WWE: Ranking The Top 10 NXT Superstars of 2018

3. Aleister Black

Proving that a badly-timed injury need not be a career-derailing impediment, Aleister Black managed to be a vital element of the NXT scene without actually being present for well over a month.

And it seems strange to acknowledge that losing the NXT Championship might actually have been the best thing that could have happened to Black this year. A disappointing title run is the main reason Black isn’t at number 1 on this countdown.

Taking a back seat to the (admittedly very compelling) Gargano/Ciampa story did Black no favours in the early part of the year, and while Black deserved much better, NXT redeemed itself by giving him a starring role in the ongoing saga, giving him room to remind everyone why he’s one of NXT’s top stars.

Black is at his best when he’s allowed to walk the line between good and bad. His moral ambiguity is what differentiates him from his peers, and not in the Johnny Gargano sense of the term – which is less ‘no man is ever truly good/no man is ever truly evil’ and more ‘if I say I’m the good guy, who are you to argue?’ The key difference is this: Black doesn’t care if he’s the hero or the villain. It’s a purely tertiary concern.

Injured at a house show, Black was forced to take time off to recover just when his involvement in the Gargano/Ciampa feud was getting really interesting. But thanks to an ingenious ‘who shot JR’ style storyline, his momentum wasn’t derailed.

In fact, the story allowed for Black to rebuild and restore the mystique he’d lost during his title run, and his return was triumphant. Utilising notoriously uncontrollable Nikki Cross as messenger, kicking the heads off a bevy of security guards, this was the Aleister Black we’d been waiting for.

And Black was quickly upgraded from add-on to major player in the Gargano/Ciampa story. His quest for revenge against Gargano was depicted as complex and fascinating – their match at NXT TakeOver Wargames was, to my mind, the match of the year, not least for the ending. How many other wrestlers out there can claim to tell an entire story in the space of a sentence?

Another title run wouldn’t go amiss, but at this stage Aleister Black doesn’t need gold to prove his worth. His work speaks for itself.