We’ve got a guy named Nigel joining Marquette men’s basketball this fall, so let’s celebrate with a tour through the best Nigel McGuinness matches from Ring of Honor.
I haven’t been particularly shy about the fact that I enjoy watching professional wrestling on this website. I don’t post about it much, but there’s a reference or two that drops in here and there. So, much like when Sandy Cohen and Dawson Garcia joined Marquette men’s basketball, the addition of Nigel James in the 2025 recruiting class tripped a wire in my brain. “Hey, Nigel! Just like former Ring Of Honor champion Nigel McGuinness!”
I had a very good idea for a silly summer series: Check out Nigel’s page on Cage Match, find the top rated ROH matches on ROH Honor Club, subscribe to Honor Club, watch them, write about them.
And then I found THIS:
Shouts to All Elite Wrestling, ROH’s current parent company, for posting a NEARLY TWELVE HOUR LONG compilation of what they’re calling The Best Of Nigel McGuinness. 25 Nigel matches, just sitting there for free on YouTube.
Yeah, I’m doing that.
We’ll go a match at a time, and they’re all in chronological order in the video, which is neat.
A CELEBRATION OF GUYS NAMED NIGEL: PART 8
Nigel McGuinness vs Bryan Danielson
ROH World Championship/ROH Pure Championship Unification
August 12, 2006
ROH Unified
Liverpool Olympia
Liverpool, England
Last time out, we saw Bryan Danielson (the future Daniel Bryan in WWE) defeat Nigel McGuinness with a small package rollup to retain the Ring Of Honor World Championship. That was in late July, and given that Danielson used a little bit of chicanery to win by scurrying underneath the ring to change sides without McGuinness knowing where he was, there’s at least a little bit of unsettled business between the two men. So, with ROH going to England for the first ever time for a show in Liverpool, it only makes sense that the main event of the show should be Danielson defending against McGuinness in his home country. To put a little extra steam on it, this match would be a unification match, with the winner getting both Danielson’s ROH World title and McGuinness’ ROH Pure title.
You could probably argue that McGuinness had a little bit of a hotter streak coming into this match than Danielson, as he had defeated Delirious on August 4th in Lake Grove, New York, to retain the Pure championship. Danielson, in the meantime, went to a 60 minute time limit draw with former ROH champ Samoa Joe with the World title on the line on August 5th in Edison, New Jersey.
Because this is a unification match for the two titles, the Pure championship rules are in effect, and the World title will change hands on those same rules. In addition to that stipulation, in the event of a double knockout, countout, or disqualification, the match will be restarted. After the rules are explained to the wrestlers and the crowd, and the Code Of Honor handshake is exchanged, the two men separate to their corners, and the Liverpool crowd makes it clear they side with McGuinness: “EFF HIM UP, NIGEL, EFF HIM UP” except they didn’t say Eff.
The bell rings and the two men tie up and look for some sort of grappling advantage to open up the match. Finally, it’s Danielson with the first edge, and he starts out in McGuinness’ playbook with a wristlock and armwringer. Nigel works his way free, and delivers an open handed slap, paying Danielson back for a slap moments earlier as he didn’t quite break cleanly after bulling Nigel into the ropes.
Things continue as the pair exchange holds and reversals and counters. While Nigel is the first to offer a kick, striking Dragon in the back after pulling him to the mat, it’s Danielson that starts getting a little more violent, armwringering McGuinness out of the corner and then throwing a series of heavy boots to his downed opponents. Danielson stays on the advantage, and it almost seems like he’s trying to get holds near the ropes to try to provoke McGuinness into spending a rope break. A high impact dropkick gets two, maybe because Danielson isn’t lightning quick to try to get the pin, but the World champ continues to hold the advantage, eventually getting a double underhook powerbomb in order to turn that into a cross-armbreaker and prompting McGuinness to spend his first rope break.
Danielson taunts the partisan English crowd a little bit, and maybe he takes his eye off the ball a little bit. A back elbow on a charge into the corner lets Nigel get in a move or two, and now he’s the one connecting with some physical offense. All within the rules here, but it’s clear that he’s trying to punish Danielson with European uppercuts. McGuinness gets him to the mat, working a somewhat simple straightjacket submission, clearly having no interest in grabbing Danielson’s body or legs, trying to get him to use the ropes. Danielson escapes, gains control, sets up for a bow and arrow submission, and while standing on McGuinness’ hamstrings, he looks around the Liverpool Olympia for a moment as the crowd started oohing and aahing as he rocked backwards for the hold. “Screw you people,” and he merely stomps down on McGuinness’ legs.
A superplex and a diving headbutt has McGuinness in danger, but Danielson goes for a tactical advantage instead of trying to win. He puts Nigel in the Cattle Mutilation submission, and McGuinness quickly gets the ropes for his second break. Nigel holds onto the edge and gets the Tower of London elevated cutter. Dragon uses the ropes since they’re in the corner — that’s one break — and then McGuinness follows up by putting Danielson into the Cattle Mutilation to the delight of the crowd. That pushes Danielson to use his second rope break in just a few seconds, and now both men have just one remaining as Danielson tumbles outside to try to reset things.
Nigel gets the early advantage outside, but Danielson counters getting thrown into the timekeeper’s table, sends McGuinness in instead, and then tries to choke him out on the floor with the edge of the tipped over table. Danielson has to avoid the 20 count, so he doesn’t quite put McGuinness down enough to win, and now they’re back inside. Flurries of back and forth strikes get capped by a lariat from McGuinness, he gets a two count. He tries to work something out of the headstand in the corner, but Danielson dropkicks him instead, then gets a back elbow, and Danielson hooks the crossface chickenwing. McGuinness looks for a way to reverse or counter the hold, but he fails to find one, eventually spending his final rope break.
Danielson spends a little too much time taunting the crowd after a German suplex, and he gets caught with a knee trying a diving headbutt. Back to their feet, and the two men start delivering open handed slaps back and forth to each other. Sweat popping off their bodies with every strike, and Danielson thinks he has the edge, but Nigel counters — so, so, so many counters, and he dumps him crotch first on the ropes. Big flying lariat into a pinfall attempt, but — perhaps on purpose?? — Danielson’s way too close to the ropes and he burns his final rope break.
They end up fighting on the top turnbuckle, and Danielson finds a way to get a crossface chickenwing up there. No rope breaks, because they’re clearly in the corner, but them’s the rules. It’s not great leverage for Bryan, so Nigel manages to escape and hit the Tower of London for two. Danielson falls back outside, and captures McGuinness’ arms on either side of the ringpost. He pulls him into the post over and over and over again, until McGuinness is busted open at the hairline, and then clotheslines Nigel into the crowd, then goes up top and hits a forward flip dive onto McGuinness in the seats.
This is not that far from how Nigel won the first match by countout, just minus the crash into the folding chair, and the two struggle their way back towards the ring. I have no idea where the ref’s count is, but Danielson shoves McGuinness off of him with both feet back over the barricade, and the count is somewhere in the teens. He’s back over the wall and back into the ring, half a crimson mask on his face, at 19.
The sight of his own blood has fired up McGuinness, and the sight of a fired up McGuinness has the Liverpool crowd fired up as well. So, so, so many headbutts, and McGuinness finally connects with the seesaw lariat to send both men down for a moment. He takes much too long to try a pinfall, and not only does Bryan kickout, but he rolls through the kickout straight into Cattle Mutilation. McGuinness has zero rope breaks left, and while he gets the ropes, the ref has to tell him, “look, I know you’re there, but you have no breaks left!”
McGuinness finds a way to roll it over, and then he finds away to roll on top of Danielson for a pinfall, the whole time Bryan never lets go of the double underhooks for the Mutilation. That allows him to shift out of the pinfall into a hammer and anvil elbow, and he batters McGuinness over and over and over and over, pistoning his elbow into Nigel’s head. The ref tells McGuinness to fight back or it’s over, there’s no response, and Bryan Danielson unifies the World title and Pure title by referee stoppage in 26:24. Nigel McGuinness’ reign as Pure champion comes to an end at 350 days, less than a week away from a full calendar year.
A violent, emotional battle, with two men who clearly had something to prove to one another after the slightly unsatisfying conclusions of each of their last two matches. Easily the best of the three Danielson/McGuinness matches we’ve seen here (so far), with Cage Match users rating it 9.59 out of 10 and the Wrestling Observer Newsletter giving it 4 and three-quarters stars.
The crowd did NOT appreciate that ending, because they were obviously behind McGuinness the whole way. In their eyes, Bryan Danielson didn’t defeat him, merely knocked him out. Danielson, of course, disagreed with their assessment, and bathed in their boos. As McGuinness regained his composure, the crowd chanted for him, and Danielson grabbed a mic to tell everyone that this might have been his toughest title defense yet. That being the case, Dragon thinks that McGuinness deserves one more shot at the title, and McGuinness accepts.
NEXT TIME: It’ll be that title match, of course. We’ll jump six weeks into the future and head to St. Paul, Minnesota for Nigel McGuinness vs Bryan Danielson for the ROH Unified World Pure Wrestling Championship…… and it will be best two out of three falls.
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