WWE: Ranking The Top 10 NXT Superstars of 2018

6. Undisputed Era

So I may be cheating a bit by including the whole team, but prising them apart would be to undermine how effective they are as a collective, as well as individually. Undisputed Era are THE stable of 2018, in an era where stables seem to have fallen out of fashion (at least in American wrestling.)

Kyle O’Reilly, Roderick Strong, Adam Cole and recently returned Bobby Fish manage to simultaneously be an awful, smarmy bunch and somehow still terrific fun to watch.

They have a particular sleazy charm about them, from their predictable-but-brilliant cheat tactics to their group promos, which appear to take place in some nebulous third dimension of the Performance Centre which UE have claimed as their own.

Individually, they have distinct skills and talents: Kyle O’Reilly, for all his mugging and goofing, is whip-quick and vicious in the ring. Roderick Strong has finally found his feet as part of a collective, and seems much more comfortable riffing off his teammates than alone – besides which, he’s still killing it in the ring (literally – I fear for the integrity of his opponents’ spines.) And then there’s Adam Cole.

Confession: I was a late convert to Adam Cole. I didn’t get him to start with. He seemed like a production-line smarmy weasel coasting by on a catchphrase. I was so ready to dislike him. So imagine my surprise when it turned out he was actually really, really good. 2017’s WarGames match disabused me of the notion that Cole was just a persona.

2018 has only further convinced me of his brilliance – whether it’s his performance in the six-man ladder match at TakeOver: New Orleans or his loss to Ricochet in Brooklyn, he’s been nothing but excellent in 2018.

But Undisputed Era are a team, and it’s as a team that they’ve impressed the most. They’ve had several matches this year that could easily be considered Match of the Year material – their clash with Oney Lorcan and Danny Burch in Chicago, as well as two stellar bouts with Moustache Mountain, have seen them secure their position as NXT’s top tag team.

It looks likely that the Undisputed boys will drop their titles to War Raiders in the coming year, but they needn’t worry. Gold or no gold, they’re still the best tag team NXT has to offer by a country mile. And that, as they say, is undisputed.