2021 Ongoing MOTY List: Danielson vs. Fish

13. Bryan Danielson vs. Bobby Fish AEW Dynamite 10/16

ER: This was the week before we started writing up every single Bryan Danielson match (a man who for a three year stretch not that long ago was working more minutes and more matches than anyone in wrestling) and was the week where we realized we were getting too many weekly TV matches from the best AEW guys and that it should be documented. Danielson is a guy who clearly has fun in matches and has several eras to pull from. This was a throwback to 2009-2010 Danielson, which is probably my least revisited era of Danielson. It's not because of his work specifically, but it was the era of Davey Richards and 35 minute matches and I'm not sure what it would take to get those bumped up my watch list but I'm not there yet. This was a better version of that era, with the excess bloat trimmed and a little more gravity added to heel hooks and kneebars due to the extra 10 years on the joints. Two guys in their mid 40s kicking each other in the hamstrings and bending ankles is almost always cool. They work most of this match around kicks, with missed charges leading to turning around into kicks and every other move punctuated with a kick to the back or leg. 

They work a really cool attack the leg match, but they also don't really put much effort into selling any kind of sustained leg damage over the match. Maybe that is Danielson pulling from his 2001 "sell the arm" era. I don't need a lot of melodramatic 2009 "Ohhhhh my leggggggg" selling and this match gave us that 2009 match with the melodrama snipped out. Danielson's leg took a beating before he started attacking Fish's leg harder, catching Fish in a cool trap leg German suplex before throwing sick dragon screws and wrapping Fish's leg around the post several times. Fish's big offense looked like something that could finish Danielson, and he hits a backdrop driver nasty enough that we could have seen Bobby Fish become the top AEW heel after concussing the legend into retirement. Fish's Falcon Arrow took them halfway across the ring, and things looked chippy as hell when they were heel kicking each other in the eyes and nose while holding heel hooks. Danielson really cuts through the shit for the finish, throwing a bunch of knees before locking in quick tap kneebar that looked like something Fujiwara would have used to punish an impudent student in the 80s. Bobby Fish seemed like a somewhat unnecessary AEW signing and Danielson immediately made him feel like a guy worth having around. 

PAS: I thought this was tremendous. Fish is going to be stuck working workrate tags with the Young Bucks, but this period where he came in and just hit Muay Thai leg kicks and sharp elbows. I thought it was simple and violent, and then when it got bigger it kept the violence and the selling and never went into overkill territory. I loved how Fish paid back the leg capture German suplex with a leg capture backdrop driver later, and if I came into this match not knowing the hierarchy, I would have totally bought his top falcon arrow into the knee bar as a finish. I thought the kneebar duel was one of the best I have seen done in wrestling, and that final ankle pick was sick stuff. This match obviously had a little extraneous stuff which a BattlArts match wouldn't have. But BattlArts is what this reminded me of, which is obviously about as big a compliment as I can give.

2021 MOTY MASTER LIST