AEW Five Fingers of Death 1/13 - 1/19

AEW Collision 1/18/25

Dustin Rhodes vs Adam Priest

MD: Priest is one of the best unsigned guys in the country. He's able to wrestle with anyone, any shape, any size, completely consistent and compelling in presenting a character, an idea, a vision for pro wrestling, for making everything matter, for expressing how he feels (and that he cares) at every point, always on, always interacting with the world around him. He's very good. 

When Trevor Lee ended up back on the indies last year, part of me wanted to see a sort of southern strategy to ROH, where Lee, Priest, and the Workhorsemen (and maybe Kiera Hogan if that wasn't crazy) carried things with a geographic focus where they could be faces for part of the country and heels for the others. It's hard to think through any such strategy to ROH because unlike AEW proper, it's really hard to figure out what the business (or even creative) plan even is. I enjoy ROH as wrestling for the sake of wrestling building to hybrid PPVs made up half of matches with the normal roster and weeks of TV setup and half of fly-ins for the sickos. But I have no idea what the plan is or what a metric for success is past ending up in a TV station, maybe. It's more important than ever in a post Elevation, Post Dark, Post Rampage world though. That's for sure. Anyway, southern strategy. Lee/Priest/Workhorsemen (and some associated southern female). It's a vision.

And this was a match. We're in a post-Rampage world, like I said, so the usual booking formula of building someone on Rampage with a TV win over a ROH-level or local talent in order to heat them up so that they can wrestle someone who needs to be heated up for an actual feud is disrupted. We're in unsure territory, but if I had to guess, they're heating up Dustin to lose to MJF as part of the MJF vs Jarrett build. And since I want to see MJF vs Dustin, I am a-ok with that. That they brought in Adam Priest to do it is all the better.

I said Priest could face anyone, and he can, and the size difference was interesting here. It played out the most when he went over nasty for the power slam (drawing the dreaded "oof" call from Nigel), and especially with the very cool entry point to the Cross Rhodes, as Dustin just kind of draped his arm over Priest's face. Smooth as silk in a way you never see. Dustin, like Windham before him, is able to work big when he's on offense and small when he's selling, and the few points where Priest did get some stuff in here worked so well because Dustin was working small and Priest was working confident. Just two guys who really knew what they were doing.

Obviously this only went a few minutes but I'd love to see Priest against most of the roster, especially on ROH where he'd have time (and less hierarchy issues). Here, though, they came in and accomplished exactly what they set out to do, and whenever that happens, it's beautiful pro wrestling in my eyes.