AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 12/2/20

What Worked

-Jericho/Kazarian was a decent enough old guy fight, though I think a lot of the best stuff happened during picture in picture, sadly. Jericho is good at keeping a nice thread of hard short right hands and stiff right elbows running through matches like these, and I liked him peppering in stiff strikes while mostly just letting Kazarian either bump or do his 2006 offense. Kazarian takes a nice big bump into the guardrail, and he lands right on Jericho while doing a Spanish Fly and while I don't think that was intentional, I dug it even more as a nearfall. I liked the bit with MJF threatening to throw in the towel, strong asshole move from the guy infiltrating the stable. The match itself wasn't clean, some things didn't quite land like they were supposed to, but that typically adds to a match like this. 

-I am not excited for 60+ year old Sting in AEW ("long term contract"!?!), but I cannot put into words the joy I felt listening to Schiavone scream his head off in excitement. It's Stiiiiiiiiing!! 

What Didn't Work

-The further we get away from a time in wrestling where battle royals were either a) an important part of a card, or b) a common match on a card, the more we get into the territory of modern battle royals filled with people who don't know how to work a compelling battle royal. Two minutes into this battle royal and I counted 9 people lying on the mat, apron, or ringside, selling exhaustion. Nobody knows how to work interesting mini stories within a battle royal, they now only know how to do actual sequences they just work in normal matches. Dustin is the best battle royal worker in AEW, and he was not in this one, and you really need at least one battle royal engineer in there to make one work. Tully Blanchard was shown smiling on from the crowd, and you'd think a super compelling battle royal worker like Tully could have at least passed along some advice. Tully was the kind of guy who you'd see constantly stooging his way through, cheapshotting people, begging off when caught about to cheapshot someone. Here, one of the few people I saw trying something like that was Kip Sabian, who was comically blocking people off so Miro could beat them down. The rest just looked like guys lying around until it was their turn to bump. Sure, there were some nice elimination bumps (I liked Quen getting thrown back over on the silly string attempt), but there just wasn't any color or battle royal artistry happening here. Everyone needs to just go watch an All Japan battle royal (any one). There will be at least 3 or 4 easy things to steal. 

-Well, Baker/Hirsch was a bit of a mess, several little time standing still moments. Hirsch is billed as 4'11 but I'm not sure she's even 4'8. She makes Baker look like a giant, but that just made it worse when none of Baker's kneelifts came close to making contact with Hirsch's head. Baker has long legs, and I don't honestly know how kneelifts can miss by 6" when she barely had to lift her knee over her waist to make contact. And that was kind of the story of the match. I liked Leyla's chops on the apron, thought her suplex was cool (but think the set up of Baker needing to sell in the ropes while Hirsch slowly runs back and forth hitting offense is silly), but that submission trading was slow and ugly. Baker is a great personality and has improved in the ring, but that was not visible here. 

-I think I would have liked the Cody/Darby tag a lot more if it was just a Darby/Hobbs singles match. Darby selling and getting ragdolled by someone like Hobbs will always be entertaining, even though Hobbs doesn't quite land with the follow through that they act like he has on commentary. All of Darby's offense looked great, my favorite being the springboard back elbow on Starks before the commercial break, and that nasty coffin drop on Starks to end things. Actually, any time Darby and Starks interacted looked good. The problem was mostly Cody. Cody tagged in with a bad run of hot tag offense, whiffing on stomach kicks, barely making contact on a springboard dropkick, landing way light on a pescado; all of his offense looked like he was just running through a rehearsal with Starks and Hobbs, saving the full contact for the actual live show.  

-WHYYYYYY did that main even need to be 30 minutes? You ever watch one of those Jon Moxley matches where it looks like he's working at about 2/3 the speed he usually works, and throws most of his strikes so that they don't make contact? It's a thing, and that's how he spent most of this 30 minute match. Anything interesting about the match (namely Moxley getting his leg worked over after a dragon screw in the ropes and getting tossed knee first into the guardrail) get abandoned by the first commercial break, never to be mentioned again. Moxley worked this match the way a depressed man in a bathrobe makes breakfast, just dragging his feet throughout the entire thing. Kenny felt like he noticed how draggy Moxley was and decided to dump himself on his head a bunch to make up for it. It helped, honestly, but Moxley kept dragging things back down. At one point, selling exhaustion, they had one of the worst looking "on our knees throwing strikes" exchanges I've seen, the kind of thing that would stand out as bad on any local indy. Omega was making awful faces, all of the shots looked terrible, completely embarrassing stretch of match. It went so well, that not long after they decided to have an even stupider strike exchange by sitting in folding chairs and taking turns seeing who could throw a more mediocre punch. 2x speed only mildly saved things, but they couldn't save how awful Moxley's elbow strikes looked while escaping Omega's first 1WA attempt. You look at those downward elbow strikes and you tell me what they were supposed to look like. I have no idea how Moxley thought those looked, but nobody can tell me those even looked like someone miming a strike. Omega's knees down the stretch may have looked bad and landed somewhere around Moxley's tricep, but at least it looked like someone throwing a limb at their opponent. What an awful match. 

-I have no actual clue how to feel about the new relationship with Impact. Impact has gone on for so long and is so off my personal radar that it's not even an amusing punchline anymore. I used to love making fun of TNA, have fond memories of that night where they went head to head with Raw and had an impossible amount of things go wrong (the Homicide mousetrap cage, Jeff Hardy being mobbed by two teenage girls in the parking garage, Hogan driving to the building for an hour). I watched it with friends and we laughed about it for years. But at this point TNA has been around since before I could legally drink, and it's just this thing that somehow never goes away. It's managed to exist for 18 years and it may be around in 18 more, but I'm not sure how old I will have to be to want to revisit a bunch of old TNA. I will watch so many other eras of wrestling several times over before I get nostalgic for TNA. And yet here they still are, somehow getting another life preserver by being attached to a stronger product. Maybe I'll root for a partnership between two competitors to actually work! Maybe this will turn into something interesting. I'm not very interested in it at the moment, but because of the angle I found out that Impact was actually on AXS TV, and before this I just assumed they had existed on Twitch or Quibi or European Netflix for the past couple years. If my Tuesday evening is otherwise unfilled, maybe I will watch AEW invade Impact Wrestling.