In the opinion of future WWE Hall of Famer Matt Hardy, before there was the Blackpool Combat Club, Jon Moxley's collection of violent gentlemen that also features Bryan Danielson, Wheeler Yuta, and Claudio Castagnoli, there was the BAR, a fighting faction back in The Fed that featured Sheamus and the current Ring of Honor World Champion, who went by Claudio at the time.

Discussing the faction on his podcast, The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy, the tag team specialist celebrated the group and put over that maybe, just maybe, they didn't get enough credit at the time.

“They were the original Blackpool Combat Club because they’d go in there and beat the s**t out of everybody,” Matt Hardy said via Fightful. “It was one of those, you knew if you were working with those guys, you were in for a very physical night. That’s the first thing. Guys like that, I love working TV with. Live events, not as much. I’m more of an entertainer at this stage. I like someone who’s big on entertaining the crowd as opposed to having to physically put your body through a ringer. Sometimes, once you get 30 years deep. You want to kind of chill a little bit on those shoes and just entertain people as opposed to beating each other up. But they were both extremely talented, both very physical competitors, and both kickass wrestlers, fighters.”

Asked why the duo worked so well as a team, Hardy first joked it was because of their respective countries of origin, before digging a little deeper into the faction's use of realism.

“They’re both European [laughs],” Hardy joked. “No, I mean, they’re both very physical guys. I feel like they both have very high work ethics, they both really bust their a**, and I think they like making their wrestling look as realistic as possible. So they’re both into that, and they’re both very physical, more than anything else, and I think they found a great bond in that. They really complemented one another.”

After winning tag team gold in WWE on five different occasions, four runs with the RAW Tag Team Championship, and a single run with the SmackDown Tag Team Championship for a combined 341 days on top of the tag team division, it's hard to say the BAR was criminally underrated during their shared run in WWE. Still, now that the faction will all but surely never reunite again, it is nice to look back on the skits where Castagnoli and Sheamus would get into bar fights over, well, pretty much anything.

Matt Hardy is a fan of blood when used tastefully.

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Elsewhere on the Extreme Life of Matt Hardy, the leader of Team Extreme, weighed in on the great bleeding debate of 2023 and whether or not performers are going back to that proverbial well too often in order to force an emotional reaction from fans.

Though Hardy is far from a prude, as he's bled his fair share in matches for multiple promotions, he believes the concept is best used as a tool reserved for special occasions in order to really make it matter.

“I do think there’s an issue for saying there’s too much bleeding on the show,” Hardy said via Fightful. “I think bleeding and blood is best when it’s used in the correct spaces and not every single week. It doesn’t need to be done too often because that’ll kind of kill it. That hurts its effect as well. When blood happens in certain scenarios, it means so much more.”

After discussing Jon Moxley's pension for bleeding in his matches, noting that he's going for a sort of fight club aesthetic that is elevated by “realistic” blood spots, Hardy reiterated his while everyone is different, his personal preference is using blood as a treat, instead of a staple of one's wrestling diet.

“I just think blood is one of the few things in wrestling that shouldn’t be overdone,” Hardy added. “I feel like it means so much more when it is done in specific scenarios, and it’s a little bit of a sparse, special thing. If someone wants to go out there and they want to gig every single week, go nuts. If someone wants to go out there and have a death match every single week, go nuts. If someone wants to go out there and have a classic chain wrestling match every week, go nuts. I don’t care what you do. That’s your stance, that’s your choice. If there’s people that enjoy that, then great. It is what it is. But I’m just talking about my personal preferences on all these issues.”