AEW Five Fingers of Death: Week of 7/4 - 7/10

AEW Rampage 7/8

Eddie Kingston vs. Konosuke Takeshita

MD: We talk all the time about how Kingston is the wrestler who understands the emotional underpinning of 90s AJPW and how to inject that back into his matches without it just being about hard shots and head drops. And I've talked plenty about some of the best, most striking things in wrestling are when contrast is invoked. The fact that the true heir to the pillars is a beer-gut wielding smart mouth working class thug from Yonkers makes it go from "working" to "magic." There were spots of that here, like when Takeshita makes the decision to hit Kingston in the ropes instead of allowing for a clean break even when Eddie's going "We're good. We're good" because he wanted his nice tribute match with the rightful inheritor of Jumbo's jumping knee. Or when they hit their limits and Eddie fell forward draping himself over the younger Takeshita exhausted and bonded in combat whether they wanted to be or not, a brief breather before they'd push forward into a finish.

But there's always a chance things can go wrong. There's always a chance that restraint and vision can stumble in the face of two like minds. You get two aficionados in the room together and that contrast may go out the window. You get me and Eric talking about John Nord and it's going to be full of a sort of hyperbole, all the verbal high spots, that you wouldn't get it if was Eric and Phil. And these two? They just couldn't contain themselves. I haven't seen a Kingston AEW match with so much delayed selling and stuff that didn't matter at all. We're in a day and age where half the roster is injured, where there's so much value in the Neo-Brooks-ian method of making every move a struggle, making every move matter, and here we have a match just blatantly full of move inflation, where it would take three shots to accomplish one thing, where in any other match, it wouldn't. They weren't small moves either. Eddie goes for an exploder on the apron, eats a German on the apron, and is right ready to hit an exploder on the floor a moment later. This match was full of that, and I get what they were trying to do, but it was all for a one-night, one-time gain. The crowd was into it, clapping up both wrestlers at various points, and the finishing stretch was hot, but they could have a better match doing half the things and registering them twice as much. They could have had an 89 AJPW match and it would have been way better than their 95 AJPW match and it would have worked so much better in the context of the promotion and Takeshita's place in the hierarchy (which is the bit of AJPW logic they missed completely, actually). Some matches needed an editor. This one pretty much needed not to happen. There was no just hope for it. Ah well.