatic kick-outs too early in the match), and, sparingly, how much an impactful kick-out on one can mean to an audience you’ve conditioned to expect to wait until 2 and a half. But in gimmick and stipulation matches? A Last Man Standing or Texas Deathmatch requires a count of ten - how many “near falls” can you reasonably pull off in a match like that, only getting back to your feet at nine, given that this fundamentally requires nine seconds without movement, with no exchange of momentum, and the risk of tension steadily dissipating over the course of those nine seconds if the crowd don’t buy that this is the finish, rather than raising because they think it is? Perhaps worse still if we consider a Table, Ladder, Stretcher, or Casket match, where the win condition is essentially binary - we can, Onita/Funk-style, build tension around how the next move might put you through a table, but the end result is that you are either going through a table or not, there is no table near-fall. In a ladder match, you can create movement and build momentum with big dramatic stunts and high spots, and you can even create tension through the anticipation of those moments, but conversely, every time you execute one of those high spots, what you’re not doing is climbing the ladder and winning the match, so again you risk bursting the balloon and releasing all of that tension too early. We have all seen matches that have made this mistake.
I find the biggest error when it comes to working gimmick matches is when wrestlers attempt to work their stock wrestling match around the gimmick. Wrestling matches have a formula, we’ve established this - in fact, they have many, and formulas within formulas within formulas, but let’s not get too into the weeds here - but, creatively speaking, the point of a gimmick match is to break that formula. Any deviation from a standard wrestling match is a break from the norm - and by that I don’t just mean War Games, Ladder matches, or Exploding Ring Barbed Wire Deathmatches; even a tag team match is a deviation. So when it comes to structuring or planning those matches, begin by asking yourself, “what difference does this stipulation make?”.
If you’re the final two wrestlers in a Battle Royal, it can feel like the easiest thing to do to build escalation is just to have a truncated version of your standard, tried and tested match - you know which moves get a pop, you know what to do in what order to escalate, to build tension, to keep things moving, and get the crowd on-board. But there’s a problem here. Your aim in that standard wrestling match is to pin your opponent to the mat, but in a Battle Royal you need to throw them over the top rope - the structure of a standard match is contradictory to what you’re trying to achieve here. Just as in a standard match I hate to see a wrestler pick their opponent up off the mat - the match ends on the mat, why would you not want to keep your opponent there? - equally I hate to see it in a Battle Royal, because if your aim is to lift your opponent up and over the top rope, why have you made it harder for yourself by first knocking them down on the floor? It’s a video game logic applied to wrestling, seeing the match as a matter of reducing each other’s health bars until one is sufficiently lowered that their weak spot is flashing red and you can come in for the kill, rather than a logically coherent approach to wrestling as if it were a legitimate contest.
Everything you do in a gimmick or stipulation match should be informed by the gimmick, and as best as possible that should be conveyed to the audience. Your comebacks, cut-offs, and false finishes, even your finishes, that work in a singles match won’t work in any number of gimmick matches. Even in a tag match, if your comeback, if your false finishes, are just strung together from your singles match bag of tricks, you’ve failed to engage with the match - use every tool at your disposal, and show the audience what makes this match different to everything else they’re going to see on the same card. Creatively, that’s the point of a gimmick match, and if you start there, then you can find the logic behind your planned finish, behind your false finishes, behind how you use the match to build and manipulate tension, and all you need to do is fill in the blanks from there. You might even be able to solve the War Games problem.
You’ll notice that a couple of times there I used a specific, slightly clunky, form of words - “creatively, that’s the point of a gimmick match”. Because I can’t leave a discursion on the nature of gimmick matches without a note towards the booking and history of gimmick matches.
Wrestlers lie. Wrestling promoters lie more. It’s in the job description. With your fan head on rather than your wrestler head, if I asked you, “what is the point of this gimmick match?”, you’d probably provide the answer that generations of wrestling promoters have conditioned you to provide. For example - the point of a Cage match is to keep the action inside of the ring. To give the heel nowhere to run, and to prevent outside interference. How many times have you seen a cage match that outrages the audience for failing to deliver on that promise? They said that there would be no outside interference, but they still came up with some bullshit gimmicky way for the heel’s lackeys to get involved!
I’m sorry to say, The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does. The point of a steel cage match was never really to keep everything inside the ring, to stop the heel from running away, or to keep their buddies from interfering. No, the purpose was to part marks from their hard-earned cash by making them think that the cage would do its job, that this time the heel had finally bitten off more than they could chew, and found themselves in a situation that even they couldn’t wriggle their way out of. The promoter and the wrestlers create that expectation, you pay for it, and then they violate that expectation - somehow, the heel still did find a way to win. It’s all about heat, baby!
And sure, you didn’t get what you paid for. But next month? Next month they’re saying the cage will have barbed wire on it. And another babyface is going to be the special enforcer. Surely this time the heel’s days really are numbered!
It’s a carny, money-making business, and every gimmick match you can think of has that fact deep in its DNA - they were only designed to sell you a promise, not to deliver on it - and whatever angle you approach it from, that’s well worth remembering.
