AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 1/19 - 1/25

ROH TV 1/22/26

Adam Priest/Tommy Billington vs Premier Athletes (Tony Nese/Ariya Daivari) 

MD: Wrestling isn't math.

Sometimes, though, it can be a book report.

Everyone rushes to make things quantitative, to bestow star ratings, to rate things next to each other. 

I care a lot more about understanding, about categorizing, about yeah, analyzing. That's not about scoring on points having to do with excitement, execution, innovation so much as breaking down the narrative and try to figure out how it ticks. These things can go hand-in-hand. You can use this to judge a match but that's not usually my intent. 

So we're going to do something a little different this week. We're going to look at a match through a narrative framework.

I'm not saying you can do this with every match exactly this way. I'm not saying I do it with every match automatically, though my brain is wired now to be thinking about some of these things as I watch, sure. 

This works well for a southern tag (the most beautiful form of pro wrestling there is) but for other things, be it face vs face matches or matches from cultures that structure things differently, the hinge points that still should exist are transitions or momentum shifts. Not everything will fit neatly into a three act structure but there still should be act breaks if you can figure out where to find them. Otherwise, it's just all noise and the match is probably not going to be very satisfying even if it might be sensational.

Pre-Match: This covers entrances, talking on the way to the ring, inset (insert?) promos. There's a lot to see here. It matters how people come down to the ring. It sets the stage, creates a mood. We're going to cover a 1981 joshi babyface vs babyface match later this week and to see Jackie Sato grasp people's hands on the way to the ring and understand the connection she had with the crowd relative to her opinions gave some insight into the match itself and to how the crowd reacted. We're the blind man touching the elephant and every data point helps.

Lots of data points here. Athletes are out first with Sterling putting over their relatively new heater, Stori Denali as she towers over everyone. He gets some cheap heat talking about local sports, hypes everyone up to shout Athletes Rule so that they can shout Athletes Suck instead. These guys were getting booed anyway but there's no question now. They look like a unit with matching red boots even if everyone's stylistically different in other ways with their own flourishes.

Priest/Billington are out to Billington's music, reddish matching tights, a tron that just focuses on Billington. We get an inset promo with Swirl and Lethal, Lethal having turned on Bandido, and Billington/Priest by proxy a few weeks ago. Lethal says they're done. Christian says they're not. A little wonky. As that's happening, they're moving down to the ring with haste and energy, Priest hyping up the crowd.

Code of Honor: Here's a bonus element just for ROH matches. I love the Code of Honor. It's a mandatory handshake before a match but it forces an extra character moment to set the stage right at the start of the match. Athena always puts a dainty left hand out to insult opponents for instance. Sometimes she clocks someone as they shake, sometimes she doesn't, but that tension is always there. It's an opportunity and while you need a baseline of straight up shakes, it's to a wrestler's detriment if he or she doesn't make the most of it.

Adam Priest absolutely makes the most of it. He tells you almost everything you need to know about him in the span of fifteen seconds. He gets right in Daivari's face, putting his hand out. When Daivari just stares him down he shoves him and puts the hand back out. He's got a chip in his shoulder, full of babyface fire. He's hungry and won't be denied. Daivari on the other hand is a vet's vet, just like Nese, and he has his own pride, and in the face of that challenge, he doesn't back down, but does show a modicum of respect, slapping Priest's hand to complete the Code. Again, fifteen seconds, but they set the stage immediately, making the most of it.

Feeling Out/Shine: They're still fleshing out the stage. It's Act 1 of a play, introducing the characters, setting, and the "normal world." Who are these people? What makes them different from each other? Why do you root for the babyface? Why do you boo the heel? If the match was going to play out with everything fair, everything normal, what might it look like? There may be a "false heat" of sort where it seems like the heel is getting an advantage, but then they get comeuppance. 

Priest and Daivari start with chain wrestling focused around the arm. Daivari is the early aggressor but Priest is ultimately able to turn things around and win the exchange, pumping his arm as the fans chant "Athletes Suck." Daivari presses him into the corner (since he couldn't get an advantage cleanly) and he and Nese double clubber before calling for an Athletes chant (they get "Suck" for their trouble). Billington manages a blind tag off the ropes and they hit a slick drop toe hold/elbow drop combo before controlling with the arm and quick tags for another couple of minutes, until Nese is able to get back in and has a nice rope running exchange with Billington leading to the...

Transition to Heel Offense/Heat: Transitions are everything. They're the act breaks, the change that we see in the world. They're the shocks to the system that grasp you as a viewer and change the course of history. They should be clever but definitive, not mushy and unclear, but also earned and believable. A kick to the gut out of nowhere doesn't generally cut it. That's not enough to change history. Something too far the other way is going to feel more like a process than an exclamation point. Sometimes that can be okay but it means you're telling a different sort of story and need to insert more nuance. 

They did an excellent job here. Nese and Daivari are very good at layering these things. Here Nese succeeds on a dropdown, throwing Billington off balance. Is a dropdown a trip? Is it just getting out of the way of someone running? It's pro wrestling. It can be either or both. It doesn't necessarily matter what the original intent was. Here it does throw Billington off and Nese charges right in behind him to clip the legs in the ropes. He goes to drive Billington into the barricade. Billington fights him off. Daivari comes to help. Billington fights him off too. Thus distracted, Nese is able to toss Billington into the hard ring apron shoulder first and then, as Nese rolls in to distract the ref, Daivari and Sterling are able to stomp on him. It's a great transition because it caught everyone by surprise, because it clearly leaned hard into character: Nese was opportunistic and underhanded, Billington valiant, and it led to a bit of cheating to show the difference all the more clearly. 

Heat/Hope Spots/Cutoffs: Again, wrestling isn't math and there can be differences in ratios here. Some of the best tags of the 80s have long, long shines where the heels get their comeuppance again and again and relatively short heats. To me, it's just basic narrative logic to have a longer heat where you're building up pressure more and more for a hot tag and getting the fans wanting it more and more.

It's good to have a singular narrative focus and they make use of the arm here. Billington's arm was thrashed on the apron. It gives Nese and Daivari a target to attack and gives an "out" for why Billington can't come back even though he's trying his best. He goes for punches or forearms but the arm gives way. He reverses Nese and puts him into tombstone position. The arm doesn't let him hit it. Hope snatched away. The Athletes get showy and cocky building to Nese missing a moonsault, but he's able to make the tag and Daivari cuts a crawling Billington off with an elbow drop. All of this builds up the pressure.

Transition to Hot Tag: again, transitions are inflection points, shocks, the world changing, act breaks, the most important part of a match past maybe the finish. This is the moment the crowd has been waiting for, what they had been hoping for. The inversions have already come with the hope spots and cutoffs, but this is one last chance to either be definitive with it or string a last series together.

Here it's basically just a double down after Daivari and Priest both go for clotheslines. Important is that Nese is still reeling from that missed moonsault (though that's just an extra detail for why he can't disrupt things, but the Athletes are so good with details). Simple, straightforward, as Daivari crawls towards his corner to find no one there and Billington finds exactly what he was looking for in Adam Priest. But it's art so it's subjective, right? You could say that even though Daivari had a clear moment of control (ball possession?) after the elbow drop cut off, that the key inflection point was the missed moonsault and everything after that was the Athletes losing control. It's interesting to think about either way. Again, not math.

Comeback/Finishing Stretch: Another place where you can separate more or combine if you want to, however you'd like to think about it. In modern wrestling, they're so stuck together that it's hard to differentiate. The comeback generally leads to pin attempts and break-ups and things ebbing and flowing towards a finish. In modern matches, you often get a really extended finishing stretch that can be as long as half the match where everything breaks down and you get constant spots/action for long minutes and I am not a huge fan of that. But yes, the babyface who got the hot tag comes in a house afire (of fire?) and releases all that pent up pressure and they start laying down false finishes to build to however the match is going to end, ideally raising that pressure back up for the finish.

This was a particularly great stretch because it was less about big moves and kickouts (or break-ups) and more about playing with conventions and expectations. We're all trained to know the various ways a match logically tends to end and this didn't just give us big moves but narrative beats where endings could happen only to snatch them away and build to the next one.

Priest led off with what would be the comeback phase. He had some great signature offense, mowing down Daivari as he fed for him but then catching a foot and turning it into a German Suplex and leaping off the turnbuckles with a tornado DDT after he shoved off Nese who was trying to stop him. This was disrupted by a Daivari small package attempt, which you can note, if you want, where things shifted from comeback to finishing stretch (though again, it all blurs).

What followed was a series of false finishes, a double submission by the babyfaces, Sterling causing a distraction on the apron, heel miscommunication, Nese pulling the rope down, a kickout after a heel double-team, more heel miscommunication and Priest locking in his half crab, Denali using Billington cutting off Sterling's second attempt at distraction to chokeslam Priest (pin broken up by Billington), and then finally, after Billington cleared Daivari out to hit a dive and make it one-on-one, Priest reversing Nese's pumphandle driver finisher into a roll up for the win. Just a very clever and self-aware sequence of not just finishers or moves, but coded moments that we have fans have been conditioned can understand could possibly lead to the end of a match. It had me on the edge of my seat at least as after the double submission, almost anything that happened could plausibly lead to a finish given our understanding of pro wrestling.

Post-match: This is where the finish sets in and resonates. Maybe the heels get their heat back. Maybe the babyfaces run them off. Maybe they celebrate with the crowd. Maybe the commentary just takes things through the replay and cements the message of the match.

Here the Swirl came out to ambush and the Athletes joined in. The babyfaces won the battle but lost a bit more in the war, giving them plenty of places to take things moving forward.

Pre-Match, Feeling Out/Shine, Transition to Heel Offense, Heat/Hope Spots/Cutoffs, Transition to Hot Tag, Comeback/Finishing Stretch, Post-Match. In this case there was the Code of Honor as well, which fits in between Pre-Match and Feeling Out/Shine, and could probably be part of the latter. It's a useful framework to think about how matches are put together and how they work narratively. Not every tag match is going to follow it. A tag may have double heat. You may get a "Things Break Down" period after the hot tag that's so lengthy with so many momentum shifts that you may want to try to organize it some other way. If you're watching an All Japan tag from the early 90s, it's much more about specific match-ups and hierarchy. Lucha manages ebbs and flows differently and I wrote more about that here years ago. But in all of these cases, you're generally looking for transitions. Those are your anchors to breaking down a match.

And of course, you don't have to do any of this. You don't have to think about matches this way. You don't have to engage with wrestling this way. It's art. You can just sit back and consume it. But I know that I personally enjoyed this tag, which was very good, all the more for engaging with it and thinking about it through this lens. 

Did I give it a star rating? No. But by breaking it down this way, I pulled out a lot of what made it stand out and pop for me, at least from a storytelling perspective. There are lots of different ways to engage with wrestling (and art in general). Try to explore and figure out what works for you, even if it doesn't necessarily fit into some of the quantitative boxes others have traditionally used.