AEW Five Fingers of Death 4/10 - 4/16

AEW Dynamite 4/12

Darby Allin vs Swerve Strickland

MD: I was thinking of a format change because the column felt a little redundant in the last month or two, especially when we had five more active fingers and at least two or three of us tackling things. I was thinking maybe a Dark/Elevation match of a week sort of deal which is stuff that gets less attention, but I'll keep powering on for a bit. If we get some Danielson/Omega interaction, I'll lay down my criticisms of Omega, once, and then move on. I'm sure everyone's looking forward to that. 

Strickland's a guy who I had a lot of criticisms about when he was a face, but I really do like him as a heel. A lot of the obtuse offense works better when you're a jerk taunting and stymieing your opponent (and the crowd with it) and the contrived setups should get heat, not applause. I do think that Cassidy vs Matthews was the best AEW match of the week and probably of a month or two, but I have more to say about this one. It was something of an impossible situation. Darby had to win. He's in the main event program. He had MJF coming out after the match. Swerve, too, probably had to win. He had a new faction after his old faction petered out in a weird sort of way that you almost never see in wrestling. There was a point right after his turn that he felt like the number three heel in the company after MJF and Jericho and he had lost a chunk of momentum over time. The new faction isn't exactly a sure thing either. The Embassy is a fine trios champ act over in ROH with big, looming credible-looking monsters, but it needs to be rebuilt to a degree to accentuate Swerve. I like Nana but you can't help but squint and turn your head sideways and think about what the pairing of Swerve and Tully might have been like. 

Anyway, Swerve can't lose, but Darby has to win. Darby having to win trumps Swerve having not to lose, so it's up to the math of the situation and the specifics of the match to avoid misery and failure. The math of the situation had Swerve heated up given the ambush on Darby last week and a bit more heat coming his way through screwing Keith Lee at the end of the show. That is what it is, quantitative pro wrestling booking, the sort you could get from AI or in EWR. Wrestling by numbers and on Tony's newly rearranged booking spreadsheet. 

The other half is the more interesting one. The match had to be laid out in a manner that would put Darby over while keeping Swerve strong, with both of them needing more rub than usual. Thankfully, they had a few things going their way. First, there was the familiarity, seven singles matches between them. That let Darby hit some big moves right from the get go but also had Swerve ready to sweep out the legs and take over. Second, Darby's nature is to work from underneath anyway, so Swerve could take most of this without anyone blinking an eye so long as Darby was ready to fight back memorably. You factor those two things in and mix it with a hearty dose of interference from Nana, and you had Swerve looking dangerous, someone who could win against to talent, or at the very worst, could hurt them badly, which only made Darby getting one up on him at key moments having him look like a worldbeater. Then you give Swerve the ultimate out, hurting his own foot on a high risk move, the sort of thing he needed to keep someone like Darby on the ropes. That didn't lose him the advantage even, but it made him a half step slow on covers and opened him up to the gnarly foot biting by a Darby that was frothing with his own blood. There's an old line of thought that for a heel to keep his heat, he needed a viable excuse; maybe it was the truth, maybe it was a lie, but it had to sound good. If it sounded good and was a lie, then that'd just get him all the more heat. 

So you take all of this and add in the things that make Darby and Swerve special, Darby's selling and speed of execution, Swerve's clarity of focus and reactions in the moment, the offense from both of them that feels stilted and off-center and that pulls your eye in ways you're not expecting, and they pulled off something of the impossible. But that's what Darby Allin does whenever he goes out there anyway, looking like a star while getting beaten around the ring. Swerve will have his moment and while he may not be stronger on paper for this loss, that he was able to manage it with such verve and panache only made him all the stronger in my eyes.