AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 3/25/20

What Worked

-Even though some spots got a little too "oh right this is Jimmy Havok", this was probably the most I'm going to enjoy a Jimmy Havok singles match. Havok shakes Cody's hand and Schiavone speculated he was playing mind games. I thought Schiavone was making a joke about Coronavirus but no he was just implying "I don't think that handshake was sincere". But Havok had a nice right hand after the handshake, and that's something I don't typically get to write about Havok. Cody took a couple of nice upside down bumps in the corner, hit a decent dive and a big ramp run lariat into the ring, Havok spiked himself nicely on a couple of CrossRhodes, there was a bad Havok armbar (well I tried going a sentence without dumping on him, but he made the top side of the review and that's something).

-Darby worked a match, obviously Darby is gonna be on the top side. Sabian and Penelope were fun foils for him, with Kip flying back on the John Woo dropkick and bring there to get flung by Darby on one of his sky high armdrags. Penelope tied Darby up nicely from the floor and it lead to a great whipping springboard kick across Darby's face. I loved the misdirection that played into Darby hitting his excellent tope, a nice bit of timing capped off with a perfect dive. I don't think I've seen him use the ankle pick to trap someone in the Last Supper pin, and I dug it.

-Brodie Lee holds his silverware like a convict.

-I'm a fan of whoever did the caricatures of the roster at ringside, but they needed to be driving tiny convertibles and holding tennis rackets.


What Didn't Work

-I thought the wrestlers in the audience was a nice touch last week. It was fun to hear guys talking trash and rooting on the matches. There was a chop in the Inner Circle tag last week where a chop didn't hit flush, and I heard someone go "Nope!" That's fun. Empty arena is just tough to get into.

-Jake Hager's theme music seems like it was written for someone else, and I'm sure we wouldn't have to go back more than a month on his Twitter feed to find him retweeting someone talking about how hip-hop isn't "real music". That and his weird patchy brown face tan made it look like he was wearing a prosthetic nose.

-If you're going to make Brodie Lee into the abusive father who red face screams "IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR ONE NICE EVENING!?" after his kids sneeze or accidentally drop a fork, you gotta have him go out and absolutely murder QT Marshall. What is QT doing even getting in one bit of offense? Lee can't go out there and do slingshot sentons that mostly miss. He needs to go back and watch some unprofessional Bradshaw syndicated squash matches.

-There was plenty I liked about the Guevara/Omega match, but the tone felt a little all over the map, and a lot of it felt like a real sluggish Omega performance. It also felt unnecessarily long, but that could be because so many big AEW matches are go go go that this one just felt like they were going slow just to go long. Omega seemed especially sluggish after the first commercial break, running at half speed and just dropping to the mat without his trademark derpy spring. Sammy did a running thread through the match attacking Omega's hand, and I liked the ways Guevara went after the hand. Some of Guevara's best shots where when he was going for an armbar and trying to get Omega to unclasp his hands, just punching at Omega's hand. He never went over the top with it and almost always used it to get out of a jam. He even resorted to biting that hand down the stretch. But Omega never really seemed to notice nor care, which fit nicely with his limp body language over the rest of the match. The final third of the match picked up nicely, we got a great Guevara dive, and several V Trigger knees from Omega. The first couple looked so-so, but the one he did to set up the OWA looked finisher worthy itself. Guevara came off way better than Omega in this whole thing, and I thought Omega's selling for Guevara's offense was flat at best, nonexistent at worst. This should have been better, and would have benefitted from being 15 minutes instead of 23.