AEW Five Fingers of Death 10/24 - 10/30

AEW Dark Elevation 10/24

Eddie Kingston/Ortiz vs Jollyville Fuck-Its (Russ Meyers/T-Money)

MD: Great use of the time they had here by Nasty Russ and T-Money. The airplane spin/punch combo was instantly memorable and popped Ian and Menard. They were able to hit one or two more things on Ortiz too, and he was good enough to sell it even after he somehow hefted T-Money up for the fisherman's buster for the finish. Otherwise, they got to do the thing that we saw them do so well last time they had an Elevation appearance, feed, Russ flipping for Ortiz's comeback lariat and T-Money running into all of Eddie's shots and being a great giant canvas for the corner chops. But yeah, another ten minutes in some indy would have been nice.

AEW Dynamite 10/26

Bryan Danielson vs Sammy Guevara

MD: There was a moment in January or February where one of my absolute top Danielson AEW matches was Guevara, heel Danielson and face Guevara that was, driven by Guevara's athleticism giving Danielson the ability to push and push and push and the animosity that came from Danielson's sheer disdain for Guevara's claim to fame, the vlog, fueling the violence. I think my perfect wrestling world at that point had Danielson taking the TNT title and facing all sort of oddball challengers on a near weekly basis. No one could have predicted how 2022 turned out though.

This got a long, fairly complete fifteen minutes and had its share of Guevara pushing Danielson in the way he likes to get pushed, but plenty of character and crowd interaction as well. The commercial break fell a little later than usual maybe, allowing for Guevara to dive in right at the start with an immediate attack. The story here, as much as anything else, is that Sammy wouldn't know when to quit, when not to stay on something (be it forearms, or kicks) or would go for that extra flourish and pay for it (his tricked out back flip after a leapfrog or the missed moonsault, into a second, into a standing shooting star press), but then able to get back into things through his athleticism alone. Add in a bit of abuse from Tay and Danielson's comebacks being driven by grit and fury and absorption of blows and this was fairly enjoyable all around. There's a PPV match with no commercial break that these two could have that would really give Danielson his adrenaline-laden dream, and this wasn't that, but it leaned well into the hierarchy and Danielson's cruel mastery of pro wrestling while still highlighting all of those things that make Sammy special and tapering down all of the excesses that sometimes that people out of his matches.