AEW Full Gear Live Blog

 PAS: Wife and kids are visiting the in-laws today, so I figure I would check this out.  I am incredibly excited about Eddie Kingston vs. Jon Moxley, Kingston is an all-time favorite of mine and I am so excited to see what he can do with the biggest opportunity of his life. I also think Darby vs. Cody should be good as usual, and there are some other matches which might be good too.

Allysin Kay vs. Sereena Deeb

PAS: Not sure the point of having two different women's titles that aren't particularly booked well and that folks don't really care about. This was a solidly executed match that never did anything to stand out past solid. I liked the stuff in the ropes with the neckbreaker by Kay and later the dragon screw in the ropes by Deeb. This never broke past OK, although that is a pretty good rating for the AEW women's division.

Hangman Adam Page vs. Kenny Omega

PAS: This was OK I guess, this isn't really the type of wrestling I like, and the parts where they just exchanged, and then exchanged finisher, I was completely out. Also Page has a shockingly bad looking shoulder block from a guy I assume was trained by Beau James. I did like the finish with Page fighting the One Winged Angel before falling, and some of the chops and knees looked really good. Page hit a really nice regular clothesline and should probably ditch the goofy flip and just throw that. This is the kind of thing that Meltzer will give 5 3/4 stars too, and I thought was closer to watchable.  

John Silver vs. Orange Cassidy

PAS: I dug this a bunch. I am someone who found Cassidy's indy stuff relatively insufferable, but he tweaked it a bit in AEW and it is more of a way to frustrate and taunt his opponent then something that breaks the rules of wrestling. Silver was great as a steaming hothead, and I thought the ripping of the pockets was fun frustrated response spot. I haven't seen much of Silver before, but I dug all of his short man power spots, the one armed gorilla hold was really cool as was his spinning backbreaker, and his wild strike combos were stiff and cool Cassidy does have great body control and his escapes and counters looked great, just a compact exciting little match. A real surprise. 

Cody Rhodes vs. Darby Allin

PAS: I thought this was well on it's way to being a classic until a bit of a flat ending. Cody has had some undeniably great matches in his AEW time, but he has always felt like the canvas other artists were painting on, here he added some color and texture of his own. Here he actually had some killer offense and brought plenty of great offense of his own. All of the arm work of Rhodes was super nasty, the hammerlock throw to the stage looked like one of those crazy bumps Allin would take against Ethan Page. I also loved him shifting his weight on the Darby armdrag and dropping him on the bad arm. The top rope Cross Rhodes was brutal, as was the top rope counter to the sleeper. It was building to an amazing finish, but the series of rollups just didn't look great and the finish fell flat.  Darby has so much great looking roll up offense, having him win on some lame reversal was weak. Still overall this was killer and this PPV is super delivering with the main event still to come. 

Nyla Rose vs. Hikaru Shida

PAS: This PPV is delivering even on the things I wasn't looking forward too. The only other Shida match I have liked was against Aja Kong, so she must be best against big ladies she can hit really hard. I liked all the knee work by Rose, and she really knows how to use her size to make it hurt. Shida kept it pretty simple and just smashed Rose over and over again with nasty knee strikes until Rose was done, no problem with that finish at all. 

Young Bucks vs. FTR

PAS: I liked big portions of this, but think it eventually bloated past the point of great match. I really enjoyed the insane bumps Cash Wheeler was taking, just flying to floor like a luchadore losing his mask. I also thought the stuff with Harwood's busted hand was cool, not sure if that was an improv, but they did interesting things with it. The Face in Peril section was great, lots of interesting cut offs and a fun escape to a hot tag. The finish run just went on and on though, running through too many tribute spots and too many near falls, there was stuff I liked and would have liked as finishes, but they just ran too many finishes. At 20 minutes this would have been great, at damn near 30 it just was too much. 

Final Deletion

PAS: Not sure what the hell that was. Why it was so incredibly long, and I am not sure why they ended a comedy match with a horrifically violent murder. The last couple of minutes were some sick stuff, not sure how much of that was camera tricks, but it sure looked horrid. The bump from the apron was nasty, that chair shot to the forehead was gross as was the last chair shot on the concrete. Then they go back to weird call backs to other Hardy cinematic matches. I am not sure it was bad, but I am not sure it was good either.

Chris Jericho vs. MJF

PAS: This was pretty good stuff too, I thought the Jericho miss of the Judas Effect into the post was nasty stuff, and MJF's arm work was pretty good, although hurt by the Cody and Darby match being worked the same way. MJF still needs to work on the little stuff, although the big stuff normally looks OK. Goofy finish, although appropriate for what they are trying to do. Everything on this PPV hasn't hit it out of the park, but everything has at least been good stuff and you can argue that everything has over delivered. Very excited for this main event!

35. Eddie Kingston vs. Jon Moxley - GREAT

PAS: My expectations for this were sky high, Kingston has had so many stone cold classics, two matches on our All Time MOTY list, and this was him shooting his biggest shot ever on a PPV main event. This is a match I am going to want to watch again, but on first impression it didn't reach the heights of his best stuff. I thought the first brawling exchange looked great, the Frye vs. Takayama exchange almost always looks bad, but they were winging punches at each other with real force and violence. The tough guy chop exchange is also something I don't normally love, but worked for what they were trying to do here. I thought when this delved into death match stuff is where it fell a bit short. The barbed wire baseball bat is pretty tired at this point. I did like how Eddie sold the internal damage with the bloody mouth, and the craziness of wrapping his fist in barbed wire for the backfist was pretty great. Didn't think we needed either the thumbtacks or the alcohol, and a lot of the match was built around those as the big spots. The Eddie kicks to the nuts were great, as were all of his little quick jab slaps and crossfaces. I think we needed one more big Eddie near fall, and while the bulldog choke with the wire is a sick finish, I wanted it milked a bit more. The big dramatics in WWE matches are tiresome shit, but Eddie Kingston can do big dramatics better then almost anyone ever, and I needed this to be a bit more high key. I still thought this was a heck of a PPV main event, and one of the better matches of the year, but it won't end up in a Kingston top 5 or maybe even a Kingston top 10, and I wanted this to be his masterpiece. 

JR: It’s pretty rare that I feel way off base after a match compared to our little bubble, but I seem way higher on this than everyone else. I suppose I’ll try and articulate why? I think after a show on which everything felt bloated and over booked, this moved a clip that I was comfortable with. Eddie Kingston has strengths that have been touched upon here many, many times, but one I think that stands out in this performance is his ability to mine emotion and narrative without the WWE style negative space that every big main event has come to rely upon. I didn’t want an I quit match with two guys laying around after big moves and then grimacing and then doing something again. I wanted what I got here; a match which someone trying their hardest, pulling out every stop, and then when they ran out of ideas, coming to terms with their own limitations. Moxley was good here as well, working with enough pace to not indulge in some of his bad habits and very clearly wanting to give the brunt of the match to Kingston. It really felt as though this match played to both of their strengths in a way that doesn’t often happen anymore. We see workrate epics up and down the card, especially in AEW. I trusted Eddie to give me something that felt like a Kingston title challenge rather than an AEW main event and he delivered. While I’d listen to an argument that he has had a bunch of better stuff this year, I thought this stood out as a worthwhile entry, at least as an exercise as a single person building an internal narrative. 

ER: I am definitely the low voter on this one. This was probably the best promo build to a match we've had in who knows how long, with Kingston giving the kind of promos that come across the timelines of people who aren't on wrestling Twitter. Everyone I know who watches wrestling regularly was excited for this match. Universally anticipated. And it earned that anticipation. It just didn't deliver for me to the level I thought it could. They had ideas, and I think they went for maybe more of those ideas than they needed to. I think that the build felt so real, and the payoff felt so fake. I didn't like the use of weapons, and didn't think the match needed them. I don't love baseball bat shots in wrestling, especially when they're coming around the halfway point of the match. Maybe I associate them too much with Russo, but it's a bad connection either way. But I didn't buy into the barbed wire usage, even though both men's acting throughout was good. If you're going to have several spots where wire is scraped on someone's head or face or neck, somebody needs to blade if that wire is from Party City. Barbed wire wrapped fist is cool, but someone has to bleed because of barbed wire wrapped fist. The alcohol poured onto thumbtack holes is a cool bit that they did well, but I also don't think the payoff was good enough to necessitate tacks even being in the match. 

I don't think they needed that, and I think it would have better for the real match build for them to have more of a straight brawl. I think their work with chairs was good, and if they just did 2-3 extra things with a chair they wouldn't have needed any of the stuff with the bat, wire, or tacks. Fill in the time with more brawling. Kingston was also weirdly quiet throughout. He's used his mouth to legendary heights during this feud, the kind of promos that would have been memorable coming from a strong promo era, so it just felt really weird to me when he didn't utter a peep in this match. Kingston is one of the more amusing wrestlers of my life at working a couple of good verbal reactions into a match. A regretful yell after throwing a punch with a hurt hand, and angry insult after taking one leg kick too many, but here he was silent. It made things feel less dramatic to me, and I didn't feel as connected to it as a result. I thought the early parts of the match were great, and felt like they were building to something as strong as expected. Both of them were good at throwing chairs at each other, and Kingston brings such wrestling value to walking brawls. He's good at selling honestly and filling time, doing things like blocking a thrown chair with his hands, but not pretending to sell his head. Kingston shakes and rubs out his wrist after getting his hands up, and ol' JR doesn't pick up on it and first says it hit his head and then covers and says it was blocked mostly. Excalibur saves it and actually puts over Kingston's more nuanced selling by saying you could tell it affected his hand and wrist. 

That kind of attention to detail will keep the floor of a match high. So this was not a bad match, not at all. This was a match worked with a high floor, by two guys who can and have done well with matches like these. Their acting and selling was strong without, even if it did feel like it needed more passion. I grade Kingston matches tougher than anyone else's matches these days, because he's wrestling at a higher level than anyone else right now, I think he's been the best wrestler in the world for at least the past two years, and he's been a great wrestler forever 15 years now. He has consistently impressed me as much as any wrestler the past few years especially, so he's just going to be on a tougher curve. There are plenty of wrestlers who could have likely had this same match, and I would have come away impressed. This one just didn't move me like the best upper Kingston matches do. 

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