AEW Five Fingers of Death 8/28 - 9/3 Part 1

AEW Dynamite 8/30

Eddie Kingston vs. Wheeler Yuta

MD: I've spent a lot of time with 1989-1991 All Japan over the last few years and let me tell you something: hierarchy makes the world go round. This goes back to the notion of contrast making the world go round, and what is hierarchy but a form of contrast, right? If you had to slot back to 1989, this would be something like Olympian era Yatsu vs Revolution era Kawada. Of course, you rarely get a straight singles match like that in AJPW, but we're more apt to get BCC tags and trios anyway too. Still, we rarely get a chance to really see it play out in a situation like this. I do kind of wish Eddie would spend more of his time thinking about and manifesting this sort of thing than other aspects of the style, but that's part of why I liked this one so much.

Anyway, with hierarchy like this (where, let's say a 1b is wrestling a 2b, not to quantify it), a couple of rules apply. First, for the lower wrestler to stay in it, he needs some sort of wedge (see Hansen clotheslining the post). Here that wedge was Eddie's damaged arm and Yuta's merciless assault upon it. Second is that the higher level wrestler can come back at almost any point. The lower wrestler can do damage but it'll mostly be containing the higher wrestler unless they can come up with some way to actually put them away, easier said than done, rarely done, almost never done, actually. What this means is that while Yuta could hit an early single arm DDT to open Eddie up or smack the Uraken away or drive a dozen elbows into the arm to force Eddie down, he would have to come up with something else to put him away, and in going away from it to do so, the moment constantly threatened to slip away. All it took was the tiniest bit of hubris (something Wheeler had in droves) for Eddie to turn things around and start firing back. One shot knocked Yuta off the top to the floor. One duck led to an exploder. It didn't take much. 

Yuta pressed every advantage that he had and it earned him a match more competitive than it should have been otherwise and the sort of lasting glory that comes from forcing himself up from one of Kingston's Urakens so that he could eat a second with a defiant look upon his face. When Eddie walks the road towards balance and not excess, everything is good and right in this world of ours.