Earlier this month, New Japan Pro Wrestling held a press conference with Will Ospreay celebrating his IWGP World Heavyweight Championship win. It was then he issued a challenge to CM Punk.
"Before I was champion, a man who sparked a whole lot of interest in pro wrestling, CM Punk said he’d like to face Will Ospreay," the fan-favourite Indy wrestling star said. "Now I have the biggest prize in pro-wrestling, so if you really want to prove you were the best in the world and not the best of a bad bunch, come over here and try and take this."
Talking to Digital Spy, Punk was asked about the challenge, and seemed far more interested than you might expect!
"I don’t want to give people false hope in answering Ospreay," Punk started. "But he’s for sure somebody that I’ve never wrestled before that interests me a lot more than, I guess, the corporate side of professional wrestling nowadays." That lines up with recent comments about why a WWE return doesn't interest him, and you have to wonder whether that's a reference to AEW as well.
"New and different things are going to interest me more than doing the same old, same old. I always need new goals," he added. "I don’t know, let’s see if he has it at the end of the summer and then ask me the question again."
It sounds like we should stay tuned, but Punk clearly isn't making any promises.
One thing we do know is that this would make for one heck of a match, and if Punk is going to step back into the squared circle, Ospreay would be one heck of an opponent to do it with.