When you ask Session Moth Martina about herself, she starts by listing all the things she’s not. “I’m not the flippiest, and I’m not the fastest,” she insists, rattling off every weakness she can think of. “I’m not the best technical wrestler on the card. But I have something else, and apparently that’s what’s working.” Settling on what that something is has been the product of over a decade of grinding – sometimes literally – on the indies, where she was often relegated to, as she delicately puts it, being the comedy toilet break match on an all-women’s show.
And it’s not like she minded that either. Her willingness to be the butt of the joke and down cans was always part of her charm, but in recent years, it’d become something more like a ceiling. “I’ve been wrestling so long and I’ve had so many ups and downs, lately it was like I’d almost forgotten what the ups were like,” she admits.
“I was always so used to the bottom spot. Regular, always there, always reliable, and you spend so long kind of floating around wrestling, not knowing your place, not knowing if you’re needed.” When she looks back at the last couple of years, she remembers a distinct feeling that she was wasting everyone’s time.
Six months ago, those lingering doubts crystallised in a shockingly earnest promo where she admitted that she wasn’t injured, wasn’t hurt – but just didn’t think she could do it anymore. She’d lost her dad at the start of the year, and her mum had spent several months in hospital. “You don’t know how hard it is,” she told the crowd, “to get on a plane, come and dance and drink and put on a face every month, and lose.”
A gear switched after that point, and suddenly the resident funny woman had set in motion one of the most moving stories of the year, not least because she was urged on by Millie McKenzie, who was forced to step away from the ring by a rare form of liver disease. EVE owner Dann Read says grounding everything is reality was part of the magic. “So much of it was real,” he says. “I think that’s the beauty of it. Every element to the storyline we told had reality involved, everything in regards to what [Martina] had been going through in her personal life, and then everything that Millie had been going through.”
“If you’re not gonna do it for yourself,” she’d told a tearful Martina, “Do it for me.” And she did.
Her win at Wrestle Queendom back in March was momentous for many reasons, but one of them was hearing that conversation ring out in a video package at the O2, reminding fans, and Martina herself, of the battle it took to get there.
“It’s one of the big memories stuck in from the whole day,” she says of hearing it a second time. “Obviously, I’m so nervous, it was the biggest stage I’ve ever had. I’m nervous about my skill as a wrestler, to live up to the hype of this huge event that they were after putting me in the main event, so all the insecurities in the promo are quite real.”
CREDIT: Robert Brazier
Watching it back made her believe in her own story as much as everyone else had, because it made her see “from an outside perspective” what she’d actually gone through.
“Seeing a video of my dad in the crowd cheering me on, that coming up in the O2 just brought tears to my eyes right before I went out. That was the most special moment to me. He’ll never know, but his face lit up the O2, and that is the most important moment that I could make that happen.”
Struggling to sum up the weight of all the emotions she felt, she remembers thinking that she’d hit her peak, “and if it’s the end, so be it.”
“I have that memory for life now,” she adds. “That’s forever going to be the best night I’ve ever had in wrestling – and that includes all the years in Japan, America, TV, getting signed, all that stuff. I don’t think anything equates to Queendom, because I thought nothing like that would ever happen again. So it came at a really important time.”
When I ask about conversations she had backstage afterwards when she came back down to Earth, things get more characteristically Session Moth. “Well,” she says with a wry smile, “if you were at Queendom and you were at the after party, there was no coming back down to earth.
“That after party, it felt like heaven. Everybody dancing, the balloons going around, all the girls. Like, it wasn’t about one particular person, it was about every single one of us. Everybody was happy for everybody else. It was a complete joint effort, that show, and everybody played their part.
“I was surrounded by people that care about me. It was genuinely surreal to have people that I grew up in wrestling with, and everybody else that believed in me all these years, [all] coming up to me and sharing that moment. It made it even more special. It still feels like a dream.”
Session Moth Martina celebrates her win at Wrestle Queendom, 2026. CREDIT: Robert Brazier
In the afterglow of it all, she’s re-evaluated her place in wrestling, coming to the welcome realisation that while her legacy might be unique, it’s hers alone. “I’ve done my own thing, and nobody else can really say that,” she nods.
“I’ll never be on the WWE Hall of Fame of Irish Wrestlers – that’s Fergal Devitt, that’s Becky Lynch, that’s [Lyra] Valkyria, and it’s JD McDonagh. I’m going to be off on a little rock over the other side. It might not be as pretty as this one, but I’ve carved my own legacy over the years. That’s something Queendom made me realise. Just because you didn’t exactly get the typical journey, you still had a crazy story. And at the end of the day, no one else can really say they’ve done that.”
It’s not to say that outlook didn’t falter slightly when she watched things go a different way for other people. “I’ve seen someone get really popular on the scene, and then get whisked away to Japan, or WWE or AEW. And it can happen very quick, because on the internet, things come in 24 hours – if you happen to be the hot product in that time, you’re good.
“I feel like I’ve had that 24 hour loop a few times, but it just never really took fire for me,” she says. “But in a way, that’s kind of created my consistency over the years. Constantly trying to take fire means you’re constantly burning.”
Having always sensed she’d tread a different path, she famously turned down a WWE contract in favour of signing to Ring of Honor, wrestling there only a handful of times before Covid forced the company to temporarily shut down. Then, afew years later, she made three appearances on AEW, which, with its island of misfit toys energy, is the place she’s always hoped to settle. “I’ll never forget it, when they had their first press conference, I was like, ‘This is the dream,’” she says. “The people that don’t fit the WWE criteria, maybe this is the place for them. I would like to think that if I have a chance anywhere, it could be there.”
AEW’s own Will Ospreay co-produces the EVE shows, and Martina says the “TV excitement” he’s introduced has benefitted all the women on the roster, as has, frankly, his name.
“A lot of people won’t admit it, but they’ll come to see Will Ospreay more than they’ll probably come to see female wrestling,” she shrugs. “He knows that, so he’s helping us get more people in the door, and they’re staying for us.
“He’s going to go off and do amazing things with AEW and Wembley, but he’s constantly looking back on us and thinking, ‘These girls are good, how am I going to help them?’ It’s a very selfless endeavour he’s taken on and it’s helped women in Brit Wres an insane amount. I never would have imagined the best wrestler in the world taking an interest in British female wrestling, but here we are.”
“He could wait at home for his meet and greets with AEW, but he’s there in a staff shirt at the Big Penny Social after wrestling the best people in the world. Like, that’s humble if I ever seen it. He has everyone in the world talking about EVE.”
Session Moth Martina and Will Ospreay: CREDIT: Robert Brazier
As for conversations he’s had with Martina about what’s next in store, she says she’s finding out with the rest of us.
“I think that’s his idea of what this championship reign is going to be. It will be me taken off guard, having tests thrown at me. I have no idea which way it’s going to go, and the pressure is surreal, because I had such a big moment. There’ve been so many incredible female wrestlers as EVE Champion before, how do I make my mark on this thing now before whatever’s next?”
When I ask Dann Read what it is that sets her apart, he wishes me luck summing up what is a lengthy and considered talk on wrestling itself.
“Wrestling as a subject, people have quite a visceral response to it,” he says. “And it’s because they think that wrestling is trying to con them – this idea of ‘is it real or not real’ – so their guard is immediately up.” As he sees it, Martina is one of the few who can disarm even the most casual fan.
“Over the years, over the decades, you’ve always heard of the term, ‘everyman’. I don’t think there’s ever really been an everywoman. I think that we all know someone like a Martina, and we all like someone like a Martina. There is an element of fun, but also very much still nine to five trying her best, and that’s kind of who we all are in life. When you see that character, she allows who she is as a real person to come through in both the good ways, the fun times, but also, the bad and the sad times. I think she’s able to help get people’s guard down on what wrestling is.”
Whatever comes next, she’s going to do it her own way, like always. She might not be the flippiest, the fastest, or the most technical, but she inadvertently set a new bar for women’s wrestling after she won her match against Rhio at Queendom, and it is, obviously: Can you move people to tears to the tune of Cascada’s Euro-dance banger ‘Everytime We Touch’?
It’s a feat that only the Session Moth herself could pull off, which I put to her before she faces Alexxis Falcon in her first title defence tonight (June 5). “I always knew I could make people laugh,” she smiles. “But I never thought I’d ever make people cry.”