AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 5/6/20

What Worked

-I liked Nyla Rose's cannonball off the top, and her powerbomb delivered a nice flat landing. But somewhere, some man is crying about it.

-I overall liked Moxley/Kazarian, though I liked more what they were going for in the first half than the second half. After Janela's goofy brand of dancing, I was getting into these two just basing a match around heavy chops and headlock takeovers. And I thought the layout was much stronger, even if there was some shady execution on some of it. This should have been Moxley beating Kazarian down while Kazarian does his best to keep up and fight back, and that's mostly what we got. I liked Kazarian utilizing "holding my leg out" two different times, letting Moxley run himself into a boot off the top to the floor and in the ring. And Kazarian took a couple of tough bumps, including getting backdropped out of the ring onto the ramp and landing on sprawled knees. Finish was simple and easy, no need to have someone kicking out of your best stuff, and I appreciated that.

-QT Marshall did his best to make Archer look good, and I think QT has some of the best strikes in AEW. He's exactly where he should be within the AEW hierarchy, but he's become a guy I really like seeing when he shows up.

-Loved Britt kicking Brandi in the stomach and hitting a nice DDT on the floor. But for all of JR and Excalibur showing concern for Brandi when Jake's snake was crawling on her, nobody ever asked how awful it must have felt for the snake to see Brandi wearing snakeskin shorts.

-The peaks of the main event made it work, even though it still had that weird combination of "pretty dangerous bumps but also yuks" that they always go for. Can you picture Buzz Sawyer getting punched in the head and thrown hard into a guardrail, and then hit with an inflatable pool float? No, because that would be pretty stupid. There's always this weird vibe when they do a match like this where they have to do some crazy stuff so that they're taken seriously, but this weird shame where they don't want to be the guys taking something like pro wrestling seriously. I don't understand it myself, but it's clearly the house style. Sammy Guevara took a lot of big bumps and is the best guy to be teaming with Jericho in something like this, to take all of the big bumps while acting as his hype man. Sammy takes a gnarly powerbomb into a roll up door, and leans way into a golf cart bump (much better than Jericho, who JR immediately had to give a "well luckily I think Jericho got out of the way of that cart..."). Omega was much better doing wild stupid stuff like that awesome moonsault off the cherry picker, than he was at simple brawling (I'm not sure why he was throwing punches a foot past people's heads in a brawl, but there they were). Even Swagger takes a big bump through a stack of guardrails. Those type of things kept the match up here.


What Didn't Work

-I really liked the opening of Janela/Rhodes, loved the fast scramble small package nearfalls especially, but disliked it the longer it went and thought it was pretty lousy by the end. The longer Janela matches go, the more he shows that he has no idea how to transition back to offense other than "take someone's move fully, and just get up and go on offense". That kept happening throughout the match, and it looked worse each time. There were moments that were good on paper, like a chop exchange ending with Cody goading Janela into throwing one more, only to have Cody kick his arm as he chopped. But with Janela it's really obvious when a spot is going to miss or hit, as he telegraphs things from a mile away making it clear when something is going to whiff. He started that chop while standing 7 feet away from Cody, made a cool on paper spot look silly. Beyond that it was awkward positioning (like Cody's moonsault off the entrance way that Janela had to casually walk 10 feet to take), or awkward movements Janela's silly little run to miss a ramp charge, or that sad little flub where he couldn't hop up onto the apron to finish a spot). By the end of this I was already tired of Cody hitting something big, Janela kicking out with a dramatic nearfall, and then that nearfall meaning nothing when he just stood up to do his own move. Moves trading sucks when someone just stands up after a reverse superplex. The strike exchange in the home cement was shit dressing on a turd salad.

-Why does Lance Archer pick his weakest looking offense to finish matches? His twisting splash off the middle rope looked better than anything he used down the stretch of the match.