AEW Five Fingers of Death 10/28 - 11/3

AEW Rampage 11/1/24

RUSH/Dralistico/Mortos vs BEEF/JD Drake/Butcher

MD: Really enjoyed Rampage this week overall. Very "Fastest Hour of TV" vibes. They started in the ring for this one, cut to Stokely after, did the Vendetta squash, paid off the Stokely bit and did something out of normal format with Taya, then went straight into the three Top Flight matches, one after the other, all linked with the entrances, and with the undertone of Moxley-influenced aggression in the air more so than usual on AEW TV (that doesn't involve Moxley directly) right now. Very much a "Restore the Feeling" sort of show for me, but then my feeling and other people's feelings tend to be different. I'll miss it if and when it's gone just like I miss Dark and Elevation.

And obviously, this was a great way to start. Look, I like the Outrunners, but I do think there's a ceiling to them and that the act will only have legs for so long. I see a higher ceiling for BEEF. Yes, he's over the top, but he's over the top in a believable way. The Outrunners are characters. They're very fun characters who are enjoyable to watch, but BEEF comes off as more human. You might know a guy like BEEF. You might tell yourself and everyone else that you wished you didn't, but then so do JD Drake and Anthony Henry, right? Deep down, though, having someone so earnest and enthusiastic in your life just makes it better. Do I think he can be world champion? No, but I think he can be a challenger for the TNT or Continental Title that fans might really get behind on a chase.

The most interesting guy in this one was Drake though. Arn Anderson is on record that he thinks he (being Arn) was a terrible babyface, that he didn't have the "skills," which in this case more or less means deep armdrags and dropkicks. I'm not sure if he really believes that of if he's being self-effacing but in saying it, he shortchanges just how good a babyface he was and what makes a good babyface in the first place. It's not "skills", it's emotional connection. I imagine Drake might say the same thing Arn did, but he was really good here being shoehorned into that role. He engaged with everyone around him, hitting the tranquilo pose early, played face-in-peril sympathetically but with fire, downright seething when RUSH stopped the run across the ring to kick him in the face, and then fired back for the hot tag, standing toe to toe with RUSH before making that final, pained turn to tag BEEF in.

Butcher fit right in too. Obviously you want him slugging it out with RUSH. You want everyone slugging it out with RUSH. There was a bit early on too where Dralistico really played up that little dog/big dog dynamic with his brother which I find effective. This was good all around. Only thing I missed here was one of those Jake pre-tapes to set the stage. BEEF has this sort of transformative element to him that makes everyone into Giant Machine or Piper Machine like in 85. Someday we'll get BEEF/Mark Briscoe interaction and the skies will part and the angels will sing.

ROH TV 10/31/24

Athena vs Abadon

MD: Abadon's an interesting case. If you go back to the territories, they'd move around like Kamala or other monsters, never staying in one place for too long. Here, they're one of the only honest attractions (in as they're used like one) that AEW/ROH have. They're gone more than than they're here and they're instantly credible and dangerous when they arrive, generally able to challenge a champion only to come short. Then they're away again long enough to make you forget about the loss so that they have an impact when they come back. I know in the margins they're working indies and training but the lack of ringtime is probably not ideal. 19 matches in 2024 with a third of those being squashes on ROH TV coming in at less than 2:30. 2023 was much the same. It's a tricky balance.

Part of me wonders if we're reaching the end of Athena in ROH. It looks like Billie's story is cresting again and Final Battle is around the corner. Plenty of people who don't actually watch ROH have been clamoring for it. Everyone who does likely wants her to stay. I do understand that what ROH is might change in the future (and it might not) but it gives her the freedom to stretch. This went almost 20 minutes, more with the pre and the post-match. It had all the room in the world to breathe. I love AEW commercial breaks in some ways, but Athena doesn't need them like others do. She is fully formed, self-actualized, able to structure her matches in the ideal manner and make the most out of every second. This sort of match would have been very hard to pull off in this exact way getting this amount of time on Dynamite or Rampage. I think in historical terms and the comp we'll have some day of Athena's Proving Ground matches and big defenses will shine, just like she does as the biggest fish in AEW's smallest pond. If she does get moved up at some point, then she should be featured on the same level as Mercedes, getting her own segment each week. On paper, maybe that's a bold risk. In actuality, it's an investment that would pay off in time.

But there's a match here and like I said, it went almost twenty. It was wild, with a slew of big spots that went like they should have or that were all the more impressive for maybe not. Some of the latter was simple physics. A lot of it was Athena's reactions in the moment. There were plenty of moving parts here and it was very much on her to make this feel organic. Remember, Abadon's had something like 120 matches and a big chunk of those are squashes. They did a good job sticking to character and keeping things moving, being where they needed to be when they needed to be, and this was their career match, from what I've seen, but it's a little different than Athena's 17 year career.

Athena reacted to everything, from planned spots, to mishaps like the chain falling off her band, to the crowd chanting this is awesome. She reacted from Abadon absorbing the magic forearm at the start all the way to the relief of hitting the crazy O-Face into the chairs and escaping with the belt(s). You couldn't see the strings because she managed to be on so thoroughly throughout, whether it was following some sort of plan or a temporary deviation from it. I can't stress how important that is, how rare that is in 2024, and how it turns a match from a garbage spotfest into an immersive, horrific experience.

Athena went from fear to seething frustration to seething rage to seething agony. There was a lot of seething in this one. Abadon's reaction to the blood from the skewers was spot on as well, and even better was Abadon's frustration after being unable to finish Athena off on the floor. That was the moment that the match shifted inexorably in Athena's favor, the moment where her persistence and determination and madwoman drive broke Abadon's will. For the first time all match, maybe even since their debut, Abadon showed cracks, and Athena drove a wedge through them before shattering her with the O-Face. That this went so long, had certain things that didn't work as planned, and still turned out to be compelling and cohesive is a testament to one of the best wrestlers in the world and a very game opponent and one more reason that we should cherish this ROH while we can. 

BONUS: AEW Collision 11/2/24 - Kyle Fletcher

I had tossed this in a tweet (https://x.com/MattD_SC/status/1853065072689496430) I'm doing a lot of these short form things over there, so do follow and follow along) but wanted to put it here as well. 

It's no big secret what I wanted MJF to do at Wembley. Channel Larry Zybzsko and stall. The stalling wasn't the point though. It was the means. The heat that it would have gotten him wasn't even the point. That was the means too. At the end of the day, heat generally is. It's a means to fuel the potential energy behind a comeback. The comeback is the thing. When you have a face and a heel and a crowd that cares about the difference, it's everything.

The traditional goal of pro wrestling has always been to figure out what a crowd wants and deny them it and deny them it and deny them it so that when they get it, it's the greatest feeling imaginable. For decades, what they wanted was to see the babyface win and the heel get comeuppance. That's not nearly as true in 2024. Right now, much of the audience wants to be part of an experience, want to have bragging rights for being live for a great match, to chant "This is Awesome" or "Fight Forever." And no one enables them to do that more than Will Ospreay. He's the poster boy for it. He gives the fans what they want. So if MJF was going to be the greatest villain of his age, how could he really get under the crowd's skin? By denying them that as much as possible in the grandest venue possible. Then, in the last third of the match when Ospreay became unchained and hit spot after spot perfectly and brilliantly, it would have felt like the greatest relief (and release) in the world. 

Max went a different way with it. That's fine. People still liked the match. We're not here to talk about that. We move on. We look to the future. Let's talk about Kyle Fletcher. I love AEW's commercial breaks. You learn so much about wrestlers by seeing how they fill time during it. This is where AEW generally sticks the heat (of shine/heat/comeback since I'm using phrases haphazardly) in its matches. That's the most important part of the match! I'm not entirely sure it would even exist for most AEW matches without the breaks because the tendency to go 50/50, your move/my move and get all the cool stuff in might be too strong.

People have been hot and cold on Fletcher the last couple of years, but I've been watching him during those breaks and I have to admit, I like what I see. He's been precociously good at interacting with the crowd, his opponent, the ref, at letting things breathe, at showing himself as a fully fleshed out character with emotions and opinions and able to emote and present all of this to the crowd. He's not just hitting stuff. He's not just sleepwalking through it until it's time for the big back-from-break spot. He's alive. It's just for a lot of the rest of the match, you didn't see it nearly as much. Great (surprising!) instincts, just maybe a career of hanging with a certain sort of crowd who had learned to get over in a certain sort of way, right?

So now he's turned on Ospreay, has cut his hair to differentiate him, and as seen on Collision's Komander match, has done something even more striking. He's managed to start moving differently. That Fletcher who we'd seen peek out during the breaks is starting to show himself from bell to bell. He used his robe as a feint to cheapshot Komander to start and then moved slowly, methodologically, with purpose. He grinded him down, played to the crowd, menaced Abrahantes. When I tried to explain what made Mark Henry so special during his Hall of Pain run, the best I could come up with was the notion of "negative space", what you did between the moves and the spots. Giving life to those in-between moments turns a match from a series of things that happened to a consistent, engaging, immersive reality of its own. Fletcher was absolutely nailing that here.

And then, in the back third (after the break and after he finally nailed Abrahantes), he let Komander off the chain and they hit bombs and fireworks on the way to the finish. The crowd responded, for the most part, as they ideally are supposed to, chanting Komander's name and getting behind him. Sometimes you find a spark of hope in the most unlikely places, right?  

That brings us to Full Gear and Ospreay. I don't want him to stall. That made sense for Max. It made sense for the cowardly heel champ full of bluster. Fletcher's wrestling like someone with something to prove and he has more to prove against Ospreay than anyone. What he has to prove, however, is that he's his own man. If he comes out and wrestles Ospreay's match to prove that he can hang, that he's just as good as him (exactly what Max did!), that doesn't prove to anyone that he's his own man. It just proves that maybe he's as good an Ospreay as Ospreay.

Fletcher seems to get this, right? He seemed to get it in the Komander match, way more than I would have expected him to. How does he prove it then? He goes low early and then grinds Ospreay down the whole match. He makes sure Ospreay doesn't hit his usual first-few-minutes dive. He evades and avoids hope spots so that Ospreay doesn't even get to hit them. He denies Ospreay his offense. He denies the fans the chance to see Ospreay do his thing. They get absolutely nothing for the first two thirds (but the joy of booing), not because Fletcher is a coward but because he's an absolute bastard. Then? That last third? They get everything. Maybe it scores a half star less on the following Friday morning, but if Fletcher can pull it off, it would be an experience the crowd would never forget. It would define who and what he could be moving forward. It would give AEW another piece they badly need. I guess we'll know soon enough.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 1/6/21

What Worked

-I was initially down on the opening 8 man tag, finding at odd how much of a backseat The Acclaimed took the entire match. I thought they showed a lot of presence in their Dynamite debut and had kind of assumed they'd be treating them big. So it felt odd when they were such afterthoughts here, at the expense of talking about how Frankie Kazarian hadn't lost a step the entire match. But I admittedly got into the story after the match, with Kazarian's promo. I like a retirement or team breaks up storyline, and while it's true I haven't been excited for a Daniels/Kazarian match since 2001, I think the role of old gunslingers can be suitable to a lot of late career wrestlers. I have a soft spot for wrestlers playing that role, and I like the addition of them breaking up after their next loss. It's something that could supplement the in-ring. The match itself was fun enough, if way too one-sided for SCU/Bucks. I kind of talk out both sides of my mouth, as I have complained about AEW matches worked too competitively, but I think this would have been better if it was more even. I think SCU winning but having to work hard to beat Acclaim/Hybrid2 would have felt like even more stakes going into a much bigger match against the Bucks. It would be more like Rocky taking too much of a beating in a tune-up fight. Bucks had some nice dives, Kazarian worked hard in the match to give the angle some weight, and it kept a good pace. 

-Snoop Dogg at nearly 50 looks so cool in the Doggystyle hoodie. This guy is going to look cool forever and then cool as a corpse. He looked terrible up on that top rope, but who cares, Snoop went off the top rope. We can't all be Federline. 

-Shida/Abadon was nicely laid out, even if it wasn't quite good? Shida has charisma for sure, but her wrestling can be a real mess. She comes off uncoordinated during a lot of spots, and has timing issues, but she has the kind charisma that plays well off of a horror movie Kamala. Abadon bites at Shida's thigh and neck, and works like an ugly bruiser character from the 50s. Shida's incoordination comes out when she is doing more complicated roll ups and timing things with multiple people, and that really didn't come up until the very end here. She mostly sold a beating, brick walled for a couple Abadon clotheslines, and her fighting through things is where her charisma works. So the match played to their strengths without actually being great in-ring. 

-I didn't love the main event - too much Omega goofiness and it could have used an editor - but it was the first time since Fenix got dropped on his head that he looked like he knew which direction he was going in the ring. It was a good main event performance (could have used less melodrama) and had a nice mix of him hitting his great flying offense (dug his double springboard dropkick into wild tope con giro that almost went over the guardrail), and he's great at taking Omega's offense. Fenix will get tossed hard on Germans and lean into v triggers, and he did that all match. Omega takes a reverse rana in a way that looks devastating, but I couldn't tell you the last time a rana that looks like someone is getting spiked on their head was anything more than a "shocking" kickout. We'll see where the pinfall controversy goes, but I don't know if I need another Omega main event epic with Fenix. Fenix is doing well at working big match drama into his bigger singles, but I don't like Omega's specific brand of drama. Maybe I would like a Fenix/Omega sprint more? 

What Didn't Work

-Wardlow/Hager felt like they should have accomplished more with the time they got, felt like the middle was a little time killing. I liked Hager's takedowns and some of the early matwork, and I think would have preferred things stay that way. It feels like a fresher way for bigger guys to work a match these days. But eventually Hager took a nice bump off the apron into the guardrail, and I liked Wardlow's three suplex and slams and a couple other throws. But this didn't quite get to the level that I think it could have. 

-I thought Sydal/Rhodes went WAY too long and felt like they were throwing out way too much. Cody was really flavorless here and he was responsible for a lot of the drag. There was early clumsiness, and Cody felt so...in the way through much of this. Sydal hit a nice meteora to the ramp and a nice dive, but Cody kept taking this thing in such uninteresting directions. The Sydal crossbody with a clumsy Cody roll through into leg work just seemed like somebody throwing dumb sequences at the wall. I hate that thing Cody does where he bumps the same direction his opponent is already bumping, so has to do this stupid jog like when a car is waiting for you to finish crossing the street, just to be able to bump somewhere there isn't a body. He did that kind of thing a lot here. This had bad energy despite not being dull, it just went too long and never hit the level it thought it was at. 

-I do not like Jericho on commentary. It is way too much, and he sounds like a drunk guy rambling over everyone half the time. It's like having two JR's out there, which is two too many. During Inner Circle matches? Fine. During entire broadcasts? Please, no. No more. 

-A Bullet Club revival, famous hand sign included, is not going to be the thing to excite me. I am sure that it excites many other people, and that's fine by me. Is this something people are excited about? Jericho was acting excited. 

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 12/9/20

What Worked

-I wasn't really feeling the Bucks/Hybrid2 match, but the more ridiculous shit got kicked out of, the more I got into it. If you're gonna get crazy with it, get crazy with it. If you're going to indulge, indulge. This blew several minutes past where I assumed it was going to end, and that somehow wound up working in favor of the match. I don't love Nick Jackson's superkick as a finisher, but I love it as a cut off spot, and there were some great cut off kicks here. My favorite spot of the match was Evans missing the Angelico-assisted 450, and basically landing face first into a superkick. When the timing is that tight, it's such a great looking spot. The whole match felt like it was Jack Evans kicking out of one Bucks finisher after the other, then getting up two seconds later to hit another crazy flip, and that's the kind of BS I can get into. If you're going to have a bunch of kickouts, just go for it and through everything else out the window. That's what they did, that's why it worked. 

-The match itself was a little messy, but how could I not get behind FTR beating the hell out of Brian Pillman Jr.? Dax especially seemed to really be going after him, and it looked awesome. I loved Cash baiting Griff Garrison around the ring and back into being stopped by the ref, allowing them to hit a great Demolition Decapitation on Pillman. Dax's chops and elbows really sang off Pillman's body, and I like the way the tag was worked as a real hierarchy tag. Varsity Blondes have won a few matches on Dark, get their shot on Dynamite, get mostly run over by FTR. Having that kind of slow progress is a really satisfying way to present wrestling for me, feels similar to working Kings Road guys up the card. Pillman got to land a really great punch on Dax on the floor, and I love how Dax sold it like his orbital bone just got hit with a wrench. 

-Dustin took a big bump off the apron and hit a nice bulldog finish on Ten, though any time Dustin is on TV I think he should get at least 4 minutes. Dustin is a smart enough worker to have a special 4 minute match, anything shorter than that feels like a waste of bullets. They also managed to make a couple jokes about his Seven gimmick while avoiding a "we know what THAT means" wink, with Tony hitting the right tone with his "well he doesn't want to go by THAT number".

-Abadon looked like a real savage murdering Tesha Price with elbows in the corner and an awesome stranglehold STO. I don't know what she'll look like in a full match, but her squash work has been compelling. 

What Didn't Work

-I still don't know what to expect from Sting in AEW, and I'm not really excited for whatever it might be. I've never been a big Sting guy (nothing personal, just didn't have cable growing up so child me had no idea who Sting even was), and I can't imagine becoming a Sting guy now that he is in his 60s. 

-I kind of want someone new to throw a glass of water into Shaq's face every couple weeks, never actually leading to any kind of match, only used as a way to get a bunch of different comical dripping Shaq reaction faces. That, or I want a Shaq/Brandi street fight. 

-It feels like a crime to put an Eddie Kingston match down below, but that trios match had too much awkward miscommunication. Fenix looked bad, and honestly he hasn't looked very good ever since that awful match against his brother where he got dropped on his head. The camera caught him missing an early kick on Blade by nearly two feet, and his performance didn't get better. Butcher and Blade (mainly Butcher) were not going to be the ones to help him get back on the page, and Fenix/Butcher got hung up on a time stand still loop, trapped in a Rainmaker set up for way too long, neither sure who was supposed to turn around. At one point it looked like Kingston was trying to set up a blind tag to Butcher and Blade, but both of them just stood on the apron while Kingston yelled at them repeatedly to get in the ring, before he just went back to beating on Fenix himself. The only good from this match came from Kingston himself, since Butcher and Blade didn't seem to understand that they were supposed to be cutting off the ring. Kingston's beatdown on Fenix looked good, and I dug the way he took a beating from Lance Archer, while also doing stuff like holding onto Archer's leg from the mat, to keep him close. He took a clunky headscissors from Fenix, and sadly couldn't do much to catch a Fenix tope con hilo as Fenix landed short. The match finishing powerbomb/neckbreaker on Fenix looked intentionally gentle, possibly because his short tope con hilo landed him harder on the back of his neck than this finish would have. Maybe it would be a good idea for Fenix to not wrestle for awhile? 

-I am in the MJF in ring > MJF mic (but I mean that as a compliment, not the I suppose obvious take that it is), but this MJF/Orange Cassidy match was not good. There was a lot of work based around Cassidy's hand, which gets instantly forgotten once it's time for Cassidy's comeback, but - this will surprise you - comes back for one spot and one spot only and this hand that injured hand that was not even acknowledged for several minutes was now suddenly sold more than it had been sold in any other part of the match. Cassidy was good at taking MJF's offense, and MJF was especially good at feeding Cassidy's comeback, really leaning into everything and planting himself on all things that required it. Sadly, the best part of the match was probably the locker room babyfaces emptying out to cheer Orange on, but it all happened during the commercial break. That kind of noise would have been cool to hear. 

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 6/17/20

What Worked

-Give some decent time to Dustin, and the match is almost always going up here. I might be the lone QT fan out there, but I can't help it if QT is one of the better guys on the roster. Omega and Page looked off for large portions of this, and it was only the tag match structure that Dustin can do in his sleep that saved it. Omega kneed Dustin right in the face because he can't leapfrog a man like a normal human, he has to do a fruity gymnastics routine that messes up the timing for everyone. Dustin uses the flub and actually makes it mean something, continuing to sell taking a knee to the temple as he's taking Omega's rana and then popping up with one of his own. Or, the man got brained with an unexpected knee and he was knocking cobwebs loose. Page threw two of the weakest pescados I have ever seen, holding onto the rope until the last minute so that most of his body misses the mark and it lands with no oomph. He threw weak clotheslines too, which QT made look like great clotheslines. Page's sliding lariat did look good, so not a full loss. Marshall has such blatantly better strikes (and a great dropkick) that of course Jim Ross is going to cover that up by calling Page one of the best strikers in AEW. You knew the Dustin hot tag was going to be good, and really the whole match was worth it just for Dustin's snap powerslam, but I also liked how Marshall threw himself into Omega's snap dragon. Fun tag that relied on a proven formula and a great babyface team.

-I really loved how the set up the Anna Jay/Abadon match, giving Anna Jay the "Coming Up Next" graphic and the promo video out of the commercial break, and then flipping things into an Abadon showcase. I don't know Abadon, and horror movie gimmicks like this don't do a ton for me, not when we've seen Su Yung doing this very thing for several years now. But it's cool that random Colorado indy workers are on their radar and the twist of someone entirely unexpected being the actual star of the segment was a cool bit of presentation.

-Billy Gunn/MJF was a fun use of time and a good use of Gunn. I like how it was built around working over an old man's leg, Wardlow slamming it a bunch into the ringpost, MJF dropping knees on it and snapping it over with a quick Indian deathlock, coming down hard on it while the knee was draped over the ropes, and I like how Gunn's selling of the knee played into the finish. MJF really added a ton to this just by making sure his misses looked as devastating as all of the work Gunn was taking. MJF came down really hard on his tailbone after Gunn moved his leg off the ropes, and throwing himself hard chin first into the bottom buckle. That bottom buckle bump was something that Lanny Poffo used to do and I always loved it, and it looked neck snapping here.

-Liked Cody in his match, especially when Starks tossed him into the ropes and he made it look like he hit a brick wall. Dug his topes, dug his vertical suplex, didn't dig his opponent.

-Big top of the page love for Britt Baker's Kaitlin Olson level puke gagging in the dumpster, with a perfectly positioned banana peel on her head.

-Really liked Jericho and Guevara in the main event, really like their complementary feel. Sammy hit a real nice dropkick and followed it up with an awesome slow rise kip up, and moments later Jericho hit an awesome heavy dropkick (looked like a Bret Hart or Lawler dropkick). Jericho had a bunch of great strikes, with the peak being his killer short knees to the gut.


What Didn't Work

-Didn't see anything from Ricky Starks that I haven't seen from any of these other guys with the same build, haircut, and movement. He's probably maybe better than Austin Theory? His dance steps weren't as refined and he stutter stepped a couple times, had really performative bumps, and the only offense of his I enjoyed was when Cody would make something simple look good. You're bringing Malenko/Guerrero roll ups to my TV in 2020? Hard pass.

-Another week, another Sabian/Havoc match. Kip Sabian has more AEW matches in 2020 than anyone else. Who is behind that decision? Who thinks that anybody wants to see that? Who are the people who want to see that? I've somehow written up 23 Dynamites this year, and Sabian has been on 40% of them! He's just that one weird canned food item that everyone has in their cupboards and nobody remembers how it got there. We are supposed to move that can to the back of the cupboard and do a couple moves with it, not make a meal with plenty of leftovers out of it.

-JR thinks Hangman Page has arguably the best strikes in AEW, and that Chuck Taylor is "lanky". Has he seen Taylor's COVID bod or was he watching tape from a decade ago?

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