AEW Five Fingers of Death Week of 3/7-3/13

AEW Dynamite 3/8

Bryan Danielson/Jon Moxley vs. Workhorsemen (JD Drake/Anthony Henry)

MD: There's something to say about just about any match but I don't have a whole lot to talk about here. The choice to use Henry/Drake instead of Drake with Bononi, Avalon, or Nemeth was interesting. Drake, in and of himself, is (of course) not necessarily a comedy figure, but if you put him with another Wingman, he automatically becomes one. In general, he was one of the people on the AEW roster I most wanted to see against Danielson, up there with Serpentico and Bear Country, but he was mostly matched up here with Mox. In general, Danielson and Moxley were dominant but they had individual exchanges, Mox with Drake, and Danielson with Henry where they were able to trade strikes. I have no idea what Henry was doing on Moxley's dive but it definitely wasn't catching him; to be fair, he might have gotten caught in the ropes a bit and spun nearer to the ring than intended. Because of the size differential, it meant more for Drake to eat the stomps and the LeBell lock than someone of similar hierarchy but less mass. While I would have liked to see something more competitive, this needed to be a 90%/10% showing where the Workhorsemen got in just enough to make it mean a tiny bit more than they got crushed. That's what we got. Sometimes what you need isn't what you want.

ER: This is the Great Match Enthusiast in me speaking, but I really wanted an actual match here. I understand this was the match needed to show Danielson and Moxley as unrelenting ass kickers (and boy was that accomplished with this mauling), but as Matt pointed out, they easily could have just used other members of the Wingmen here and not the two I specifically wanted to see have an 8 minute tag. Should AEW book directly to me? Absolutely not, it would tank them in weeks. Maybe I'm just rooting for Anthony Henry to finally get a break. I think Henry was the most under-appreciated part of the 2021 WWE roster, even more than guys like Lorcan and Gulak. Henry was there for maybe three months (as Asher Hale) and it clearly didn't matter how well he wrestled, he was always going to be immediately cut. His brief run on 205 Live was excellent. Go watch these matches to see what he was doing in WWE while nobody watched: Hale vs. Tony Nese (5/28 205), Hale vs. Grayson Waller (6/18 205), and Hale vs. Guru Raaj (7/16 205) and tell me he wasn't one of the five best wrestlers on the 2021 WWE roster. 

And so I want more for him in AEW than getting pummeled in the face by Moxley, but I do really enjoy Moxley bluntly elbowing someone in the face and making them attempt to catch his dives (even when he has no clue where he's going). Danielson's kicks to Drake had to leave Drake with several different welts, and I let out an audible oooooooo after Drake grabbed Moxley by the chin and slapped him HARD...and Mox didn't flinch an inch. When Mox returned fire you could see every synapse in Drake's body firing to get him to Matrix out of that slap. I wanted more, but that's not what this was. AEW is good about giving the people what they want, so maybe we can get back to this someday. 

AEW Rampage 3/11 (Taped 3/9)

Marq Quen vs. Darby Allin

MD: There's a decent amount to unpack here, but I liked, as much as anything else, how they timed the commercial on this one. After some engaging headlock work (including one great escape counter by Darby) they set up the narrative of the match: Darby crashing into the stairs due to a Kassidy misdirect, and then Quen taking over on the torso, both front and back. With Darby, it's never the shortest path between two points but a fakeout or two before the impact. It keeps you guessing though sometimes it's a little much. That was true in his hope spots and cutoffs later on as well. Anyway, instead of going right to commercial on the heat and dumping a brunt of the slower, more methodological (but meaningful!) work there, they let Quen work him over during the main telecast and only went to the break after a hope spot got cut off. That meant we even got to see an abdominal stretch. It's really good to break formula sometimes in that way since it keeps the viewers from getting too complacent. If you can predict both when the commercial break will happen and what will happen during it, especially if what happens during it only ever happens during a commercial break, that's problematic.

The match continued on, with Quen staying in it by focusing his attack, all building to the crazy 450 to the floor. Darby's someone who throws himself into his offense and throws himself into every bit of his opponent's offense. What makes him so interesting is that he marries that and the high-risks with a lot of attention to detail. Basically, he could get by without it and still be very over, but we probably wouldn't be reviewing his matches here. Anyway, this ended with another big dive attempt by Quen right into a Fujiwara armbar. It felt like the sort of spot that would be shown in opening packages for months fifteen years ago and that was just another Friday night here in AEW. Pretty good showing by Quen over all, even if he should have left that backflip DDT thing on the drawing board.