2023 Ongoing MOTY List: Darby/Orange vs. Gates of Agony

 

7. Darby Allin/Orange Cassidy vs. Toa Liona/Bishop Kaun AEW Dynamite 5/31

ER: Yeah, I'm pretty in the bag for Darby Allin matches and I can't see what can drag me out of the bag at this point. I was a huge Spike Dudley fan and that was without Spike running as fast and hard into his opponents as possible. Spike sprinted headlong into danger like few else, while Darby does exactly the same, somehow endures the punishment, then throws his own body as a weapon. He is weapon and he is a projectile and he has the ability to be thrown so hard that I can only watch captivated while not thinking of a day where his body while suddenly shatter into a million pieces. Darby Allin is a supernova who will explode into stardust while doing something stupid like getting pounced out of the air on a tope en reversa or being dropped back first onto the top turnbuckle. Nobody gets blown up like Darby, nobody offers as much of himself in recompense, nobody but Darby has issue taking as much punishment during his opponents' swarms as during his own triumphs. Imagine if Ricky Morton had also murdered himself during his end of match comebacks, or if Spike Dudley's matches had finished not with a cooperative bulldog but with him throwing his own body even more violently into his opponent than they had just been throwing him. 

I liked Bishop Kaun's match against Dustin a couple weeks before this, but I liked it because I thought it was Another Excellent Dustin Match where he bled a ton for no real reason on a B-show and thought Kaun could have been just as well have been 50 other guys on the roster. It was a Dustin match and Kaun was interchangeable. Here, with two smaller opponents, Kaun and Toa looked exactly like the monsters they're championed as. They leaned in for all of Darby's blows and because of the size difference, Darby got to hit them as hard as possible. Darby is fearless, and the sequences where he slaps Toa across the face and then pays for that for the next couple minutes is key to everything. Kaun whipping Darby into railings while Toa sprints around the ring to upend OC, running almost so hard that he nearly flies into the crowd himself; later you can see Darby running full speed back and forth into the corners to send all his weight into these beasts, and you can see the rag in their faces as they get suckered into running after him just as hard. I love moments like Darby using an Irish whip to knock Kaun off the apron, even though it slows him down enough to leave him prone for a nasty Toa hip attack. 

The timing of everything was  - and seemingly always is - so good when Darby is in there directing traffic with his adamantium skeleton. The way he smacks Toa around with back elbows and ducks a big swinging arm just in time for OC to hit the Orange Punch, allowing Darby to hit his cannonball tope which is now so expected that it's almost easy to forget how much of an all time great tope it is. I remember buying a lucha tape and seeing Black Warrior hit a tope so hard that it flipped him upside down on collision, making the tope read like a car crash with the physics causing the elements to fly off into their own trajectories. Darby's topes always look like a man was trying to sneak through a more-red-than-yellow light and getting t-boned, and Darby is the world's most durable Yugo. 

Also, as someone who used to not be amused in any way by Orange Cassidy, he is one of my favorite babyfaces now. I get excited to hear Starship, I give a thumbs up with my thumb barely extended, and I flipped out for how hard he crashed onto his tailbone while hitting Stun Dog, holding Toa in place for a code red. I am a full on OC Guy now. That said, he's even better when Darby is the one setting up the timing of the misdirections. Darby just makes everyone stronger. 

2023 MOTY MASTER LIST