Graduation Day: The Education of William Peter Charles Ospreay (AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 7/27 - 8/2)

AEW Collision 7/30/26

Daniel Garcia vs Will Ospreay

MD: I was not a fan of the Ospreay/Mox vs Bucks tag. 

Put the bit with the 450 in the finishing stretch aside. Put even some of the over the top character beats down the stretch aside. There was a moment early on where Ospreay and a Buck crashed into one another and did a double down. Let's also put aside whether or not that spot worked (I lean slightly towards no because while you want an exception now and again to jolt people, there's a fine line between exceptional and implausible within the confines of what people have seen; doesn't matter though). It's the aftermath that frustrated me. 

They were teasing a Jackson concussion. Mox obviously wanted Ospreay to press the offense. Ospreay was hesitant. It was a microcosm to the story overall. Had Will gone to dark places in his recovery? Did he buy into the Death Riders ethos? Were the Death Riders even that bad? Did Mox have a point? Was Mox setting him up for a betrayal? Would Ospreay lose himself in order to gain the world championship? 

That's the story right? So when Ospreay gives into peer pressure and hits a dive on said Jackson, taking advantage of his potential concussion, that's a negative moment. It has to be. The fans should have responded negatively. The guy they like did an objectively morally bad thing because he was pushed into it. That had to be one of the straws breaking the back, that sets up things later in the match with Ospreay having dissention with Mox and the Death Rider mentality, and later in the night, when Ospreay refuses to bag Omega and makes the save on him instead (only for Omega to then turn on him). 

Big emotional moment. Important moment. It has to hit.

Ospreay, obviously conflicted, yet ultimately led awry, goes for the dive. He gives in to peer pressure. He gives into Mox. He acts like a Death Rider. Will he cross a line and never look back? What is the state of his immortal soul?

And the fans?

The fans start singing his name in elation because he hit a dive and they sure do like it when Will Ospreay hits dives. 

You realize how thoroughly the story is failing for that to be the outcome? It doesn't matter how strong Jackson's selling was or how conflicted Ospreay made himself seem or how charismatic Mox was or how nice the dive was (or even that they were in Montreal). It failed. That moment, a key moment for the entire story, failed. Utterly.

This matters, right? It has to matter. Obviously it doesn't matter to some people, but that makes them part of the problem and part of how we got here in the first place.

But life goes on, the story charges forward. 

And that brings us to Collision and a chance to course correct and hammer home the themes. It's only to set up the biggest match of the year at the biggest show of the year, something to set the direction for the company for months. No pressure, right?

Mox is on commentary.

Mox is always compelling on commentary, always entertaining. The problem, of course, is that Mox's own story is clear as mud. He's the emperor with no clothes but the entire world doesn't care that he walks around naked, because there are no consequences and nothing matters. Pro wrestling is no longer a morality play. It's romper room. Mox wins. Mox is cool. The Death Riders stand with him. The fans go along with it. Why would they boo Ospreay for doing a morally bad thing? That's how it feels way too often.

On some level, it benefits Moxley (kayfabe) to foster such an environment, and you can hear him spew his bs on commentary. Oh, he still likes Ospreay. Oh, Ospreay trained hard with the Death Riders. This will be a nice friendly match between two sparring partners. It's all just business as usual. Just pro wrestling. None of it really matters. It's personal, but between brothers. 

It would be great delusional cult of personality bullshit, honestly, if Mox was ever going to pay for it, if it was presented as him trying to pull the wool over the world.

Traditionally, you'd have commentators who would constantly point that out. Imagine Mox trying to pull this bs with Lance Russell? You'd have babyfaces who could speak to it. Imagine Dusty Rhodes cutting through this. Instead, they joke about Tony Schiavone's wife beating him up. Everyone wants to be Mox's pal. Great.

Okay, so that's the Redemption tag and Mox on commentary.

What does this leave us with?

It leaves us with Daniel Garcia. 

And that is a massive relief, because Daniel Garcia can do his job. Daniel Garcia delivers. Daniel Garcia almost never strays from true north. Those times that he does? It's almost certainly because of pressure from above. They're few and far between though (and mostly involve multiple superplexes in a row). 

The job isn't to wake up Friday morning and count stars. It's not. That's the horse chasing the cart. It's not to work matches around a checklist specifically set up to get those stars. It's not celebrating once you got them, not when other things don't work, like, you know, the biggest emotional beat in a key match? 

The job is to work people, to make them feel, to get them to a specifical emotional point, to build pressure and then take them over the top. It's not to put smiles on faces. It's not to get them chanting "This is awesome." It's also not somehow saying that the wrestling itself doesn't matter. The wrestling itself is the point, but the goal of the wrestling is to move people emotionally. That happens through selling, and timing, patience and framing, and ultimately execution. It happens through getting people to buy what you're selling, but you need a clear vision of exactly what that is. 

And yeah, like I said, Daniel Garcia can do the job. He may not pass the airport test. He may not do the biggest spots. He may not end up in all the gifs (though the gifs he does end up in are almost all great; you just have to dig a little deeper to find them). He may not even get the pop when his music hits. But as the match goes on, he gets the crowd. He hooks them. He's more over on the way out than he was on the way in.

And whatever he was trying to accomplish in the match gets accomplished.

So then, the match.

Mox is full of shit, but it's up to Garcia (the character) to buy into that shit and give it his own spin. Maybe they were going to stab Ospreay in the back. Maybe they weren't. Maybe Garcia resented him because the fans never left Will when they had left Danny back when all he wanted to do was to restore the feeling. Maybe Garcia felt kinship anyway. Maybe Garcia liked the idea that Will was the "young boy" and not him anymore. Maybe Garcia feels betrayed that Ospreay gave back his patch. 

Maybe a lot of things. They all make Garcia's performance compelling. That said, Daniel Garcia (the wrestler) had a job to do. That job was to put over how far Ospreay had come, put over the fact that he as a different wrestler than before his injury, different from when he had just come back from it. He had to present clear lines that differentiated Ospreay from the Death Riders. He had to put forth the idea that Ospreay was not just a star, but the star, not just a wrestler, but the wrestler, not just a champion, but the champion that can carry the company forward. 

Ospreay hadn't quite landed that on his own. He had good individual moments, such as when he finally took Brooks out after Brooks played upon his remaining good nature. But that was still mid-stream in the story. Ospreay was still conflicted. He had to be past that now. He had to be fully focused, fully driven, an ace. 

And it was up to Garcia to provide the contrast to let Ospreay show it to the world.

Garcia and Mox can be mud. Ospreay has to be crystal clear. 

So Garcia started things by muddying the water. He talked a big game. His hands flew all over the place, full of attitude. He wanted the "young boy." It was "graduation day." 

And then, as Ospreay charged in, Garcia dove right out of the ring. Dissonance. The greatest tool of a pro wrestling heel. Get people thinking and feeling one way, that the world itself should be one way, and snatch the rug out from underneath them. Garcia wanted this fight and now he was running away. 

He was goading Ospreay (treating him like a twelve year old). And Ospreay gave chase, because of course he did. The Detroit fans booed, jeered, and then, when Ospreay caught on and caught Garcia, let out their pent up frustration with big cheers as Ospreay did the same with big shots. Garcia kept his cool in the face of the onslaught though and snuck in a throat shot. It didn't do him much good though. In a fair fight, no one can stop Will Ospreay. That's the point.

No one, except for maybe Will Ospreay himself. That's also the point.

Ospreay here flexed his greatest strength as a pro wrestler. It's not the athleticism, though that's a close second. It's the bull-in-a-china shop charisma. It's weaponizing that (potentially charming) 12-year old mentality to connect with the crowd. He brought Garcia over to a young fan and whacked him before high fiving the fan. On the outside, when he slipped off the guardrail (planned or not), he steadied himself with another fan' shoulder and gave him the biggest, most endearing grin.

That's when Garcia caught him, dangled him over the rail, and dropped him on his head. Ospreay's weakness is his the same as his strength, his personality. That is compelling fiction. A minor plot-related vulnerability to help rationalize his opponents not getting totally swept under is his neck. The two are very different and it's important to keep that in mind.

Garcia went in hard on the neck. Ospreay was ready for that though (this matters), so Garcia went in to the leg. This was a different Ospreay, though, and it was important to show that, so increasingly, Ospreay had counters, not ones that were just bounding and adrenaline rushes, but little bits of wrestling as well. For maybe the first time in this entire journey, Ospreay felt like a different wrestler, a more seasoned one, one that could carry a company. That had been the point of all of this and it was finally starting to come out in the actual wrestling. 

Garcia wasn't going to make it easy for him though. There were counters to counters. They didn't feel overwrought and needlessly flashy like you'd usually see (for instance, from the classic Ospreay vs Ricochet footage). This was close up magic, holds hung on to, body control kept, Garcia being a monkey and refusing to let go. The flash was additive, a magician's trick to get you to look at one hand when the other was doing the work. The flash was a means and not the end. A different world. A different Ospreay, one that was grounded in what the wrestlers were both trying to accomplish and not just what might look cool in the moment. 

Means and ends. That's the thing that's been missing, and it took Garcia to drag it out of him. Because Daniel Garcia is damn good at his job.

He's good at the emotional bits too.

By the end of the match it was clear that in Garcia was wrestling a different Ospreay, that Will had taken on the lessons and decided upon his own truths, that he had graduated. Even though Garcia had an answer of his own to every answer Ospreay provided to Garcia's questions, the fact that Ospreay had answers in the first place, adult answers, not just twelve-year old ones, meant that Garcia seemingly broke first. He started laying shots in, started berating Ospreay. Ospreay stood up and clocked him. Just like that. Garcia thought he was luring Ospreay in, just as he had tried early in the match, and caught him in a choke, but Ospreay calmly dropped his elbow pad, flipped back over, and hit the hidden blade.

For the first time since this story started, we have a truly different Will Ospreay on our hands. Post-match, the Death Riders left ringside, leaving him for dead as the Don Callis Family attacked, but this was a different Will Ospreay, one that could stand on his own, that could make his own save, and he did so, standing triumphant in the ring as the show closed, beating the odds, an ace.

What remains to be seen is how much that different Will Ospreay that we saw here was due to Ospreay finally growing into his role in the way the company so desperately needs and how much was simply due to Daniel Garcia being so damn good at his job.

We'll all know soon enough.

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