AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 1/1/20

What Worked


1. Darby Allin vs. Cody Rhodes

ER: First match on our 2020 MOTY List, and for all I know the first actual match of 2020. You want to start off your year with fireworks, you need to put a powder keg like Darby out in front. This also felt like a big Cody performance, and had a long moment towards the end when he hit a big cutter on Darby, had Darby down, and took the time to toss his loose weight belt and posture for the crowd. I could see something like this unnecessarily halting a match's momentum, but it worked for me here and added to Cody's confident performance. Darby crashed all over the place, crumpling weird on Cody's throws (like that big reverse suplex), and fighting back in ultra competitive ways. Darby hits this insanely great tope right into Cody's tender shoulder. I mean he really crashed hard sideways right in the exact spot that Cody had been rubbing. Darby would come back to that shoulder and Cody was good at showing the effects. I thought Cody came off like a real big deal here, and he really fearlessly took some of Darby's craziest ideas in stride. The lunacy of one man to do the coffin drop to the apron combined with the lunacy of the other man to lie waiting to have his ribs crushed, is something special. The Arn play was some classic wrestling back scratching, just a great use of a legend. I loved Arn just showing Cody the play book, the man who did all the tape watching. It's hard not to do that and come off a little corny, but the execution of this was flawless.

PAS: Darby is a great guy to start the year with, he comes off like such a star on TV, in a way that indie acts often don't. We get one big Darby bump to the floor, and a couple of teased huge bumps, when Cody shoves him off the ropes and he lands on the stage, and when the Coffin Drop on the ring apron doesn't crash and burn and he actually hits it. The arm work was all pretty cool, his crazy cannonball tope to the shoulder was great looking, and I loved Darby's scramble to grab a Fujiwara. Good Cody performance too, his selling was good, and the Ultimo Guerrero reverse suplex is a big piece of offense. I liked the finish too, with Arn not interfering, but calling in the play from the sidelines. I don't think this will stay at number #1 too long, but it is a nice opener for the year.


-Damn Sammy Guevara is really great. He's the first guy to figure out how to do something effective during a commercial break when all you have to work with is a 1/8 screen picture window. That thing can be a real killer of matches, watching a small part of your screen while muting a commercial for metastatic breast cancer medication that is taking up 3/4 of your screen. Sammy cuts a promo on cue cards and finally cracks the code on how to advance your character during a commercial. This guy is good.

-Dustin's new ring gear alone would have gotten this to the top part of the page, but the Sammy match was great. Outside of the bummer of a commercial break (down below), this was a great use of both characters and another great Dustin performance. This guy has been on a tear that I think we've all been dreading running out for 10 years now. When he really came back to status as a top 10 worker in 2009, it felt like something destined to being a memorable 6 month run. And he turned that comeback into being the best TV worker of the past decade. Guevara's twerp heel act is really entertaining to me, a great guy to have Dustin chop and slap around the ring. Dustin really lays a great beating to him, breaks out a wonderful cannonball to the floor, breaks out two different snap powerslams including one on the floor, is crazy enough to be a ring veteran doing a Canadian Destroyer on the RING APRON in the same week where veterans are complaining about how the kids are killing the business, and he continues to move as quickly against these juniors he works. Sammy is a great opportunist punk, and I like him smarmily using his flying offense and balancing it with tight strikes. His mounted punches were hitting Dustin hard enough that it felt like he was making damn sure nobody would be the one to notice him whiffing on punches vs. Dustin. The finish was screwy but I liked it. Jack Swagger sneaking up on Dustin from behind only to knee him in the balls feels like Swagger is properly incorporating Proud Boy street offense into his in ring repertoire. I can't envision a scenario where Dustin on my TV will end up down below.

-I'm beyond tired of Pentagon's act at this point and always do a forward skip once he starts his cero miedo hand signals routine. It always saves me time. And I really didn't like that Nick Jackson/Fenix Riverdance kick exchange mirror sequence. But the match picked up nicely after that with nice Bucks double teams, big twisting moonsault to the floor from Pac that crumpled Omega, a dumb fun suplex exchange between Pac and Omega that ended with a fantastic sitout powerbomb from Omega, and that pinfall ended with Pentagon making a positive contribution and kicking Omega in the mouth. This had plenty of moments including a wild spinning kick off the top by Fenix that ends with Fenix eating Omega's knee. This was fun, capped to a reasonable length.


What Didn't Work


-ER: That opening video really felt like a "See? Nothing wrong here. Not worried. We're just four friends agreeing on everything and saying 'Elite' a lot."

-I am not excited to hear Taz calling matches, but maybe he's gotten better since his last TNA run. Cruel to have Schiavone the one absent. JR can't take a break?

-Is Scorpio Sky trying to talk like The Rock, or has his promo pentameter just leaked into general backstage promo styles?

-I'm just not into Nyla Rose's brand of monster. The set up is long and requires everyone to go along with everything. I'm tired of spots where people have to pretend to be hung up on the ropes while waiting to get hit, and while AEW typically has people doing that 1-3 times per episode, I think Rose is the biggest offender. And here she really hung Shida out to dry while taking forever to get to the top. The knee that ended it looked good, but the journey was long and arduous. Nyla has a "better version of Tamina" vibe, but that's a low jumping off point. Riho had good energy that added to things, and I liked Baker's comeback spots. There's a chance Baker is someone who thrives in multimans but gets exposed in singles matches, and that's at least promising.

-Matches like Moxley vs. Trent are part of what makes some stretches of Dynamite a real drag. Moxley is in a program with the champ, he doesn't need to be having 2.9 count matches with Trent, there don't need to be Malenko/Guerrero roll ups, he doesn't need to give Trent 70% of the match to make sure Trent comes out of this like a star. He doesn't need to "make" Trent. This started fine, with Moxley kind of shoving Trent around the ring with big full arm chops, but they pretty quickly went to "This is an equal contest between two guys who both have what it takes" and AEW needs to just stop that. This should have been 5-6 minutes and a not really in doubt victory for Moxley. He doesn't need to give Trent 5 different close nearfalls.

-The commercial cut in Dustin/Sammy was cruel unfortunate brutality. We're already in the tiny 1/8 portion of the screen, Sammy has his head draped on the apron wedged into the ringpost, Dustin is approaching and swinging a chair at Sammy's head...and then we cut to a Little Caesars and Thor, and when the match comes back Sammy is holding Dustin in a chinlock. What!? How did he escape the chair predicament? How did Sammy untie himself from the train tracks in time? Let alone get to the position of hitting an Asai moonsault? That thin crust pizza ad wasn't THAT long. The most unfortunate ad break.


2019 MOTY MASTER LIST