AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/6 - 5/12

AEW Collision 5/11/24

Blackpool Combat Club (Bryan Danielson/Claudio Castagnoli) vs Top Flight

MD: Unfortunately, I didn't love this one. And no, it's not because we had gotten in our heads the moment the show was announced that we wanted Makabe vs Danielson. I like Top Flight in general. Dante is a special talent. He has that extra bit of something that lets him go a bit higher, snap off a bit quicker. He can couple that with sympathetic selling. I've known that ever since the Malakai Black singles match. Darius has looked his best standing up to guys like Moxley. He's a scrapper deep down and should lean harder in that direction. Claudio's one of the greatest bases outside of Mexico ever. Danielson is Danielson, incentivized to make every match he has left special. 

So it had a lot going for it on paper. It also had a lot working against it. This was a hierarchy clash, and that meant that Top Flight was going to be punching up. Maybe two years ago you could have played up Top Flight having a significant teamwork advantage, but the BCC has been around for a while and Danielson has teamed with Claudio a bunch. Maybe in Minnesota, Top Flight would be the underdog babyfaces and treated as such by the crowd, but this was the first main match on the first main show in Vancouver and Danielson, a Pacific Northwest icon was in the match. There was a time a couple of years ago where I had hoped that the BCC would become Tsuruta-Gun and they'd spend a year feuding with a new Super Generation Army (I was thinking Garcia/Moriarty/Dante/Hook type guys with Yuta in the Taue turncoat role). But things didn't work out that way. The matches we have gotten along those lines had been too scattered to really coalesce into any sort of meaningful movement.

Still, Danielson and Claudio are two of the best, and top, top notch tag workers as well. Dante and Darius are talented and fiery. While I didn't realize it coming in (and in fact was frustrated that they weren't doing a Danielson/Cash tag given Dax had a singles but we don't know what we don't know, of course), the match was meant to have a few purposes: to establish how much Danielson values AEW and its talent, to reestablish him as dominant after his loss and a couple of weeks away, to position him to have the post match promo and for Claudio to walk out. So this could have worked. Those were not necessarily hard goals to achieve. It more or less achieved them. As a match judged on its own standing however, it failed both in theory and execution. Execution first: quite often, the wrestlers didn't seem on the same page. I can think of a couple of clear occasions, when Claudio took a twisting headscissors from Dante and during a moment where a Top Flight double-team pressing off of Claudio was maybe supposed to take out Danielson too (maybe it wasn't? Who knows. It sort of did, just not clearly). Nothing overly egregious so long as everyone is healthy and fine. They were just jarring and unexpected moments from guys you expected to hit things clean even more so than anyone else. 

The structure was the bigger issue. Top Flight managed to control in their corner early, but a lot of this ended up being Darius getting swept under and battling from underneath. The problem was that the crowd was entirely behind Danielson as he was laying a beating on him. Darius' hope spots elicited boos at worst and woos at best and neither were exactly promising in the face of "yes" strikes. If Top Flight had taken a cockier, more brazen approach earlier with their control maybe they could have leaned de facto heel later on but they instead chose to breathlessly try to contain Claudio. It meant that it was far too much a stretch for the match to course correct and make Danielson's dominance feel deserved. Dante was able to shift the tide just a little with his rapid-fire forearms to Claudio after the hot tag, but things fell apart again soon after and the match stumbled to conclusion more than it stuck the landing. I fully believe there's a good match between these two but also that we'll probably never get to see it. It unfortunately wasn't this match in this place on this night with this purpose. It did enough of what it was supposed that we'll all just move on to the next thing, but I can't say it doesn't leave me a bit wistful for what might have been.