AEW Five Fingers of Death Week of 12/20-12/26

AEW Dark 12/21 (Taped 12/3)

Eddie Kingston vs. Colin Delaney

PAS: Delaney and Cheech have been one of the best tag teams in the world in To Infinity and Beyond for the last several years, and would be perfect regulars on Dark and Elevation at a minimum. I can imagine their young guys like Private Party and Brock Anderson would improve by leaps and bounds if they got a chance to regularly work TIAB, and Delaney would be a great utility player on his own as well. This was a fun short match which let Delaney get in a bit of offense before going down. His springboard stunner is a nifty move and he certainly takes a nice beating from Eddie. The Delaney fan in me would have liked this to go another 2 minutes or so, but this was still solid stuff.

MD: You got the sense Kingston respected what Delaney could do. That bled through in the ringwork itself. I could have used a few more minutes on this but again, hierarchy says probably not and Kingston understands hierarchy as well as anyone on the roster, even as he peppers in opportunities around it. There are too many cutters in AEW but there's probably room for Delaney's springboard stunner. It's always fun when Kingston just starts to unload with the suplexes and I liked the little wrinkle on the finish. This ended up a bit like a Tenryu vs Teranishi type match. Tenryu (or in this case Kingston) was going to give him everything he deserved based on who he was, but not a lick more than he should have based on his role in life and on the card.

AEW Dynamite 12/22

Darby Allin/CM Punk/Sting vs. The Pinnacle (Dax Hardwood/Cash Wheeler/MJF) 

ER: This was a long match paced out over three different hot tags for our heroes. It sometimes felt a bit long, and not every sequence worked, so it basically came down to a series of whose hot tags worked and whose heat segments were the best. Darby always has the best of both, and Sting continues to do the best work of his last 20 years on hot tags, while the Punk stretches all felt like they underdelivered. Darby can make anything come alive, so while the focus for awhile was on MJF running from Punk (even going so far as getting Punk to blow himself up chasing up and down the concourse stairs of the Greensboro Coliseum), Darby is doing small things like aiming for Cash's eye socket with a back elbow and wrenching him around by the neck on snapmares and cravats, but then takes the Punk/MJF chase up a huge notch. Darby - as he does - hits one of the hardest topes possible into The Pinnacle while they're starting to approach a heaving abdomen Punk. Darby's topes are almost always the best reason to rewind a wrestling show, and this one looked like a helmetless tackle. He twisted his body at the moment of impact and it made him crash perfectly through all three of them. 

Sting has been so fun in ring, and I loved how he took fight to Cash as well. That legsweep kick to set up the Scorpion Deathlock is a cool thing I don't remember 1998 Sting doing, and his tug of war with MJF avoiding Punk was paid off nicely with a stiff short arm clothesline. Sting really seemed like he had it out for Cash here, boxing his ears and raking his back, then bringing him into the ring with a hard landing vertical suplex. Sting somehow throws a vertical suplex like a 30 year old, honestly a crazy spot for a 62 year old to be doing (and this was before he did something much crazier). Darby making his transitions back to opponents' control as entertaining as his own time on offense is something Darby does best, getting stuck in enemy territory and thrown recklessly by Cash hard and fast over the top rope (bouncing off the edge of the apron on his way down) and FTR shine when they're hitting combos on him. I thought things dipped a bit with Sting's ring time going on a bit too long and Punk's long portion not fully clicking, but an awesome FTR power plex on Punk and an unhinged Darby crossbody that took him and Cash to the floor kept this constantly threatening to be spectacle. Sting and MJF had a couple of chippy moments (loved how Sting took a bulldog to break a Scorpion Deathlock) but things peak incredibly when Sting hits an insane hiptoss that throws MJF headfirst to the floor into FTR, the guardrail, and the floor, and then unleashes one of the oldest man planchas to the floor. Insane. The match might not have needed the full 24 minutes, but they still kept managing to keep upping the ante and making this a big main event. 

MD: As celebratory attraction matches go, this was up there. It felt like bringing Andre or Dusty in for Xmas to team with Watts and JYD, but in some ways, it was even more effective than that because it furthered storylines better and paid off other things. One advantage of the AEW style of not doing a lot of rematches is that the Punk interaction with Darby and Sting still feels fresh and unresolved. They had one match. Punk won it. Maybe a year from now, Darby beats Punk. Maybe not. But here they could team and all all honor one another and feel like a unit with a connection because of that one prior match. The Pinnacle doesn't always seem the most unified stable, but here it all came together with the matching yellow trunks and MJF really taking the fair weather camaraderie to extremes, celebrating FTR at every opportunity. He took everything to extremes, coming in off of the big win against Dante and the big workrate performance against Darby, and felt the freedom to go full chickenshit heel, teasing a lock up with Punk before tagging out, hitting Sting before immediately begging off, letting Punk chase him around the arena, and later on doing things like teasing a punch on a held Sting only to tweak his face instead. Like everything else in the match, it paid off, though not with Punk getting his hands on him, which will come later, but instead with Darby's dive from off camera or Sting lawn darting him out of the ring.

The structure of this worked pretty well. They had all of the feeling out process (with a new match up in FTR vs Punk, which played out both early and late) and antics, with the actual shine on Cash during the first commercial break, taken nice and slow with things like Punk's ten punch in the corner and cutting off the ring. When they came back that transitioned to heat on Darby after he got taken out with the top rope, the first hot tag to Sting and then the second heat on him during the second commercial break. Then they went into the big comeback, first with Punk vs FTR (including the Powerplex which Excalibur was really happy to call) and then with the MJF lawn dart and Sting dive, before Dax took the bullet for MJF and ate everyone's finish.

Everyone got their moments, even if MJF's were mostly underhanded and they missed Darby taking him out through the timekeeper's table. Punk seemed a little bit off with his timing and execution now and again, more so than in a lot of recent matches I've seen of his; maybe half a step behind at times and it added up, just not enough to really detract from the match as there was so much else going on. In general, both sides worked together well. I loved all the bodyslams. It's like Punk's infected everyone around him with them, but they were all used in important ways, setting up BOTH hot tags for instance. For something that is organic and accidental, it's striking to me how much FTR are like Les Blousons Noirs, with Cash as dangerous Gessat and Dax as Manneveau. Dax stooged all over the place in this one and Cash was pretty slick, including one little moment where he won a wristlock by slipping a knee in that was right out of 60s French Catch. So good big moments. Good little moments. Nice commercial management. Solid structure, though maybe it went a half segment too long. The good guys win. The fans are sent home happy (well, they would be if not for the Rampage taping that followed). And the bad guy gets to escape and to live another day and bluster on the way out. Nice piece of business that knew exactly what it was trying to accomplish and pretty much nailed it.

PAS: I think this would have been a strong MOTY level match at 15 or so, but felt a little draggy at 23. Still excellent, big star, super entertaining stuff. The Greensboro Coliseum saw a ton of these kind of matches over the years, whether it was Dusty, Steamboat and Dick Slater vs. Tully, Black Bart and Ron Bass 12/29/84, Dusty and the Rock and Rolls vs. Arn, Tully and Flair (4/20/86) or even Shelton Benjamin, Charlie Haas, Eddie Edwards, El Generico vs. Roderick Strong, The Briscoes and Michael Elgin (12/4/11) (actually that match went an hour and twenty minutes?!? What the fuck was going on in 2011 ROH?). This delivered all of the big beats of a great big star six man main event, and even some shit like the Sting plancha which we had no reason to expect. MJF was fun as Jimmy Hart (which is actually a pretty good role for him), and FTR are way better in this kind of cut the ring off stuff than when they try to do PWG shit with the Young Bucks or the Lucha Bros. Also, what a treasure this AEW Sting run has been. I have loved every single second of it, and Sting in tag matches with workhorse partners seems like it could go on forever.