AEW Five Fingers of Death 11/18 - 11/30 Part 2

AEW Dynamite 11/26/25

Darby Allin vs. Kevin Knight

MD: I'm no expert on the concept of challenger brands, but I know a thing or two about comparative advantage. At the end of the day, AEW is wrestling, and in the US, wrestling is associated with WWE. It has been for four decades basically, and for over two of those, WWE has had a functional monopoly. It's a starting point for whatever sort of pro wrestling any other company is going to present, even if it long ago morphed into sports entertainment, and even if that particular flavor of sports entertainment has become something plastic, homogenized, and entirely corporate.

So it has to be familiar enough that sponsors, tv execs, grandparents buying Christmas presents, etc. will recognize it. That doesn't seem particularly hard though, not really. And it's not particularly interesting to talk about. What is interesting to talk about is what AEW does from there. How do they differentiate themselves? How do they fill a hole in the market? How do they offer something that the frontrunner cannot. 

We've seen some of that throughout November. The compare/contrast between War Games and Blood and Guts pretty much speaks for itself. 

Now we're into December though and December, in AEW, is all about the Continental Classic. The C2 is a beautiful thing, a celebration of wrestling as sport, a round robin tournament where faces can wrestle faces and heels can wrestle heels, where every match matters and where it all comes down to points, endurance, match-ups. 

It's a false dichotomy to try to separate wrestling from storytelling. Every match tells a story; some tell a story more clearly and cleanly than others of course. In this case however, the difference (dare I say the advantage) is in the sorts of stories that can be told. 

Case in point, Kevin Knight vs Darby Allin. Outside of the tournament, there wouldn't be an underlying story coming in. It would be a 'cold match,' one completely hinging on who these two wrestlers are and where they currently stand within their own fictional lives and the overall fictional universe, and of course, the wrestling styles that they bring to the table.

That, in and of itself, might be enough, because there's a lot that's interesting there, but it's made all the more so in the tournament environment.

Darby is fighting a never ending war, one that's left him in shambles. He just lost to PAC (dishonorably) after being burned (also dishonorably). The C2 is a chance to pull himself back together and try to gain some measure of tangible, conventional, professional success. It's also a chance to face off against PAC (and maybe Claudio and Moxley) again and ruin their aspirations. It's a chance to live life dangerously, to leap headlong into facing new opponents and proving himself, of pushing himself as far as human can possibly be pushed so that he can once again feel alive. 

For Kevin Knight, it's a chance to prove himself, to stand on his own, to show the world what he can accomplish. He just failed to win the National title. He has failed once or twice to win the tag titles. He's been told he might be a main eventer in three years. Maybe people see him as just a high flyer, the less experienced junior partner to Speedball. This is his best chance to test himself against the best in the world and moreover to show the world that he belongs alongside them. It's his best chance to supercharge that sideways promise of what he might someday become.

Darby came in hurt. Knight came in hungry. And they had a match that was sports-based in its trappings far more than the critics who don't actually watch the product might imagine. They, like other first round match-ups so far, started on the mat, a feeling out process, Darby showing off his background and Knight wanting the world to see he was multifaceted. Knight, perhaps leaning on Darby's physical weakness coming in, took an advantage and drove Darby to the floor. Darby tweaked a leg on the way down, opening himself up for a picture perfect barricade dive from Knight, and the match opening up in the latter's favor.

Interestingly, Knight didn't hone in on the leg. Instead, he worked the arm, and when that failed him, tossed Darby into the corner at full speed. Every subsequent time that Darby started to come back, he shifted gears, refusing to stay with one tactic for long. When it looked like Darby was about to beat a ten-count, he took the fight right to him with a leaping clothesline out of the ring. There was a real sense of keeping the ball on one side of the field and continuously shooting on goal here. It's not wrestling as sport in the same way that Bret Hart or Steve Grey or Tatsumi Fujinami are necessarily, for they move entirely differently. Knight and Darby are broad, full of a physical charisma that emphasizes output, consequence, instead of input. But a similar feeling is there nonetheless in the creative strategic decisions at play.

You could see it all the way down to the finish. Knight missed with the UFO but caught Darby on the way up for a Coffin Drop. He hit the coast to coast dropkick, as breathtaking a move as could be, and then followed it up by hitting the UFO splash, also spectacular. What really stood out to me was what he did in the middle, however. When Darby was stunned by the dropkick, he hefted him across the ring with grit, without hesitation. In that moment, even more so than the coast-to-coast or the UFO, that you could see how badly Knight wanted it. 

The C2 isn't just one thing. It's a celebration of so many of the things that make wrestling great. Part of that is the high bumping and huge selling of people like Darby and Knight, and the amazing moves they do. Part of it, though, is how much they care, how genuine they are. There's nothing plastic or artificial here. It may not resemble the "wrestling as sport" of decades ago, but it embodies a similar spirit and it's nothing that the frontrunner brand can begin to hope to offer.