AEW Five Fingers of Death: Week of 7/18 - 7/24

AEW Dynamite 7/20

Darby Allin vs. Brody King

MD: I'm writing this having been away last week, with most of the ROH PPV left to watch. I figured Phil might have done the barbed wire match out of principle on the Ringer, but he went with Allin/King and if I have to choose (and I do) that's what I'm going to go with too.

That said, this one's a bit tricky. What's to even write about here? The match really speaks for itself. There's a size differential. Darby was his most Darby-ish. Brody came off as an absolute monster. Darby attacked early by using his body as a weapon. Brody caught him and made him pay for the risks. There was a move or two where Darby was trying to come back due to Brody recovering from that initial shot but once he was able to chain a couple of moves together, it became a dismantling, with Brody really cutting off the moments of hope before they could register with his superior strength. Darby never really got a proper comeback, as instead, his moral victory in the match was making it back into the ring after the hanging apron choke, even if he was crushed immediately thereafter. Considering this is all building (I assume) to the appealing big match of Darby/Sting/Miro vs House of Black, it was a fairly effective step on the road. 

What made it work as much as anything else was Darby's selflessness. Darby ultimately loses a lot of big matches and he spends big chunks of his matches working from underneath, but the crowd cheered for him and chanted for him throughout and looked at his last second dive back into the ring as a big moment and a small victory, one that will likely be as remembered as the fact he ultimately lost. He understands who he is and what he is and the fact that his path of getting over and staying over isn't trying to eat up his opponent and get all of his stuff in. The daredevil nature would get him over in the moment but it's the projected resilience in giving and giving and selling the impact and weight of what's happening to him but not quitting or giving up that keeps him over through his losses and between matches and programs. 

There's a confidence in being able to do that, especially when you're a star and especially when you're small. You can see it through wrestling history, the way that Terry Funk gave and gave in Japan in a sea of guys pushing their dominance and how the crowd learned to love him because of it. You can watch how a broken down Dynamite Kid, his mobility fading post-injury ate up so many opponents in 1988 WWF or 1989 AJPW and how both the matches and his own aura suffered because of it. You can watch the difference between Inoki matches in 1986, how much more he feels the need to impose himself against the technically superior UWF guys and how much better his performances come off when he's facing people like Murdoch or Andre or Sakaguchi instead. With the latter, he had the confidence to sell and give to build to his comebacks without feeling the need to show that he was his opponent's match. Darby understands his role, but even more than that, he understands his path. As long as he retains the confidence in himself to keep on that path, he'll continue to give one great, resonant performance after the next.