AEW Five Fingers of Death 10/23 - 10/29

AEW Dynamite 10/25/23

Bryan Danielson/Claudio Castagnoli vs Orange Cassidy/Kazuchika Okada

MD: Let's talk about intent though we'll take the long way to get there. I'm bad at lists. I'm bad at ranking things. I'm bad at star ratings. I get that even the C+A version of Skippable/Fun/Great/Epic would probably be useful to people for these AEW matches or what we did with Catch or whatever, but that's just not the way I'm set up. I'm much more into looking for patterns and trying to understand the nuts and bolts of what makes things work. I'm also not as much of an execution guy as some of my esteemed peers. Good execution helps more than bad execution hurts. However, I'll certainly hold it against a wrestler/match if he does something beyond his own physical abilities or beyond the abilities of the wrestlers combined to make feel somehow organic and natural. In a lot of ways, that goes back to theory, to mapping out what will be done, either in the back or in the moment. I imagine Erik might have some controversial things to say about Okada's execution here and that would make for a good article but it's not my lane, not really.

I'm also not one to just hunt for the greatest matches. You learn a lot from the things in the cracks. You learn a lot from matches that are never positioned for that sort of established, star-adorned greatness. I think a lot about purpose and situational understanding. What can you learn from a squash? What can you learn from a ten minute TV match meant to set up something else? What about a house show? A tag vs a trios vs a triple threat? A gimmick match? A match building off of limb damage vs more of a bomb throwing sprint? And yeah, a main event title match too? But we're never all the way in. We never know exactly what we don't know. For instance, I don't know when Bryan Danielson got injured. Was it off of Andrade's back elbow on Collision? Was it off of Okada's pancake that Taz was wincing all over the place on? Was it really somewhere in the Orange Punch/Rainmaker? Did he work the whole match hurt? Was he even hurt at all (he likes to lie, remember)? 

Here's another one we don't know: How long ago was the match planned? Okada's schedule is what it is. Danielson's just coming back from injury and only has so much time left so it makes sense to hotshot matches that might have been held off on otherwise. Cassidy's program with the BCC seemed more or less over until Moxley's injury. Basketball's back so they needed a big base-popping match to try to keep the ratings steady given the competition. This match might have set up Danielson vs Okada at WrestleKingdom. It did set up Claudio vs Cassidy at Dynamite. It's probably a step on the road to Cassidy vs Moxley. 

So there's a lot we don't know. Does that matter to your individual enjoyment of the match? Maybe. Maybe not. For me, the context matters, because I am personally curious just what the circumstances of the match are and how well the wrestlers manage to accomplish their goals. That's a driving force in how I look at a match. The brain doesn't shut off. I'm not ranking anything here. I'm not just thinking of greatness for the sake of greatness. So, even putting aside the potential injury and potential frustration for the matches lost to a future that is quickly slipping away, I'm left to primarily engage with the text itself. That's not unusual for me. A lot of the matches for Found Footage Friday end up like that. Some of the Panama matches do. Most of the Catch matches did. It's one reason I'm so thoroughly enjoying Esteban's putting all of the Puerto Rico matches in context.

There are things we can know from the text. This wasn't Orange Cassidy's match. He was a cog in the machine. It elevated him to be in this spot. It continued his story to a degree. He was there to eat the fall to set up the Claudio match. This was an attraction match, however. It was the local star and Mil Mascaras or Andre the Giant against some of the top heels. In this case, the heels were tweeners who could go either way, but the idea was the same. Moreover, it was set to build to one key exchange at the end, Bryan vs Okada, before giving way to the coda of Claudio vs Cassidy that would set up what was to come. That meant we got Danielson vs Cassidy to start but also that we didn't get much of it. Danielson didn't engage with Cassidy's theatrics. He just went right at him instead. It was almost like we didn't have the interaction between them at all. It wasn't even a tease for what might have been; it was a mauling that defied it but that also didn't deny the possibility that it might some day exist, that if given the time and the space and the opportunity, Cassidy might get under Danielson's skin. It was almost defensive, as if Danielson was afraid to open that door and see what might be behind it. In a tag setting, he was able to get away with that. In a singles setting, things might be different.

It let them tease out Claudio vs Okada, strength and size vs star power and presence. It let them bear down on Cassidy during the commercial break, and it finally built to Danielson and Okada facing off with one another and the pop that went with it. From that hot tag on, they rolled into an extended finishing stretch. They kept quite a few interesting beginning and middle bits for this sort of a match on the table for some other time and built instead to the duel moment of the camera cut outs for Okada and then the hug, before paying off the Punch/Rainmaker combo and the swing and setting things up for next week. As a stop on the road, it was satisfying. As a first encounter between Danielson and Cassidy, it was lacing. As a second 2023 encounter between Danielson and Okada, it was only a tease. As a set up for Claudio vs Cassidy (and potentially for future BCC matches with Okada), it was entirely effective. As a clutch TV main event you could never get anywhere else, it felt special. As a dream match, it was probably lacking. To some degree, every match exists in multiple states in this way. This one, however, just happens to be worse than most.