AEW Five Fingers of Death (And Friends) 7/8 - 7/14 (Part 2)

Athena vs Masha Slamovich Prestige 7/12/24

MD: I'm lacking keyboard access currently as I'm writing this one ahead so I'll have to double back for Darby vs Mortos. I'd been looking forward to this match for ages though and wanted to get some thoughts down about it now that it's come and gone. Let's start with Masha. I was most familiar with her from watching her Northeast indy stuff a few years ago. My big takeaway then was that she was a bit of a victim of circumstance. She was positioned in a lot of intergender matches where she was supposed to come off as a real force, equal, maybe even superior. No problem with that in theory. In practice, the issue was that it repeatedly led to escalation too early in her matches. Before she was fully established there was a need to make a splash in those matches and show immediately that she could hold her own against any sort of opponent. As she became more established, having been rewarded for doing too much too soon in her matches led to what felt like bad habits that bled into more conventional settings (or the same sort of unconventional settings but long after they were necessary as she was fairly quickly established). That clashed a little with her positives, the biggest of which is her ability to just jump off the screen and be absolutely electric, which just happens to be one of Athena's biggest qualities, that unpredictable intangible that makes her stand out from everyone else. I was expecting sort of an unstoppable force vs immovable object type war here. Life sort of got in the way though. 

I've written a ton recently about how Bryan Danielson (the person) likes to lie. This was a tangential sort of situation where it was actually Athena (the character) who is living something of a lie. We're just not sure how much of one, which made for a fascinating, committed performance. She was injured against Viva Van in a Proving Ground match a month or two ago in a fluke moment of hitting the floor. She hasn't wrestled since but they've been playing it up as part of the storyline on ROH TV. Obviously, for her to have a serious injury in the middle of this generational run would have been devastating so it's good that they've made an angle out of it and she's keeping dates and working the PPV, etc. It definitely put a different tint on this one though. No longer was it a godlike clash of the titans. Instead, this was a different sort of Masha, more wry, more subdued, and an Athena that oscillated from scheming to desperate to vulnerable to vicious, that was always on her back foot, whether it was due to the character actually working injured or just being forced to portray that injury as more serious than it was because of the longer term issues at play and a #1 contender breathing down her neck for the ROH PPV. That's a lot at play for what is, in a lot of ways, an inter-promotional sort of dream match. You didn't usually have that many things in play for Backlund vs Race or Flair vs Bockwinkel for instance. 

Athena started with a pre-match promo putting over her accolades and presenting a mission statement, to prove that she was the best champion in wrestling. Masha, a tag camp in TNA, sort of handicapped herself in return, spending the entire match refusing to touch Athena's leg once. If Athena was trying to prove A, then she would prove B instead without any question. Considering that Athena had no intention of fighting fair, it was a fairly successful big of goading that spoke to Masha's confidence and pride. Again, this was a fairly remarkable performance by Athena, always hobbling, always hopping, always off-balance. Early on, when they stayed on the mat, it seemed challenging but not impossible, but later on as she was throwing strikes and kicks and hitting bombs, I don't think there was a moment where I wasn't conscious of the boot on her leg because of how into the moment she always is. That's not normal. It's the ideal, but so few wrestlers ever reach it, and it was all the trickier because we're not supposed to know how injured Athena actually is. She's an unreliable narrator even in her physicality. Eventually, as Masha pressed her natural advantage and started to take over, Athena feigned even further injury to lure her in for the magic forearm. That let her take over for a while, but either the need to portray the injury or the actual injury gave Masha a wedge to keep coming back, and it all led to first bombs and then a ref bump, a phantom pin to allow Masha to save face and Athena ultimately using the boot. This wasn't the match I anticipated or expected, but that's still on the table for a rematch somewhere down the line. As it was, it was Masha being reactive in very impressive ways and Athena being as impressive as always with living in the moment, just for an entirely different and challenging sort of moment.