AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends): Week of 8/1 - 8/7

AEW Battle of the Belts III 8/6

Claudio Castagnoli vs. Konosuke Takeshita

MD: There was a lot of AEW product this last week but none of our guys. Punk's still out and we're between big Danielson (vs. Garcia) and Darby (vs. Brody in his signature match) matches. Eddie cut a promo to set up his Sammy PPV match and hyped the crowd between BOTB and Rampage. There was Serpentico putting over Cole Karter and a fun Emi/Nyla/Shafir vs. Storm/Willow/Shida match on Elevation, the hard hitting Emi vs. Shida match on Thursday Elevation, and a Pac match on Dark I stopped watching after a really early brainbuster. Someday, maybe I'll do a C+A of Emi tags on the web shows, but not this week. I wasn't as high as other people on the Dynamite women's tag, but thought the Rosa vs. Hayter singles was pretty good for what it was. 

Still, I was coming into the main event of BOTB not sure what I was going to write about this week. I figured I was going to go back and cover Garcia vs. Yuta and Martinez vs. Deeb from the ROH PPV as I liked both a lot, and especially liked the series of oneupmanship tags on the web shows leading up to Deeb/Martinez. And why, you ask, was I not looking forward to Claudio vs. Takeshita all that much, given that Takeshita is the 2022 golden boy of AEW? Mainly because I've only liked two of his AEW matches this year. I wrote up the Kingston match a few weeks ago and explained why I didn't think it worked at all. I'd call the Page match even worse: just two guys hitting stuff with no build, no rhyme, no reason, no point. So there's the short JD Drake match - which covered a lot of ground in less than four minutes, but it was all grounded ground - and the Mox match, where he was forced to survive within Mox's formula of getting chewed up while trying to find openings. 

Claudio's the guy who's in career matches for people like The Miz, but I just figured that we'd get a bunch of maximalist noise that people would eat up (and they're certainly allowed to; I'm the outlier!) and that it wouldn't be for me. Instead, we ended up with a pretty balanced title match. Around five minutes of chain wrestling, five of Claudio working the back through the break, around five of Takeshita coming back and getting cut off more broadly, and then a finishing stretch. It's not quite as balanced as that. The stretch was a bit longer than the climb back and cutoff, but wrestling isn't math, even if sometimes a little bit of math can't help. Claudio played up both his own strengths: his literal strength and also his ability to take a limb and lock on a hold, and Takeshita played his strengths (athleticism, size, flexibility) in the opening exchanges. They weren't going in and out of holds evenly so much as Takeshita ending up in a hold and having to get out only to end up in the next one. They were going so hard and intensely that Claudio almost lost Takeshita on the monkeyflip. Both guys looked good, with Takeshita gaining an advantage once the pace picked up. The back work played into Claudio's control, was at least paid lip service to throughout the match, and informed the finish, but it wasn't religiously adhered to. That's fine, as Takeshita is as much of a guy who can believably channel an adrenaline burst as anyone. 

My favorite moment in all of this was one of Takeshita's first hope spots, during the commercial break when he blocked a Claudio suplex and really fought for one of his own. It showed all of his heart and determination but earned him absolutely nothing. The effort probably cost him and his hurt back more than if he had just taken the suplex. All he bought himself was a little bit of space, just a few seconds, before Claudio charged back in. But it said so much about who he is as a character and the legacy he carries that he had to give it all to try to reverse it, no matter the cost. 

My least favorite part was probably when they did the roll through/pop ups down the stretch with the delayed selling, but that was twenty seconds of a twenty minute match, done only once, with one or two moves each. Frankly, they're each such physical wrestlers, channeling so much emotion and adrenaline and heart, that done in a very  limited way that it added instead of detracted from the match. The key moment of the finishing stretch - Claudio catching Takeshita in mid-air to block the knee - was one of those things that *only* Claudio could do. As physically impressive as it was, what's more impressive to me was how much he centered and focused the match, bestowing meaning upon things that might just have been intense and impactful but a less meaningful spot for some other wrestler. I though the Moxley match did a good job of asking what would happen if Takeshita was forced into Mox's crucible. This one did a much better job of taking Takeshita's strengths (and he does have many) and crafting a compelling title match where he had to fight out of them from underneath.

ER: I thought Takeshita looked pretty bad during long stretches of this, but also thought it was one of the great Claudio performances. Claudio has been having these type of great matches with overhyped Speed & Agility guys for at least 15 years now, but he's so good at finding new ways to have those matches. He has the brain and strength to muscle around an athletic flier to great things, and knows how to catch and sell their offense so well that there are few finer at crafting near 3 kickouts. He's so strong at working a 70/30 match while making an opponent with loose offense look genuinely damaging, great at working an opponent's athletic strengths into his own. Takeshita's best athletic strength is his hang time. You give Claudio a man who can hang in the air, and Claudio will find several ways to make that hang time end with a bang. The most compelling parts of this were Claudio working over Takeshita's back. Claudio throws men into some impossible moves, and his backbreakers all stung. They fought real well over a vertical suplex (sadly in picture-in-picture) that ended with Takeshita victorious but still holding his back in even worse pain than before. It's that hard fought battle over that suplex that really stood out. The hard work matwork at the very beginning stood out in the same way, as they worked over knuckle locks and looked like they were each pushing back with equal force and strength. That level of fight isn't there in a lot of Takeshita's suplexes and other offense. His offense is something that only looks as good as the athlete he's up against. Not everyone can take his offense, whereas you can probably count on one hand the people who Claudio couldn't do his offense to. 

But Takeshita has some real moldable strengths, and as I said, every piece of hang time ended with something spectacular. Claudio uppercutting him out of the sky or Takeshita flying to the floor with a flip dive, or the way he would almost look weightless to set up a huge Claudio moment. Now, Claudio's strength can make a lot of guys look weightless, but that running leaping knee that was caught by Claudio and turned into a brutal Death Valley Driver? That's a real Two to Tango situation and was one of several things that Takeshita added to. The Ricola Bomb reversal was a tremendous nearfall, and I bought into at least three of Claudio's kickouts, his body language so good at making it look like Takeshita was going to get his first big AEW victory. Claudio was at least a Top 10 guy for most of his time in WWE, and it's exciting to think about him bringing that into a roster with entirely new match-ups. 

2022 MOTY MASTER LIST