AEW Five Fingers of Death 12/16 - 12/22 Part 1

AEW Dynamite 12/18/24

Will Ospreay vs Darby Allin

MD: It was breathtaking, mindblowing even. They had jockeyed for position, to see who would be able to hit a top rope move onto the other. Ospreay gained the advantage. He flipped and twisted and landed on his feet as Darby moved. He was believably staggered from the effort though and Darby rushed forth to lock in and hit the Code Red. Ospreay shifted his weight and flipped him back over. Now Darby was staggered and completely open for a hidden blade. Ospreay butterflied Darby for the Stormbreaker, lifted him up, hefted him over, and Darby continued the momentum hitting a Code Red. Unquestionably amazing sequence, maybe one of the most impressive and spectacular in AEW history.

Work with me for a few minutes here and imagine a world where the match ended there.

Up until that point, it had been excellent. Darby tried to contain and frustrate Ospreay early with a headlock but to no avail. They had an answer for one another during that opening feeling out process but Ospreay liked the answers more than Darby did, maybe. That's why Darby went big early, wanting that Coffin Drop bad, too bad, and choosing to go for it long before Ospreay was softened up. He wiped out hard on the corner of the apron.

And that's the magic of Darby Allin, isn't it? When the car crashes, you can't look away. Ospreay couldn't look away. The human underneath all the moves and spots and counters burst through and disbelief came over his face. If Ospreay's going to feel that way about what happened, the fans, already inclined in that direction anyway, will feel it double.

Darby had already been selling little things during that opening stretch, a side effect of using his own body so effectively (but not efficiently) as his primary weapon, and now every movement was portrayed as agonizing. Ospreay, momentum on his mind, took the role of the aggressor. Instead of rushing straight from one counter-laden sequence to the next, Darby had to work from underneath and create hope wherever he could manage it. All of that built to the sequence in the corner culminating with the Code Red.

It would have been enough. This is going to sound counter-intuitive but it would have been better, neater, cleaner, satisfying, incredibly satisfying, but still leaving a lot on the table for whenever their next match might be.

Instead they cycled through everything you might expect, even if you wouldn't know the details. The fighting spirit strikes had them hanging on to one another. The big spot was a Styles Clash to the floor. The actual finish had Darby push through it all to hit a couple of Coffin Drops. It was fine but felt like noise after the height they had just hit.

The Code Red had served as the gateway to the last third of the match, a transition towards an extended finishing stretch, when it could have been an exclamation point on the match that people would have been talking about for months. Now it's a nice gif and bit of a highlight reel but people had already moved on to the Styles Clash by the end of the match.

If the match had ended with the Code Red, I bet it'd have gotten a half star less in the Observer than it ultimately will get. But past Dave, not a single person would have been disappointed. It was a great taste of a dream match, more than a taste, a meal, a better meal than the overgorging spectacle we got in the end. It would have been doubly successful for leaving so much on the table and protecting Ospreay as it would have been a banana peel finish of sorts. It had been a complete narrative package, more complete than with the extraneous bits tacked on at the end.

Less can be more, especially when less is so unique and so dynamic and already so much in and of itself. Bigger isn't necessarily better. A match's quality isn't based on how full of stuff it is, even if that's currently the only way to break the 5* WON barrier. There are more important barriers to break; immersion and emotional engagement are more important than elation and fans drunk off of spectacle. There's a better balance to be struck. I really do believe that.

-----

Ospreay made a very gracious and grateful post this last week. In it, he asked for feedback. I doubt he's ever going to see this but my advice to him would be to ground his obvious greatness in the fictional reality of pro wrestling.

There is a Ric Flair mentality that the fans deserve to see every spot in every match because that's how he felt when he was watching Ray Stevens. I see it a little like a concert from someone with a hundred great, classic songs. The ten you get will be different than the ten someone else may have gotten but you appreciate those ten all the more because nothing is assured and because you got some others didn't, even if they got some you didn't. If everyone gets everything all the time, then there's less reason to appreciate any single thing.

I liked Ospreay's early AEW promos. gracious, focused, human. He wanted to raise his family while doing what he loved. AEW was letting him do that. Where he frustrates me is when he mentions performing for the fans. Yes, a basketball player can perform well, but in wrestling, it's best to avoid those blurred lines. The worst example of this is when he called out MJF for having bad matches and said Tony called him to save the show. There was a way to say something similar and implying that MJF's attitude of taking the easy road and cheating was robbing the fans of the champion they should see. Ospreay, instead, could have noted that he was going to push anyone that faced him to their absolute limit. If they could step up and even come close to beating him, the fans would  get their money's worth. It was saying the same thing but in a way that made sense in the fictional world of pro wrestling.