AEW Five Fingers of Death 7/15 - 7/28

AEW Rampage 7/26/24

Royal Rampage

MD: Let me try to cover a lot of ground quickly. I wrote recently about the difference between plot and story. The only bits in this one I'd actively call "plot" along those lines would be Darby winning in general to set up the Grand Slam title match and Hangman coming out to eliminate Jarrett. There was a ton of story though.

To confuse matters further, I'd break down the story here into explicit story and implicit story. Implicit story is everyone working together to eliminate the Butcher because  he's known to be a beast in battle royales. It's Darby going right after Brody because Brody eliminated him at a prior one. It's character driven, history driven, not necessarily something to set up further matches (though it could be). It's the fact that these characters live together in a shared universe and are fully formed and fleshed out. That comes into play in a setting like this.

More explicit story would be the rivalry between the Conglomeration and the Kingdom or the backstage segment between Kip Sabian and Nick Wayne that set up their interaction here. So there were smaller stories, larger stories, a bit of plot, and then a baseline of wrestlers and characters dipping in and out. Sometimes it was for a brief burst of entertainment like with Menard or Cutler. Sometimes it was to play into that Forbidden Door feeling of a few months ago like with Lio Rush or Mortos. Or it was steak and sizzle in one like the opening stretch with Claudio and Komander.

The simple fact of the matter is that a lot of the blue check or old carny criticisms of AEW when it comes to plot and story (implicit and explicit) are either lies or fully ignorant from people who don't watch the product. Sometimes I think that it might be that these people existed in a 90s world where there were multi-month feuds with partners that were married to one another on house shows town after town after town and AEW is instead a TV product. That's probably giving them too much faith though. I don't see how you can watch something like this match and not see a plethora of character, story, and plot. Every AEW Battle Royale is like this.

ROH Death Before Dishonor 7/26/24

Dustin Rhodes/Ross Von Erich/Marshall Von Erich vs Dark Order (Evil Uno/Alex Reynolds/John Silver)

MD: I'm still getting a sense of the Von Erichs. At times they seem moderately generic, as if they've traveled around so much that they haven't really been able to specialize. They've been working since 2012 but only have ~130 matches in Cagematch (the comparison point is Nick Wayne or Billie Starkz who have double or quadruple that respectively). You'll see Ross do something like a slingblade and kind of go "Ehh" on the idea that maybe he should be leaning harder into who and what they are and who and what makes them stand out against others. Then sometimes, I'm certain that Marshall, despite the size, is sort of the Bobby Fulton of the two, the more charismatic and theatrical, and Ross is really more the Tommy Rogers, hitting stuff sharp and clean. Then you have a match like this where they both get a face-in-peril bit and I just need to see some more. Thankfully, I've got another match coming up after this one.
 
Anyway, this worked really well. The underlying story was that the Dark Order kept taking Dustin out from the floor, primarily Alex Reynolds, who is great at playing a trolling shitheel which is probably something he should stick with as he's a competent and hard-working babyface but not one that stands out on the roster. That meant that the Von Erichs had to wrestle from a 3 vs 2 deficit. It also meant that the fans were denied Dustin (other than the opening brawling) until it was time for the hot tag. The fans could relate to the IDEA of the Von Erichs, but they're still building up familiarity with Ross and Marshall as individual entities (just like I am, I guess). Dustin they know as well as any wrestler in the world. Very smart layout, but then that's one of the hallmarks of Reynolds/Silver. They're the only guys I've ever seen that can make controlled chaos consistently compelling.

Once Dustin did come in, everything broke down in a satisfying way with Dustin hitting his big stuff on everyone before the numbers overwhelmed him. I bought the kickout on the wombo combo as he's tall enough that they couldn't hit it exactly the way they wanted to. Then it all built to the claws and shattered dreams and the ref being just out of position at exactly the right time, and this was all really satisfying in the end. I don't know if Dustin and the Von Erichs will just have the titles for the residency or what, but this is much more of what I want out of a six-man tag, using the extra players to lean harder into ideas like double heat and isolation on the floor instead of just maximizing the number of possible spots.

AEW Battle of the Belts 7/27/24

Dustin Rhodes/Ross Von Erich/Marshall Von Erich vs Roderick Strong/Matt Taven/Mike Bennett

MD: A big feel-good, celebratory title win in front of the home crowd at the residency, the sort of thing that was all but destroyed in mainstream wrestling in the 2010s. This stayed grounded for the most part until the end and then went over the top with bells and whistles for the last couple of minutes.

In general, it was a little more of a standard shine/heat/comeback than the Dark Order match which started with brawling and went into double heat instead. There were similar themes though. Here, things broke down on the floor at the end of the shine and led to Dustin being taken out by a pile-driver leaving things 3 on 2 and letting the Kingdom press their advantage. It's a good model and they can definitely continue to run with it over the next few weeks so long as they can find ways to believably take Dustin out of the matches. Then they can start inverting and tweaking and seeing how that looks like. With just two data points, we'll call it coincidence for now.

I liked the point of transition with Bennett hitting his bounce back shot on the apron before the pile driver and then Strong sealing the deal with a backbreaker. There wasn't necessarily that same anticipation for Dustin on the hot tag (as he was taken out but not repeatedly like in the Dark Order match), but the Kingdom fed for him like pros; it's what they're best at. No one in wrestling can take a nut shot quite like Matt Taven; it's his best quality other than the fact he's still throwing punches instead of forearms. Then the finish maybe got a little silly with the cowbell hitting this time (it missed in the Dark Order match) and all the interference, but when you're going to send everyone home happy, sometimes you can get away with that. Great to see Dustin with a belt again, and yes, 91 WCW and the York Foundation as six-man champs is a sweet spot for my youthful wrestling watching, so I absolutely want them to lean more into that aesthetic than the spot-heavy Elite idea of trios tags.

AEW Collision 7/20/24

Darby Allin vs The Beast Mortos

MD: Playing catch up here. There's story and there's plot and then there's purpose. Usually, if you look at a match through the lens of purpose, the other things come into focus. What was this one trying to accomplish? It was the first televised match for the residency so it was setting the (somewhat literal) stage for that in tone and look and feel. It was Darby's first singles match since March and had to heat him up to a degree for Blood and Guts and for all other things to come. He's in a slightly different spot now. Despite being a ragdoll who can sell and sell and sell and then come back, he may have to be presented as more of a force and take more of his matches in a post-Sting (and soon to be Post-Danielson) world. He's more of the face of the company now. That meant he ended up taking closer to half of the match here, more than you might expect.

Then you had Mortos. He needed to be heated up a bit for his ROH match as he's going to be a player there and kept strong enough to put over Hologram on the 27th on Collision to make that meaningful. I had previously thought that he shouldn't be doing the top rope press slam and the spinning dive in every match, that these should be held back a bit because they stand out so much against everything else happening (which says a lot!) but since he needs to be used to put over others right now and can't be fully protected, it's one way to keep him strong and formidable. I think maybe it sacrifices potential growth in the long run but there are a lot of short term goals where he fits perfectly and keeping him spectacular in every match helps it feel special. It just comes at a cost and that should never, ever be forgotten or minimized. Even here, Darby won by hitting the crucifix bomb off the top and it was a bit of a banana peel protecting Mortos even if he ate the coffin drop and was pinned cleanly. The other thing about him that maybe I've discounted, is that he's wider than he is tall. I see him as a Killswitch like monster, but he's really not. He's more of a LA Park and that changes the dynamic somewhat.

AEW Dynamite 7/24/24

Blood and Guts

MD: I'm kidding. I'm not going to review blood and guts too. This is already enough words. I'll just say this. Next year, I would very much like the people in the match to watch the first few War Games and try to figure out what made those special and tap into that instead. No plunder. No big set pieces. No crazy bumps. Blood, guts, crazy selling instead. It would stand out against the competition. It would stand out against Anarchy in the Arena. It doesn't have to be all the time. It could just be once. Just try it. This is established now. There's nothing to lose.

Read more!

AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends): Week of 8/1 - 8/7

AEW Battle of the Belts III 8/6

Claudio Castagnoli vs. Konosuke Takeshita

MD: There was a lot of AEW product this last week but none of our guys. Punk's still out and we're between big Danielson (vs. Garcia) and Darby (vs. Brody in his signature match) matches. Eddie cut a promo to set up his Sammy PPV match and hyped the crowd between BOTB and Rampage. There was Serpentico putting over Cole Karter and a fun Emi/Nyla/Shafir vs. Storm/Willow/Shida match on Elevation, the hard hitting Emi vs. Shida match on Thursday Elevation, and a Pac match on Dark I stopped watching after a really early brainbuster. Someday, maybe I'll do a C+A of Emi tags on the web shows, but not this week. I wasn't as high as other people on the Dynamite women's tag, but thought the Rosa vs. Hayter singles was pretty good for what it was. 

Still, I was coming into the main event of BOTB not sure what I was going to write about this week. I figured I was going to go back and cover Garcia vs. Yuta and Martinez vs. Deeb from the ROH PPV as I liked both a lot, and especially liked the series of oneupmanship tags on the web shows leading up to Deeb/Martinez. And why, you ask, was I not looking forward to Claudio vs. Takeshita all that much, given that Takeshita is the 2022 golden boy of AEW? Mainly because I've only liked two of his AEW matches this year. I wrote up the Kingston match a few weeks ago and explained why I didn't think it worked at all. I'd call the Page match even worse: just two guys hitting stuff with no build, no rhyme, no reason, no point. So there's the short JD Drake match - which covered a lot of ground in less than four minutes, but it was all grounded ground - and the Mox match, where he was forced to survive within Mox's formula of getting chewed up while trying to find openings. 

Claudio's the guy who's in career matches for people like The Miz, but I just figured that we'd get a bunch of maximalist noise that people would eat up (and they're certainly allowed to; I'm the outlier!) and that it wouldn't be for me. Instead, we ended up with a pretty balanced title match. Around five minutes of chain wrestling, five of Claudio working the back through the break, around five of Takeshita coming back and getting cut off more broadly, and then a finishing stretch. It's not quite as balanced as that. The stretch was a bit longer than the climb back and cutoff, but wrestling isn't math, even if sometimes a little bit of math can't help. Claudio played up both his own strengths: his literal strength and also his ability to take a limb and lock on a hold, and Takeshita played his strengths (athleticism, size, flexibility) in the opening exchanges. They weren't going in and out of holds evenly so much as Takeshita ending up in a hold and having to get out only to end up in the next one. They were going so hard and intensely that Claudio almost lost Takeshita on the monkeyflip. Both guys looked good, with Takeshita gaining an advantage once the pace picked up. The back work played into Claudio's control, was at least paid lip service to throughout the match, and informed the finish, but it wasn't religiously adhered to. That's fine, as Takeshita is as much of a guy who can believably channel an adrenaline burst as anyone. 

My favorite moment in all of this was one of Takeshita's first hope spots, during the commercial break when he blocked a Claudio suplex and really fought for one of his own. It showed all of his heart and determination but earned him absolutely nothing. The effort probably cost him and his hurt back more than if he had just taken the suplex. All he bought himself was a little bit of space, just a few seconds, before Claudio charged back in. But it said so much about who he is as a character and the legacy he carries that he had to give it all to try to reverse it, no matter the cost. 

My least favorite part was probably when they did the roll through/pop ups down the stretch with the delayed selling, but that was twenty seconds of a twenty minute match, done only once, with one or two moves each. Frankly, they're each such physical wrestlers, channeling so much emotion and adrenaline and heart, that done in a very  limited way that it added instead of detracted from the match. The key moment of the finishing stretch - Claudio catching Takeshita in mid-air to block the knee - was one of those things that *only* Claudio could do. As physically impressive as it was, what's more impressive to me was how much he centered and focused the match, bestowing meaning upon things that might just have been intense and impactful but a less meaningful spot for some other wrestler. I though the Moxley match did a good job of asking what would happen if Takeshita was forced into Mox's crucible. This one did a much better job of taking Takeshita's strengths (and he does have many) and crafting a compelling title match where he had to fight out of them from underneath.

ER: I thought Takeshita looked pretty bad during long stretches of this, but also thought it was one of the great Claudio performances. Claudio has been having these type of great matches with overhyped Speed & Agility guys for at least 15 years now, but he's so good at finding new ways to have those matches. He has the brain and strength to muscle around an athletic flier to great things, and knows how to catch and sell their offense so well that there are few finer at crafting near 3 kickouts. He's so strong at working a 70/30 match while making an opponent with loose offense look genuinely damaging, great at working an opponent's athletic strengths into his own. Takeshita's best athletic strength is his hang time. You give Claudio a man who can hang in the air, and Claudio will find several ways to make that hang time end with a bang. The most compelling parts of this were Claudio working over Takeshita's back. Claudio throws men into some impossible moves, and his backbreakers all stung. They fought real well over a vertical suplex (sadly in picture-in-picture) that ended with Takeshita victorious but still holding his back in even worse pain than before. It's that hard fought battle over that suplex that really stood out. The hard work matwork at the very beginning stood out in the same way, as they worked over knuckle locks and looked like they were each pushing back with equal force and strength. That level of fight isn't there in a lot of Takeshita's suplexes and other offense. His offense is something that only looks as good as the athlete he's up against. Not everyone can take his offense, whereas you can probably count on one hand the people who Claudio couldn't do his offense to. 

But Takeshita has some real moldable strengths, and as I said, every piece of hang time ended with something spectacular. Claudio uppercutting him out of the sky or Takeshita flying to the floor with a flip dive, or the way he would almost look weightless to set up a huge Claudio moment. Now, Claudio's strength can make a lot of guys look weightless, but that running leaping knee that was caught by Claudio and turned into a brutal Death Valley Driver? That's a real Two to Tango situation and was one of several things that Takeshita added to. The Ricola Bomb reversal was a tremendous nearfall, and I bought into at least three of Claudio's kickouts, his body language so good at making it look like Takeshita was going to get his first big AEW victory. Claudio was at least a Top 10 guy for most of his time in WWE, and it's exciting to think about him bringing that into a roster with entirely new match-ups. 

2022 MOTY MASTER LIST

Read more!