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.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/12 - 5/18

ROH TV 5/15/25

Dustin Rhodes/Sammy Guevara/Marshall Von Erich/Ross Von Erich vs Mason Madden/Mansoor/Ariya Daivari/Tony Nese

MD: There are a couple of different ways to do an 8-man tag. You can lean hard into the tag gimmick by creating a sense of danger and difficulty just from the sheer numbers at play. Any time someone gets too close to not just the wrong corner but even the center of the ring ropes, there's a chance that a knee or arm may reach out. That evokes the sense of those 80s New Japan elimination tag for instance, creating a mood where all of these wrestlers are trapped with one another, the babyface getting dragged down as face-in-peril most of all. Or you can just toss the tag rules out the window and run rapid fire spots with people running in and out, making use of those sheer numbers to keep the action going and going with no logical reason for it to ever stop or for anything to sink in. 

Anyone who knows me is going to know what I prefer. And this did a pretty good job at it for the first two thirds. In that case, you'd maybe run through individual pairings until you got into the heat but they avoided that for a specific reason, Dustin's more or less cracked a code, or at least I think he thinks he has. When he's with the Von Erichs, he drops back and delays getting in the ring until after the hot tag. They find some way to contrive it, whether he's attacked before the match or just slips back into the scenery of the numbers like here. 

In 2025, it's tougher than ever to figure out what the fans actually want. In 1985, they wanted to see the heel vanquished and the babyface triumphant and a clear win or at least a clear beating, or ideally both. While there are increasingly heels on the AEW/ROH working to get under the skin of the fans and get actual heat, and while maybe in time, that will restore some of those old incentives, fans today seem to want their candy. Candy can come in a number of forms, but it's generally something they can brag about seeing or experiencing, whether that's a five star match, a debut, a crazy spot, or just getting to sing along to a theme song or as part of a chant. 

Getting to see Dustin Rhodes is a form of candy. He's a legend, an attraction, someone who knows how to work a crowd from underneath as well as anyone else alive. For 80% of the viewing audience, he was part of their childhood, whether they started watching in 1990, 2000, 2010, or 2020. Who knows how many more times anyone will get to see him wrestle live. He's candy. And by holding himself back, he makes the fans earn it and makes his arrival into the ring mean all the more. That also lets him put the Von Erichs front and center for both the shine and the heat, giving them reps and getting the fans used to them in both roles. 

The other aspect of an 8-man is all the characters at play, and given the heel side, that was bound to go well. MxM interacted with the Athletes with the cheer at the start, by pushing them out of the way of danger. They were able to switch things up with the spot where Madden drapes an opponent over the ropes and Mansoor hits an apron senton. Last time Madden caught someone trying to hit a tope. This time, it was due to Mark Sterling getting involved as a distraction. It's a great spot but it'll only feel organic if they keep thinking it through in creative ways. Here it was the transition to heel control which made it all the better. 

Things did build to Dustin and even more so to Sterling getting hit by the Golden Globes/Shattered Dreams/Unnatural Kick and then the claws. They always have the ref dramatically look away when that happens. Maybe they didn't need to when it was the manager getting kicked? Anyway, it was a crowd pleasing finale and a good presentation overall. I would have liked another minute or two of heat but they were probably working against the clock, but other than that, I had a good time with it.

AEW Collision 5/16/25

Dustin Rhodes/Sammy Guevara vs Lio Rush/Action Andretti

MD: This was a #1 contender's match for the shot at Double or Nothing. I can't say it really felt like one, especially when Dustin was doing his fake dive bit in the middle and given a relatively anti-climactic finish where Sammy jammed Andretti's torture rack neckbreaker finisher to hit his own. In general, I like matches ending like that now and again, without a clear exclamation point, but maybe not a match with stakes? 

Of note, we got much more of Dustin in this one, including him working face-in-peril because the alchemy is different in a straight up tag than a six or eight-man and there's less of a need to showcase Sammy. That said, Dustin was excellent at slapping the mat at various points and selling the leg and really doing his half to explain why he wasn't making it to the corner despite making it look like he was fighting as hard as possible.

We know that about Dustin though. More importantly, this was the first time that I really got CRU as a team. The Top Flight breakup/feud did no one any favors but seeing them up against some contrast, they really came off like a swarming menace, in the way they took over, in cutting the ring off with Dustin, in that late match flurry against Sammy. Real Kaientai DX actually, in a way that I'm not sure anyone else is matching right now. There's maybe something there and I hadn't felt that before. They need something else. There would be worse fates for them than to become Ricochet's guys, for instance, especially if he ever lands a singles title and has to be protected more (he's pretty bulletproof right now). So this was pretty good for what it was, but I didn't quite feel the weight. I do think the PPV match could be good if Dustin can hook the crowd.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 3/10 - 3/16

ROH 3/13/25

Gates of Agony (Toa Liona/Bishop Kaun)/Top Flight (Dante/Darius Martin) vs Frat House (Preston Vance/Cole Karter)/Premier Athletes (Ariya Daivari/Tony Nese)

MD: Different matches have different purposes. Different wrestlers in different matches have different goals. Greatness comes in a lot of forms and not all of them are well captured by star ratings. While I don't have a taping schedule in front of me, this was filmed in Oakland with a Collision and I'm almost certain it came on post-show as part of an ROH taping that ended with a Mistico trios. ROH is very much wrestling for wrestling's sake, a way to fill out cards, give people work and reps (develop talent), to create a well of extra content in a post-Elevation/Dark/Rampage world, to build up a product which may be more lucrative/marketable at some point. I think it brings TK some joy, both because of his affection for the brand and because it lets him put together matches without any external constraints (commercials, demos, network notes, etc.). For me, it harkens back to being a kid in the 90s and watching Power Hour or Worldwide or Prime Time (or later on Velocity/Heat/Jakked). The big story beats weren't going to happen there, but you'd get to just watch an hour of wrestling and enjoy it just for what it was. I think there's a disconnect with people who didn't grow up with that maybe.

Anyway, for the crowd that hangs around, it gives them an added bonus, just fun wrestling, to a degree 'house show wrestling' during a time where there are very few house shows. That's absolutely what this was, and if you look at the broad history of pro wrestling, this has its place and its value and it's honestly a really worthy entry along those lines. I am so glad a match like this is still allowed to exist in 2025, a match anchored by incredibly giving, unlikable heels, 100% willing to do their job as opposed to trying to make it about themselves, and two very diverse, very talented babyface teams, with one absolute shining star at the heart of it all in Toa Liona. 

Let's talk structure quickly so you know how they put this together, and then I'll double back to that thought. Match started with chaos as Gates came down and Toa beelined to Cole Karter (with Kaun going after Vance). Daivari pulled Dante's hair to drag him to the corner and we got a mini FIP early. Eventually, Dante made it to the corner (Karter the weak link) and they ran a sequence where everyone slingshotted in on him one after the other, with Toa being the last, after really milking it; after he did it (to big reaction), he had the biggest smile on his face; more on that later too. With some chicanery, the heels were able to isolate Darius on the floor (including some cheapshots from the associated managers and hangers oners, Sterling and Jameson, ultimately broken up by Toa rushing around ringside with a chair to a big pop). From there, we entered into a second FIP on Darius, during which the fans chanted that they wanted Toa and Dante, reading the room, hyped that idea from the apron (which, given that his brother was getting beat on was pretty selfless in serving the match when you think about it). Darius finally came back for the hot tag and everything went into a wild finishing stretch.

I don't usually do this, but I think everyone should go check out the climax of that wildness and the finish itself. I clipped it because people needed to see it and I'd like everyone (and I mean everyone, even if you've seen it before, even if you helped conceive it) to go and take a look and then come back so we can close this out. Sound on is better, but even sound off will give you the idea. Just do it.

https://x.com/MattD_SC/status/1901244037081788581

This misses Kaun (a surprisingly natural babyface) shutting down everyone and hitting a poetry in motion leap and maybe another dive or two from the assembled mass of talent, but it gives you what I need you to see. First we have Toa using Dante as a weapon twice, both to kick at an opponent and then by press slamming him into everyone; great emotive reactions by Dante here. If the two weren't so ingrained in their obvious partnerships, I could see real money in a big/little tag team between the two of them. Obviously the crowd loved that.

But then Toa just... dropped the chain, broke through the limiters, and for about a minute looked like the biggest attraction imaginable, slapping the ground, charging up, looking for prey, and absolutely bursting through everyone in sight on the floor, all leading to him hesitating only slightly as Sterling got in the way before plowing right through him and send him careening into Nese (great work all around by everyone). The crowd went wild, even here for an (on paper) disposable post-show ROH match with absolutely no stakes. And yes, it was a good crowd, absolutely, but there was magic in what they did. And it was magic that all came to fruition as Toa rolled back into the ring and slammed the mat again, his gaze set on the last man standing in Preston Vance. 

As Toa was slapping the mat, as the post-Collision fans were going nuts for him hyping them up, there was the biggest smile on his face. Toa portrays a wild man, a bestial presence, a throwback to decades past, a killing machine, but my god, that smile. This was a guy absolutely living in the moment, basking in the crowd's excitement and adulation, realizing the sheer joy that he, through his presence and physicality brought into the world for at least those in attendance and living his very best life. You can't fabricate that smile. You can't bottle it and sell it. It was an honestly beautiful thing during a time where we need as many honestly beautiful things that we can get. And of course, that made it all the better when he had his leg grabbed from the outside and Vance (who has a history of robbing people of joy) cut him down with a very credible clothesline before the Gates fired back and won the thing. 

Sometimes wrestling is just special and it doesn't always have to be two guys leaping off the top of the cage or wrestlers bleeding buckets. Sometimes it can just be one wrestler using everything at his disposal without hesitation or abandon, just embracing all of the complicated absurdities and simple blissful truths of pro wrestling and everyone around him being selfless and giving and professional in enabling that moment. That's what they had here. The crowd in Oakland was lucky to see it. We were lucky to see it on ROH TV last week. And hopefully, now all of you reading this that went back and clicked on that link feel like you're lucky to have seen it too. I know I feel that way.

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2024 Ongoing MOTY List: Premier Athletes vs. Kings of the Black Throne

 

10. Tony Nese/Ariya Daivari vs. Brody King/Malakai Black AEW Rampage 7/12/24

ER: Kings of the Black Throne? House of Black was fine, but it wasn't enough so now I have to type out something truly stupid to refer to a monster finally wrestling like a monster and a jaundice-thighed Dutch kickboxer. What's happening with the AEW jaundice tan? We established orange as the ridiculous tan color for two decades and suddenly the Big Yellow 5 feels emboldened by a lax FDA to start branching out into other areas, away from sodas with a high school reputation for shrinking dicks. I don't know what's happening with Black's legs and midsection but something needs to stop and we need to contain this. This isn't normal. You would be called Piss Boy every year of high school if you showed up with yellow legs from some kind of chemical burn accident, so there's no way we should be letting 40 year old Dutch kickers and skinny fat bunny hopping piledrivers get away with it. 

Maybe Brody King worked big in this match due to the fatigued state of his friend, finally throwing aside the middling forearm exchanges and fake big man work for stiff clotheslines and aggressive size. His Throne Buddy's brain is slowly being eaten away as the yellow spreads outward through his tissue, but it's making King hit hard and miss with a toppling big man intensity. His work with Premier Athletes associations was a real plus for the match, taking a great out-of-control-big-man bump to the floor on a low bridge, and aiming a crossbody at Daivari through Mark Sterling. It was a good way for him to stay occupied and make this more of a match. 

Tony Nese is arguably the least cool AEW worker to champion but I like him. I didn't like him in Evolve but I grew to enjoy him in 205 Live when I was watching that a bunch for Drew Gulak, Jack Gallagher, and Oney Lorcan matches before those guys were retired or canceled or canceled into partial retirement. Nese isn't so different from 30-40 other good body speedy backflip guys in AEW but I think he's better than a lot of them. He's good at getting naturally into place for unnatural offense, falls in some ways you wouldn't expect, is good at pinballing between two guys, and is capable of fucking up in cool ways that feel like part of his character. He goes up for one of the highest backdrops in AEW history, has shockingly good worked arm strikes, and he repeatedly eats shit on his 450 splash no matter where Black sets up. People love holding the opinion that Great Sasuke slipping off the ropes only makes his Jushin Liger match more legendary, but nobody is quick to accept missed spots as part of a wrestler's charm, unless it's a JT Smith situation. Tony Nese does these missed spots that are almost surely unintentional but can read like expertly planned out Chris Hamrick or Juventud Guerrera misses, because they're never sold as something that connected and they often lead to his downfall. His meathead athlete Dave Portnoy energy makes the misses more charming, and his first overshoot barely got him a nearfall. His second was supposed to hit knees and instead his rotation is fucked up and he winds up connecting knees hard with Black and whipping his own head into the mat. Tony Nese has the tight physics on headscissors and backdrops like Billy Kidman with the same type of "I kind of want him to mess up this finisher though" charm. 

Nese and Daivari are both really good at getting in the way of Black's crescent kicks, and you know who has spent years gently flying under the radars of anyone offering a wrestling opinion? Ariya Daivari. Daivari is another guy I fell for during the glory days of 205 Live, but doesn't get talked about because his brand of professionalism can fade into the background. He has a consistently good floor, and a style that has always reminded me of Christian, but with less offense and less upside. He's great at using logic in matches the same as Christian, like the way he changed his pescado delivery here in an attempt to actually damage Brody King, getting a running leap that he doesn't otherwise do, just to throw more weight. He doesn't bump big like Christian but he has good selection in bumps. My favorite here was the way he fell off rigidly to the side after a running back elbow. The finish played great: Nese getting his face in the way of another kick while King hanged Daivari's motionless body off the apron in a sleeper in the camera foreground. 

2024 MOTY MASTER LIST

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 9/30 - 10/6

MD: Brief note to start. For those who came to the blog through Twitter, yes, I got DMCA'd to oblivion by TV Asahi. I had a few strikes already from when I was first figuring things out, having initially not thought that 40 year old Inoki gifs were going to be an issue, but I had straightened up and was being more careful. What ultimately did me in was a handheld (a fancam, someone's personal recording from a show that has since been disseminated through fan circles) of a 1983 match, which does not seem like something that would be at all claimable. But here we are. I've an e-mail out to them. I am not expecting much. I'll make a call by Thursday on what I'm doing next. I've seen both kindness and indignation from people and both are pushing me towards dusting off and picking back up anew by the end of the week, but we'll see. The good news is that we have a blog and they can't shut me up here. For now, if anyone wants to let people know this week's AEW reviews are up, posting a link couldn't hurt! Thanks. - Matt

(UPDATE: I am over at https://x.com/mattd_sc/ now)

AEW Dynamite 10/2/24

Bryan Danielson vs Kazuchika Okada

MD: Believe it or not, I have been accused over the years of reading too much into pro wrestling. I've heard first-hand or second-hand that "they were just listening to the crowd" and no great thought was put into sequence a or match b. The great thing about art is that those things don’t have to matter. You can read into it any number of ways no matter the author's intent. You can dig at subconscious strands and universal themes. You can connect dots that were never meant to be connected. Sometimes that gets you deep into the seas of lore, annoying everyone around you. Sometimes it means your expectations go through the roof when they really shouldn't, ultimately doing yourself and the wrestlers both a disservice.

Some wrestlers are so good and have such a track record that you can walk on air so long as you don't look down. Bryan Danielson is one of those wrestlers. And you know what? I'm going to take a nice casual stroll off a ledge here. Why? Well, look, it's possible that Danielson finds some way to triumph over Jon Moxley and they blow things off in December or even later. It's possible that he's lying to us and he doesn't need surgery. It's possible that he does but he recovers quickly and gets to make a special appearance for a match at one of the big shows early next year. Lots of things are possible. All that's for certain right now is that we have next week's tag and the match vs Moxley. That's it. Even this match was a bonus that felt like it came out of nowhere and existed outside of the Mox vs Danielson storyline. So I'm going to have a little bit of fun with it and will ask for just a bit of your patience.

Let's break down Danielson's reasons for wanting this match. He could attack Moxley at the end of a match, sure. But Moxley isn't just a serial killer or movie monster. He's not just an underhanded jerk who wants money. There's some ideology behind it all. We're only starting to see it. Part of it, however, was to take autonomy away from Danielson, to define his reign as he means to define the fate of the belt henceforth. Danielson, here, decided to push back against that in the most decadent way possible, by naming an opponent here so close to the PPV and having a rubber match against Okada.

The match ended up under Continental rules for the first twenty minutes alone, a way to protect Okada to a degree (as he would smartly retain his title) and put over the different aspect of the belt. And for much of those twenty minutes (after an initial title match feeling out process), Okada wrestled cautiously, defensively. What was interesting to me is that Danielson didn't press nearly as hard as I would have expected him to. It was only in the last minute or so that he pushed, leading to the nice fakeout of him hitting the Knee only for Okada to roll out of the ring as time expired.

Let's play with that. Why didn't he push? Maybe he didn't push because he didn't actually want the Continental Championship. He demanded the match, had his reasons for it, but likely didn't control the stipulations. He knew about the Continental Championship. He had been one of the driving forces behind the creation of the C2 last year. He knew that if he won the Championship, no matter what happened with the World Title and Moxley, he would be obliged to defend it in the grueling tournament later this year. It was never his intention to win the title. He respected the tournament, revered it even, and he wouldn't want to let the fans and the company down, but he also didn't necessarily want the weight of it hanging over him. That would take away his freedom to call his own shots and finish on his own terms. It's a little counter-intuitive and certainly nothing that the announcers picked up upon, but if you watch how he wrestled and how he didn't press, if you squint, you can kind of see it.

If he didn't want the Continental Title, what did he want? He wanted to draw Okada out. He didn't want the underhanded cheater, the coasting heel. He wanted a warrior. He wanted the person who faced him twice so far, not the version of Okada (entertaining as he might be) that we've seen in AEW so far. Okada simply wasn't giving him that for the first twenty minutes of the match; he was too focused on retaining his belt, through hook or crook. At the same time, Danielson couldn't let Okada overly goad him because Bryan DID want to keep his title, because retaining the World Title was the path to fighting Moxley. Therefore, he had to endure Okada's defensive strategy, take the damage that went along with it, and wait things out until he could have the battle he actually wanted. It was only in the last minute of the initial period that he got caught up in the moment and almost accidentally won the Continental Title.

So do I think that was the intent. Nope. Could you read it from the text as presented and the characters as we know them in their current storylines? Absolutely. Is it primarily due to the richness of Bryan Danielson's work that we can do so? Yes. Yes (Yes), it is. Am I going to leave this write up at that? Mostly, I'm around 900 words already, not that anyone's counting, and unlike the service you get from other writers/critics, I don't rate or rank anything. No stars. I'm not even ranking this vs the other two Danielson vs Okada matches. I get to leave it as is... except, I guess I have one more (Columbo-esque) question that I unfortunately can’t leave unasked.

Is what we were actually presented as good as the story that I laid out in the paragraphs above through gluing together some unlikely (but plausible!) and disparate (but existing) dots? Is the match still as good if what I just said wasn't true and if the more likely, more straightforward possibilities/intentions were instead the truth? No. Sorry. That urgency just wasn't there. Danielson didn't get goaded into mistakes made because he was urgent. Okada was wrestling one match. Danielson was wrestling another. It didn't come together in the way it should have.

Unless you squint. If you squint, well then it was a hell of a thing. If we have only two more full-time Danielson matches after this, well, just this once, I'm going to squint and it's okay if you do too.

ROH TV 10/3/24

Dustin Rhodes/Marshall Von Erich/Ross Von Erich vs Tony Nese/Ariya Daivari/Mark Sterling

MD: I wrote a few days ago (and then reposted it here) about how some of the old ways need to come back, and I meant it, and this match was reminiscent of Heenan teaming with his family in 83 AWA for very entertaining matches. And this, I think, was an entertaining match that was worked well. The problem is that Sterling just isn't credible. It's not his fault. He works hard, tries a number of different things, is sufficiently irritating and punchable. He even goes the extra mile with some very well crafted, clever social media videos. But those are only for people that seek them out, basically. 

The bigger issue is that his guys don't win, not even on ROH. On Dark, they won. Nese didn't get big wins over big wrestlers, but he came off as dangerous enough with the shot in the corner and the pumphandle pile driver. He's absolutely selfless in the ring, willing to be one of the rawest, truest heels in the company. Completely unlikable. Theoretically valuable because there's only a handful of people who are willing to stooge. (That's why I'm ok with Saraya sticking around - super solid stooging, even if maybe they should stop using her husband's theme song and think of the optics of everything a bit more. AEW doesn't have as many comparative advantages vs 2024 WWE as it did vs 2019 WWE as the latter was a trash fire, but one that remains is to be more moral and progressive). As noted, Sterling did just about everything right here, but it wasn't getting the reactions it should. The fans only woke up when Dustin worked the corner with big slaps on the turnbuckles. They use the Premier Athletes almost every week. There should really be some way to fix this, even if it's just making Woods seem like more of a protected threat within each match and the other guys be the ones who lose the offense. Like Gordy with the Freebirds maybe? I'm glad they gave Sterling an opportunity in his homestate but for a guy doing everything right in there, this all should have been more heated.

AEW Collision 10/5/24

Darby Allin vs Johnny TV

MD: This was one of Johnny's best matches in his run. I do get the sense that he probably needs the right dance partner. Having seen him in Lucha Underground and given the lack of heels on top, I was confused when WWE brought him back in as Miz's second banana, but I guess neither of us were entirely right there. His issue is more the dissolution of QTV than anything else. They spun it a bit on the idea that he and Taya are "TV-Ready" and maybe they could lean into that a bit more with the new TV deal. Taya's off with her burgeoning faction here and without the stable and without Taya, I'm not entirely sure what Johnny even is right now. 

The backstage Darby/Evil Uno interaction really set up their match and I didn't quite get that here. There were some mitigating factors. Darby was potentially just a little more cautious after being goaded into losing his title opportunity. That explained the early feeling out process and them starting with a test of strength maybe. Darby usually throws himself right at his opponent to start in the best of times. As the match went on, however, they starting showing some of the aggression (or maybe we should call it counter-aggression) that he should be inspiring in everyone he faces right now in the arms war against Moxley and his ideology. 

Things got pretty wild. The Russian Legsweep off the apron was not something you see every day. Likewise Johnny's spinning Splash Mountain Full Nelson Slam or whatever the heck that thing was. Just by his nature Darby opens up opportunities. And the Coffin Drop at the end was to a standing opponent (a Coffin Drop Press) which you never see end a match like this. So it got there, and you can argue away why it didn't start there. This was clearly put together for the challenge at the end though. And while that's ok, story after the fact isn't as good as story before, during, AND after the fact. 

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AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 8/19 - 8/25 Part 3

MD: I don't have a lot to say about the Coffin Match. In some ways it was weirdly minimalist in not a lot happened but everything that did happen was monumental, but ultimately a bit too much DID happen overall for me to say that. Also not a lot to say about the Dustin 10-man. It was really just a finishing stretch with a bit of prelude. I did want to double back to some other things however.

AEW Collision 8/24/24

Big Bill vs. Hook

MD: Part of the joy of pro wrestling is that that it is interactive. It's live television, sure, but it's live television in front of a crowd, where the crowd can be conditioned, can be manipulated, but cannot be completely controlled. Nine times out of ten, when the crowd loses control, it's to the detriment of the match. In those situations, it's also usually due to some miscalculation in the match itself. But wrestling, at its best, is at least partially improvisational, and an out of control crowd is a possibility to live in the moment and create something special.

Hook's rarely, if ever been in a situation like this, but Bill's pushing 40 and is a fifteen year vet. There was a miscalculation here. I won't go too deep into the angle itself, but it's problematic at best and everyone knows it. Leaning into the fact it's problematic only partially mitigates the problem. In some ways, it makes it worse. This match was set up to protect Bill and to make Hook work from underneath to overcome a much larger opponent and look all the better in victory. It was meant to chip away at him on the heels of a big return so that the angle could be heated up and both he and Jericho could claim momentum coming into All In.

A couple of problems. One, the crowd wanted to cheer for Bill anyway. He's larger than life, charismatic; people have fond memories of him. Two, the match was set up for Hook to charge in early and maybe get a shot or two in from underneath or to have Keith attack him when the ref was distracted so that the odds were against him and you could explain away him not firing back more. It was all to build first for him to hit a suplex on Bill (and on Keith to take him out) and then for the Redrum to finish it. Basically, Bill was taking not a majority of this, but 95% of it. It's almost impossible to get behind a babyface who isn't constantly fighting back, even if he's cut off. Against the right opponent and in front of the right crowd, that's fine. This was neither. And the fact of the matter is that it's not all that novel to see Hook suplex Bill. We've seen it before, not just here but in previous feuds and it's not like Hook has even had that many feuds. So it went from 50-50 support for Bill and Hook to 60-40, to 70-30, to an overwhelming tidal wive as the match went on.

So Bill had this incredible crowd to deal with, one that was going to cheer whatever he did, and he went all the way with it. He yelled at them that they couldn't support him now when they never had before. He gave every hand motion imaginable to every corner of the ring. He crossed his arms to look as dorky as goofy as possible and stomped around. He leaned hard into his offense in the meanest and most unfair and conniving ways. Nothing worked, but he justified all of it with the effort. He had posed and preened and bounced a bit at the start, just a bit of cool heel trappings, but when he realized the damage that caused, he went as far from it as possible. None of it did Hook any favors, but thanks to Bill making it seem like the adulation was the absolute worst thing in the world, it probably didn't do him any longterm harm. And then he worked it all into the finish by playing to them and turning around between chops while Hook was on the top rope so he could get caught in the Redrum. People may look at this as a failure, but I see it as Bill masterfully averting disaster. All of this now going to be there, potential energy to be tapped into when the time is right. The time just wasn't last week.

Jeff Jarrett vs. Ariya Daivari

MD: And sometimes everything goes exactly how it's supposed to. This was the same exact crowd, only one segment later, and it went perfectly. It was such simple stuff, Daivari posing in the corner to boos, Jarrett to cheers. It was Daivari doing the strut repeatedly as he got the better of Jarrett only for Jarrett to clock him, then Jarrett teasing it but unable to do it until the final comeback. It was Jarrett counting along with Aubrey and the crowd while Daivari stalled and stooged outside the ring. It was Daivari menacing Karen to distract Jarrett so he could take over and then later Jarrett getting cut off because he checked on her. It was Jarrett working from underneath in a sleeper so the crowd could get behind him and throwing punches that the fans could chant along to. And all the while, there were the tiny bits of connective tissue to ensure everything made sense and was timed and placed perfectly. The crowd just wanted to be involved. They wanted something to get behind. They wanted to feel like they were part of it all. The Hook match wasn't set up to give them that. The Jarrett match absolutely was. Pro wrestling can be fascinating when it goes wrong, but man is it ever beautiful when it goes right. 

AEW All In 8/25/24

MJF vs. Will Ospreay

MD: I'm not disappointed in Ospreay.

I'm not even disappointed in Max, not really. Maybe a little.

Mostly? Mostly I'm just disappointed in myself.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends): 10/17 - 10/23

AEW Dark 10/18

MD: Eddie was our only guy this week and he was on Dark, so I figured I'd just do the whole show. It's been a little over a year now since I've been watching AEW. One interesting thing about the promotion relative to other ones over the years is that different people from different generations get very different things out of it. Punk and Danielson coming back drew me in. Kingston and Dustin and Darby, among others, kept my interest, but on a week to week basis, it was the webshows that really worked for me. If Dynamite feels like crash TV with original ROH style dream matches, and Rampage feels a bit like late 91-early 92 WCW Saturday Night with a Dangerous Alliance match and a few midcard matches, Elevation and Dark feel like WCW syndi shows. Squashes and a few midcard matches. It's one of those things people of my generational tolerated for years, maybe grumbled about, but ultimately had no idea how good we had it.

In an ecosystem like what I described above, squashes are a amazing, right? Guys like Naylor have been so good at highlighting them and why they were special over the years, but they highlight moves, characters, give the announcers room to breathe. They're not exhausting like sprints can be. They're pro-wrestling comfort food while giving wrestlers the ability to really express who they are. You can tell a story in them or not depending on what you're trying to achieve. All the talk about how wrestlers are wasted not being on TV is irritating, to say the least. The nature of AEW's roster is that people get rotated on and off to keep things fresh. Someone like Ruby Soho coming out to her theme on Elevation gets the fresh and excited crowds going. Emi Sakura is the MVP, having hard-hitting entertaining tag after entertaining tag with partners that can vibe with her act and opponents that are better off for getting reps with her. It's the perfect place for Dalton Castle and Danhausen and Brandon Cutler and the Wingmen, giving the crowd extra value for their ticket and helping to keep acts over. It lets them try out new talent or new tweaks upon a gimmick. I was excited when Deeb, for instance, finished up her title match programs and was interacting with people like Emi and Skye Blue again.

The problem, as much as fans being small-minded, is AEW not doing enough to use the shows to build to everything else going on. There was a patch back six months ago where if someone was going to have a match on Dynamite or Rampage they'd often get featured on Elevation, and they did some things, like building to the ROH PPV with Dark and Elevation, but in general, it's underutilized. I don't know a single person who watches the webshows and feels like they're not valuable or worth watching though, no matter how much griping you get from the people who don't watch (the most worthless griping of all). This was an especially star-studded episode given they were in Canada and it was taped before a live Rampage, but don't sleep on the studio Darks either. Studio wrestling is great given that with AEW we get all sorts of variety. You may not want it as your only wrestling but as part of the whole, it balances things out.

Hikaru Shida vs Vanessa Kraven

MD: I've been giving a lot of thought about 'aces' lately. I think it's due to watching a ton of Inoki over the last year. It could be because I want to watch some Big Daddy and make some calls for myself soon. Don't hold me for that. One aspect that I think is important in an ace is to leverage the cachet you have with the crowd to find ways to highlight what makes your opponent unique. Shida absolutely did that here, making full use of Kraven's size and strength. This was not at all the same sort of match that she would have had with someone smaller or with a different background. Some of that was leaping into the catch on the outside off the chair and eating that samoan drop on the apron (which then, thanks to the AEW house style, she could use later in the match to escape the Samoan drop and set up the finishing stretch). Some of it was the struggle for the falcon arrow, barely getting her over, and then letting her kick out of it. The creativity and imagination and care that went into how she laid this out was definitely appreciated however.

Dark Order (Evil Uno/John Silver/Alex Reynolds/10) vs Tyler Tirva/Shane Hawke/Zak Patterson/Jordano)

MD: Again, we get the freedom of the web shows here. They're not trying to hit any major time marks. They're not worried about picture-in-picture commercial breaks. This was in Canada. This was about showcasing Uno, as well it should have been. It's one of those things AEW does best and that we spent decades getting denied due to weird piques of spite "up north." Though some of this was diluted by Taz poking Jose the Assistant on commentary, but certainly not for the live crowd.

This was surprisingly complete, with Reynolds getting some shine to start (useful given that he plays FIP a lot), a tease of Uno early only for him to get swarmed, some heat on Silver (including eating a huge gutwrench), and everything set up to combine the big Dark Order spots and all of Uno's signature spots mixed with all of his showmanship. They could have just had Dark Order run through these guys but they gave it enough substance to make Uno's spots mean just a little more.

Eddie Kingston/Ortiz vs Mo Jabari/Jake O'Reilly

MD: Just a stylized mauling. Jabari and O'Reilly might get one shot in but they sure wouldn't get two in a row. Ortiz knows this is his moment to come into his own and showcase his own identity and he's been doing that with the Rick Rude or the crotch chop before the veg-o-matic or the tiger style (which, now that I think about it, may not be his own identity at all). Those crossfaces in the corner were nasty though, and Eddie's chops sounded as good as they ever did. The anger management angle for Kingston made sense in the Sammy match; I'm not sure if it's totally believable moving forward, but the Pac match it seems to be building to should be fun at least.

Best Friends (Orange Cassidy/Chuck Taylor/Trent) vs Kobe Durst/Steven Mainz/Jessie V

MD: This was a straight up crowdpleasing squash on the heels of the Cassidy/PAC main event one day earlier. Occasionally they'll run these where guys can just do whatever and they don't even give the enhancement talent a hope. It was pretty brutal with Trent not quite getting all of the flip into a spinebuster (and he save the same sort of shrug that Silver got when he tried to suplex two guys at once). The Sole Food into the Half and Half looked great though. Cassidy then came in and punched everyone. I'm not sure if it's Keith Mitchell retiring or what but they don't seem to time the hug nearly as well as they used to. Anyway, this was never going to be much but it was fine for what it was.

Ari Davari vs Brandon Cutler

MD: Like I said, people watch AEW for different reasons. There are some people who are thoroughly into the Elite, to the point of having Omega avatars and whatever else. I don't have a ton of time for any of them for reasons no one needs to hear right now, but I do think Cutler's been one of the bright spots of the company over the last month. He's a guy who throws himself entirely in the act, who's unafraid to do anything necessary. He cares so much that the fans care, and as the only bastion of the Elite remaining, they care just a little bit more. You put him up against a guy like Avalon (like we'll see this week) or Danhausen or Serpentico and you get a fun comedy match, but if you put him against an actual wrestler like Davari, and you get a kind of interesting, contrast-laden match, where he can work from underneath. Here, Davari threw a lot of simple, driving shots, credible stuff that put over his annoyance of the entire situation. Cutler would comeback with fun 80s offense but Davari would cut him off by going for the eyes or with Kiss' help or through something just as conniving that sort of defies hierarchy and highlights how offended he is that he has to lower himself to wrestle Cutler. It made for a pretty fun match. I would have rather Hook had to go through all of the Trustbusters first before getting Davari, though part of that was just beacuse I wanted to see Hook vs Slim J (who is the new 5th finger if Punk isn't coming back, by the way).

Willow Nightingale vs Seleziya Sparx

MD: In a lot of ways this was an inversion of the Shida match. Willow still wanted to give some shine to the local, even if she was working heel, but she made her work for it and chip away, not going down easily, leaning hard into her size. It's hard for a babyface with a size advantage to know just how much to give while still showing the right amount of vulnerability, especially given the hierarchical difference here, but I think she nailed it. Willow has great emotive reactions in her selling, able to switch between ebullience, exhaustion, and aggression. All of Sparx' stuff looked pretty good, even some of the overwrought things like how she vaulted over the turnbuckle to hit a running kick. That's the sort of thing that is maybe a bit much but you can't fault it if the kick looks good. Jody Threat got a lot of attention last week, but Sparx should get some as well.

QT Marshall vs Dante Martin

MD: A year ago, when I first encountered him, I thought QT should wrestle more like a manager. He's capable of a lot of things (including missing a 450) but just because he can, doesn't necessarily mean he should. That said, for a lot of this period, AEW's needed credible mid-card heels to eat losses. Having the Trustbusters now help a little bit, but that's really been the Factory and the Wingmen, and Lethal, and as such, it does make sense for QT to stretch his wings a bit more. He's good at it and especially good at engaging with his opponent and the audience. They were all over him, despite having sat through all of the previous matches and even if no one necessarily bought a ticket for him, they all had a seemingly great time getting on his case and it'll be, consciously or subconsciously, part of their enduring good feeling about the night in the months and years to come.
 
Dante, in the meantime, probably through no choice of his own as he'd rather be teaming with his brother, has had a lot of ring time to improve. I thought he was already pretty far along in the singles match with Black last October, but his expressiveness and interactions with the crowd have developed since then. He's a great seller on top of his ability to seemingly freeze time as he flips around the ring and soars through the air. He's a case where the sum is greater than any specific part, as his flipping rana into the ring here would be the most spectacular thing in almost any other match in the world but felt almost subdued alongside his huge dive to the outside and stuttering splash to avoid the cutter. The finishing stretch worked to protect QT in loss but still felt like an accomplishment for Dante. Definitely the sort of match that Dusty would have been proud to call the Moo Match of the Week on WCW Prime in 1995 even if maybe it wouldn't make a comp tape for the year.

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Caught Gulak in Our Room Staring' at the Light, I'd Been Up All Night

Drew Gulak/Ariya Daivari/Tony Nese vs. Gran Metalik/Mustafa Ali/Lince Dorado WWE Main Event 3/31/17 - FUN

ER: This had some real highs but also some oddly laid out peaks, giving Lince Dorado a lot of the big triumphant moments. Out of the three tecnicos in 2017, he was the least natural and spectacular - and also the clear smallest - so it was weird that the match built to him getting the hot tag and getting weaker reactions than anyone else in the match. But the peaks were strong and the pace was brisk. It starts with some pretty so-so Nese moments, but at the same time gave Metalik nice moments to shine. Metalik's nice rana off the ropes was an early highlight, but the match doesn't quite round the corner until Daivari held the middle and top ropes open so that Ali flew to the floor while running ropes. Ali is always great for one big bump per match, one real dangerous one, and him basically hitting a tope to nothing moved us along nicely. The Gulak/Ali portions were really special, with Gulak really throwing hard basics at him and Ali hitting the mat hard. Gulak throws such a hard clothesline, and he throws a straight arm clothesline here that knocks Ali into next week! The big flying moves throughout are good, like Daivari's stiff Naniwa elbow, Metalik's plancha to Nese, Ali's match winning inverted 450, even Dorado's shooting star was delivered swiftly and landed clean (Dorado's problem is more with some wait times on his set ups, and not really flowing through spots very well, all things he got much better at a few years later). Weird to me that Gulak is the one eating the pin after looking like the biggest monster during the match, but this was fun stuff.

Drew Gulak vs. Angel Garza WWE Main Event 7/22/21 - FUN

ER: Here are two modern wrestlers that I love, who have now wrestled five singles matches over a seven month span, and somehow haven't managed to have a really good one. Drew Gulak is one of the guys in WWE who you can argue has had the best matches against the widest selection of opponents over the past several years, but for whatever reason there just does not appear to be a connection between these two. Over their previous four matches, three of them never even made it to 150 seconds. Those were matches with fun, well executed ideas that didn't have enough time to build into stories. The other match went 9 minutes - longer than all but one 2021 Gulak match - and it was somehow one of the weakest Gulak matches of the year. This is more of a satisfying porridge 5 minutes, but still doesn't quite click. Their matches always have good moments, but never quite feel cohesive enough to get to that next level. Garza's transitions back to offense always feel a bit too easy, always completely shrugging off whatever Gulak just did, no matter how punishing it looked. Obviously, a lot of Gulak's offense looked punishing. Gulak never works the same offense every match, so you never know what kind of tricks he's going to pull. He throws a few cool body shots, stiff standing clotheslines, and a great bridging German that I thought was actually going to give him a rare win. Garza has great charisma and taunted Gulak in some fun ways, and he actually gets a good reaction for his tearaway pants late in the match (even though Gulak looks more and more like an idiot every time he catches those thrown pants), but it felt like he was sometimes working a totally different match than Gulak. 

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE DREW GULAK

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WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak 3/8-3/14/20

Brian Kendrick/Jack Gallagher/Mike Kanellis/Ariya Daivari/Tony Nese vs. Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch/Tyler Breeze/Isaiah Scott/Kushida 205 Live 3/13/20

ER: There is some weird 205 curse where none of the guys know how to lay out even the most normal gimmick match. This is a match with 10 guys ranging from Capable to Actually Great, and I have no doubt it would have been much better had they just worked a standard 5 on 5 match. Instead it is an elimination match, and 205 Live just cannot do gimmick matches. Some of the worst matches I've seen on the show have been normally cool things like No DQ matches, where the guys force themselves into a format while seemingly intentionally playing against their strengths. And this match would have at least been amusing had I gotten a graphic that said "205 Live vs. NXT: Playing Against Their Strengths". Also, you book a weird invasion elimination match, and you make the team representing 205 Live the heels? I don't get it. There's nobody in the building anyway, you aren't playing to any fans, why wouldn't the home team at least be the good guys? I would have been interested in people like Kushida and Lorcan coming in and working like invading assholes, but that would be something that would mix it up a bit, and this needed to be a dry elimination match.

I don't know what it is with most elimination matches, but we always get plenty of guys eliminated due to things they would normally never get pinned by. So obviously you know this match had a ton of roll up and small package finishes after someone took 0-1 moves. It is the way of the elimination match. Most of these guys disappear without making any kind of impression: Kendrick goes down to a late small package after being almost entirely uninvolved in the match, same thing for Tyler Breeze; Kanellis had a great showing last week, goes down to a quick roll up this week; Nese had one of his most interesting showings in awhile teaming with Kanellis last week, here he gets put down quick. There were some nice individual moments, but nothing that added up to anything close to a good match. Burch turning and hitting a headbutt on the interfering Sunil Singh looked cool, and we at least got a tiny bit of Jack Gallagher showcase. Gallagher hasn't been on TV for 3 months, returns sporting scrimshaw tattoos (I'm not really one to judge tattoos; I don't plan on getting any more beyond my Violent J left shoulder tattoo and my Shaggy 2 Dope right shoulder tattoo, but I will say that scrimshaw clipper ship ink on a pale body looks much better than a Blue Lives Matter looking ass neck tattoo), but even then his return is more of a cruel tease do to the match layout. He goes at it with Lorcan (which is actually a criminally unseen pairing, with no singles matches and only sparse interactions in a couple doofus matches like these) but it gets shut down quick with a cool Gallagher rolling elbow. Gallagher also took a great backdrop bump to the floor, but really wasn't in there long. This all felt designed to be a Kushida/Scott showcase, but I'm not really buying what those two are showcasing. This match was another example of breaking something that was already fixed nicely. Nobody came out of this match looking good.

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WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak FINAL 2019 Catch-Up

ER: This is exciting, because it is a post that signifies the successful completion of a project. Last year we set out to review every match from Lorcan, Gallagher, and Gulak, and we did. We started halfway through 2019, and I've been going back and filling in the blanks with matches I missed, and this is the last of them. It's been one of my favorite regular projects, just because I love watching these three work. I have obviously been continuing it in 2020, but so far we haven't even seen Gallagher on TV in 2020


Oney Lorcan vs. Brian Kendrick vs. Akira Tozawa vs. Ariya Daivari vs. Mike Kanellis 205 Live 5/21/19

ER: This was disjointed, bad, too long, poorly laid out, poorly agented, made none of the 5 looks any better than the other 4, and was home to everything I dislike about multiman wrestling. WWE is usually a fed that can throw together an interesting main event multiman, and this was a far shout from that. Two minutes into a 16 minutes match, all 5 participants were lying on the mat as if they had all been through a real war. I knew then that this was going to be awful. There were stretches of this match where (I believe) every single participant completely disappeared for 5 minutes at a time. After the first two minutes with everyone chaotically fighting for space in the ring, we went through 80% of the match worked as a series of singles matches, three men either lying out of the way tired or off camera selling, and the layout just flat out stunk. There was no rhythm to this, just a bad series of match vignettes with nobody really standing out. Kendrick probably came off the best of anyone, and the early part of the match with Kendrick locking in and fighting for the Captains Hook, then fighting his balance while fighting out of a Kanellis sub, before getting pushed off into a Lorcan uppercut, was probably the most interesting sequence here. Lorcan hits a flip dive, he and Daivari repeat a couple things from their singles match a month prior (which I might not have noticed had I not watched them the same day), Daivari takes a big thankless splat bump to the floor and gets his ear busted open, Kanellis hits a nice spinebuster and takes a freaking German suplex on the ring apron (in this match! Why??), but this whole thing felt like it added up to nothing and kept purposely resetting itself. The finish was a total mockery, as we had spent 15 minutes with many of these guys lying dead on the mat, and you can tell the second they all get the go home signal, as they all spring to their feet and start do-si-doing into each other's finishers. I hated it.

Drew Gulak vs. Akira Tozawa 205 Live 6/4/19

ER: Gulak had been on a one month NXT sojourn feuding with Kushida, and he made the best possible return to 205 Live by saving the crowd and myself from a show opening Noam Dar match. Gulak jumps Dar in the aisle and spends the next couple minutes beating Dar around ringside, never to be seen again on 205 Live. The match itself doesn't quite catch fire, but these two are familiar opponents and are going to do plenty of things great. The pace was a little slow, which I don't mind, but I don't think the early slow pace was really needed. I still liked how we got a story about Tozawa going for his big babyface spots, and Gulak having every one of them scouted. I really loved Tozawa inching to lock on his octopus hold, with Gulak just tearing free and throwing Tozawa off him. Gulak tosses Tozawa around a few times, with a super memorable snap strength gutwrench and a bone rattling superplex that leads right to the finish. They worked some fun bits around Gulak running away from a tope, then running away from a pescado, before getting nailed with the cannonball. Tozawa's later tope is a great highspot, and Gulak plays it really well so it looks like it blindsides him, Tozawa crashing so hard into him that Gulak flies backwards over the announce table. Tozawa sent Gulak back so fast that it looked like Gulak was sucked out of an airplane. The fans got quiet at points but did stay into Tozawa, really getting behind his last big offense run and staying and responding to his fireman's carry squat lift routine. I think they have a better match in them. They've had several singles matches that all happened on 205 Live, during that couple year stretch when I wasn't watching it, so that great match might be out there as I type this.

Oney Lorcan vs. Ariya Daivari 205 Live 6/4/19

ER: These two matched up in late April, and it's notable how much cooler they look in this match than they looked just six weeks before. Daivari was wearing a black tank top then, and here he's just in black pants with a newly shaved head and stitches and a scar on his ear; Lorcan has grown in his beard and has the great black and gold gear. I like both of these guys (I mean we have a whole feature about Lorcan) but I don't think they have a good long match against each other. They don't have natural chemistry, so even when I like what both are doing it doesn't always work within the match. Lorcan's big comebacks are the best part of the match, with his great uppercuts always playing big to crowds, he also throws Daivari with a cool northern lights and then looks to rip his head off with one of his all time best blockbusters. There is something satisfying about Daivari's simple attack, as I'd much rather see someone using swinging neckbreakers and hard lariats than what makes up the offense of most main carders, but they get just too much time to tell their story. Now, what sets them apart from others - and I think this is very important - is that they had a 100% completely different match than they had six weeks prior. True, I didn't love this match or that match, but I appreciated that the main set pieces of that prior match didn't show up in any way in the return bout. That's cool, and it's an extra step they didn't really need to take. This match had cool parts to it, of course it was going to, but it felt like it should have been more. If they had stuck with the opening minute viciousness of Lorcan, where he ripped at Daivari's fresh stitches, this could have been special. They went a different way, and I like that they're still trying for that thing that will really work.

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WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak 2/16-2/22/20

Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Matt Riddle/Pete Dunne NXT 2/19/20

ER: This really felt like these guys' version of a spotfest lucha tag. It started with a nice Burch/Dunne mat section, Dunne stepping and kneeling on Burch's neck in a nasty deathlock, and we quickly move into a fun extended sprint of all the stuff these guys can do. Riddle and Dunne are throwing Karelin lift suplexes, Burch throws a headbutt and also punches Riddle in the mouth, both sides eat a powerbomb, both sides eat uppercuts, both sides eat knees, and it's all a lot of fun. It had a fun atmosphere for a match where the result was in no doubt whatsoever, and Lorcan/Riddle is a total dream match for me that has never been on tape. I loved all their sections together, it's really one of those super obvious match-ups that somehow hasn't used at all. I love how Lorcan flies into everything, from offense to pinfall break ups, and really my only problem with this was that Lorcan went down a little suddenly. If he had another brief comeback or held on for a couple more killer shots from Riddle, this would have jumped up much more for me. But I liked the match we got and would love to see this happen again.

PAS: This didn't do much for me. It just felt like another version of the same NXT million counters and reversals tag we have seen a million times. There were some cool moves in this, but they always have cool moves, and they never mean much. Riddle was a much more interesting wrestler as a rookie in EVOLVE then he is now, and I like Lorcan but didn't think he did much to distinguish himself here. Whole thing was worked at the same pace and you need to very the intensity a bit to make it mean anything.


Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Brian Kendrick/Ariya Daivari 205 Live 2/21/20

ER: This was one of the more surprinsgly underwhelming matches of the year. A street fight featuring two of the best wrestlers in the world, given as much time as it needed, in the main event. Lorcan and Kendrick are easily the best two guys on 205 Live now that Gulak and Gallagher aren't ever going to be on TV again, and they've matched up a criminally small amount of times for being in the same place for so long. But now they've been across from each other twice in just a few weeks, and the first match was a stinker and now the rematch was the weakest street fight in recent memory. I don't think it's because modern indy wrestling has conditioned me to expect possible death during street fights, as I don't need death for a brawl to be great. This was just dullsville for significant stretches, with perfunctory pre-bell brawling and spots laid way to far apart, and a lot of set up to get to those moments. The moments are usually impressive, but they generate reactions that seem to say "Well you finally got there, thank you." This could have been a mean, rugged no DQ match, but it seemed like everyone in the match decided it would make more sense to just act like extras from that Popeye movie. Burch filled this thing to the breaking point with goofy cartoon mannerisms and selling and facials, reaching peak "just not my night" after falling on his butt doing a kip-up, then getting booed after doing a bad Dudley Boyz "Get the tables" bit with Lorcan. It came off like someone using the Rock Bottom on a school fundraiser indy show and immediately tripping over his opponent. Kendrick's death valley driver that utilized the table looked great, just as a Daivari took a great drop toehold into a chair earlier. All the weapons that got involved were eventually used well for the big moment, but getting there felt way too silly. The home stretch made this at least land on its feet, with Kendrick and Lorcan finally really tangling up around 10 minutes in, and Lorcan hitting a big torpedo uppercut and tope con giro. But you know the match underwhelmed when one of the best moments of the match came when Lorcan and Burch tumbling to the floor, and getting immediately cheered by the cutest sounding kid, who says, "Come on guys, get up!" That kid was so earnestly cheering for these two Popeye goofballs that it just made me happy that kids love wrestling. Match still fell flat for me.

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WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak 1/26/20-2/8/20

4. Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. The Hunt (Wild Boar/Primate) NXT UK 1/17 (Aired 1/30/20)

ER: Yes, please give me more UK tags like this, where Lorcan and Burch land across the pond and dispose of teams in under 10 minutes. The Hunt are a fun pairing for Lorcan/Burch, as they're like Fun Size Heavy Machinery (so really they are just Machinery). Wild Boar has fluffy Dog the Bounty Hunter hair and Primate seems to have no problem always running directly into danger, whether he lands a lariat or gets run into a ringpost. From what I've seen so far, Burch has been turning in his finest WWE work in 2020, and him smothering Wild Boar with a headlock while throwing great palm strikes to his head continues that trend (I even liked Tom Phillips comparing those shots to the Bride breaking our of her coffin), and this whole match was about quick tags and quick spills. Everybody is throwing chops, everyone is working like they have 7 minutes so how should we show off in 7 minutes, and it works. The tags were quick, and every new person that would tag in would immediately run wild. Primate tags in and hits big suplexes and lariats (you knew Lorcan would have to take a big twisting lariat bump in here), Lorcan flattens Primate with a big uppercut, Boar tags in and nails a cool cannonball on Lorcan only to get headbutted out of existence by Burch, Lorcan/Burch hit a big German and their double powerbomb for a nice nearfall, and Boar toothlessly worms his way into my heart by splatting to the floor with a missed frog splash, a gnarly way to leave Primate alone in the ring. And that match ending elevating DDT really felt like a fine exclamation point on the win. More of Lorcan/Burch in UK, please.

PAS: This was really fun. NXT UK is so weird, there are like a dozen guys on the WWE roster I have never even heard of, like I don't think Primate is a name I had even seen run across my Twitter timeline much less ever seen wrestle. They are kind of mini versions of the Viking Raiders, same kind of look and offense, except both guys look like they are 5'6. This is the best I have ever seen Burch look, he is usually the clear weak link of the tag team, but he provided most of the cool stuff in this match, including some really nice takedowns and the palm strikes Eric mentioned. So many of the pimped NXT tags are so long and overstuffed, it was great to watch a couple teams get in, do their business, and get out.


Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Brian Kendrick/Ariya Daivari 205 Live 2/7/20

ER: A kind of unexpected, rare miss from these four. After the video package showing what's happened among the four over the past few weeks, they built this up like a big fight, but much of this ended up feeling like a semi-genial cruiser match. The double teams felt clunky, and both teams felt like they were working a different match. Much of the match just felt off, even the timing on the reliably great Lorcan hot tag felt thrown off, guys just couldn't quite get on the same page. There were quick tags that kind of just worked to make things feel disjointed, not getting any decent length sequences from any combination of the four. Kendrick and Daivari work Burch's knee a bit (Kendrick had worked over Burch's knee the week before in much more interesting ways), but it goes nowhere; Lorcan hits a big flying uppercut as part of his hot tag, and hits a double team blockbuster, but things end in a DQ shortly after that. This is probably the most underwhelming 205 match any of these guys have been on in quite some time. On a different night I could see this leading to something special. Not tonight.


2020 MOTY MASTER LIST

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WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak 2019 Catch-Up

Oney Lorcan vs. Ariya Daivari 205 Live 4/23/19

ER: Another of those oddball 205 matches that get 18 minutes but could have been super effective with 9 minutes. I liked what they did here, and liked that the first 12 minutes were low offense and much more about what moves didn't hit than what moves did hit. The bulk of the match hinged around two big Lorcan spills to the floor: the first time getting a dive blocked by a Daivari forearm and later taking a big backdrop tumble. Those misses were much bigger than any hits in the first 2/3 of this, with Daivari trying a couple times for his million dollar dream sleeper and once early for his hammerlock lariat. This was mostly two guys canceling each other out, like we were getting Stevie Richards vs. Stevie Richards. And I'm into that match structure, but it probably went longer than they needed it to. Around the 12 minute mark things picked up and started grabbing the fans in the arena, with a big Lorcan pescado and Lorcan stuff like his running blockbuster and flying uppercut that always gets a good reaction. They really kept the big highspots out of this match, and it was a cool experiment to see how long you can work a match around non-sequences. But it was hard recovering them after the long draw they put them through, and amusingly after avoiding big moves all match, Lorcan goes for the half nelson suplex OFF THE TOP! But he gets knocked off, and while Daivari's finishing sequence of a frog splash and hammerlock lariat is a nice one, I can't imagine too many were excited for the Tony Nese vs. Daivari match this set up.

Drew Gulak vs. KUSHIDA NXT 5/1 (Aired 5/29/19)

ER: Gulak and Kushida working a submissions match on NXT not long after this was one of the impetus that drove us to start The Big 3 project. And I like how much of this match was spent going after submissions, a nice logical jump for them to just do a Submissions Only match a couple weeks later. That match had problems, like a goofy Malenko/Guerrero sequence (in a match with no pinfalls) and this one was more coherent without specific guidelines they were playing within. But this one also didn't hit the peaks of the Submissions Match, and I think both matches hit their valleys because of Kushida's business. The first half of this was great, just both guys trying to force the other into hard fought pinfalls or trying to slowly bend a limb into a sub. Neither had easy paths to locking in a sub or getting a pin, so I dug them just trying to use leverage to force shoulders to mat instead of going right into the big spots. And it was when they started going into more typical Kushida offense that it got less interesting. There was a lot of interrupted rope running and blocked strikes spinning Gulak into Kushida Trademark Offense, and the early match submissions that were so engaging gave way to the Kushida mindset of "this is how I always set up my sit out hiptoss cross armbreaker". We also got a weird moment of Kushida and Gulak grunting at each other while going for submissions, and it felt like an extension of that thing where indy workers are too scared to say something stupid to the crowd, that they just silently pump their fists and open their mouth as if the people in the crowd were watching them on TV. I liked Gulak catching Kushida in a fireman's carry gutbuster after Kushida overshot him running ropes, and I liked Kushida trying to force Gulak's wrist into the hoverboard lock, but the Gedo clutch felt like a silly way to end a match where actual forced amateur pinfalls couldn't get a 1 count.

Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Wesley Blake/Steve Cutler NXT 5/1 (Aired 5/29/19)

ER: This only goes a couple minutes before a Street Profits run in, definitely much more of an angle than a match (these teams were all in a fantastic ladder match at the TakeOver a few days after this aired), which is kind of a drag just because I know there is a killer Forgotten Sons vs. Lorcan/Burch tag match just waiting to happen. This was fiery as hell and I don't even think Lorcan got involved in the short runtime. Burch started things off by sending Blake flying into the buckles with a big running dropkick - both Cutler and Blake are really great about flying into guys and away from guys - and Blake fires back after some Ryker interference and absolutely brains Burch with a lariat to the back of the head.

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WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak 10/13-10/19

NXT 10/16/19

Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Fabian Aichner/Marcel Barthel

ER: This was cool, even if we got Imperium's heat on Burch cut out by commercial break. But we got a ton of stuff crammed into the short runtime, and they made it feel like a much bigger match due to the layout. These teams have good chemistry, and all know how to set each other up. Burch had some cool early moments, especially dug him knocking Barthel out of the air with a headbutt. And I really liked Aichner; he would do little things I love like hold on to headlocks, hit a nice brainbuster, but his big stuff like his double jump moonsault looked great. Of course Lorcan's hot tag was going to be a highlight, and he doesn't disappoint: big flying uppercuts, nice pescado, and a fun sequence where he knocks Barthel off the apron into Aichner, then hits a tope con giro into both. The double teams in this were smoking, like Barthel hanging Burch in the ropes before he and Aichner hit a perfectly timed dropkick on him, or the tandem powerbomb from Lorcan/Burch, right up to the excellent finish run from Imperium. They really strung the finish together nice, with a nice spinebuster into a PK, and that Hart Attack uppercut off the top is a real killer. This tag felt much closer to a hot AIW tag, and considering AIW consistently has the best tag matches in wrestling, that's obviously a great thing.

PAS: This was a great sprint, with everyone looking great. Lorcan is one of the great hot tags in wrestling and he just unloads with some great wild offense. Loved the giro into both guys. I am pretty over highspots by biggish guys, but Aichner's double jump moonsault is a true holy shit spot, and made a great near fall. Didn't have the bloat that some of the tags we have reviewed have, they just went out and burned through a killer TV tag.


205 Live 10/18/19

Jack Gallagher vs. Brian Kendrick

ER: This felt like the first several minutes of a really good match, but had a pretty uninteresting finish (unless it leads to more of a feud, I suppose) that from two guys who are good at coming up with interesting finishes. Gallagher is one of the more underutilized guys on the roster. This is the first time he's shown up in a month, he doesn't work house shows, rarely works indies, and could feasibly make it through 2019 with only 20 matches worked. That's weird. He doesn't appear to be injured, just unused. I love how great both of them are at building matches around merely getting thrown into walls and corners. A huge chunk of this match is them getting run into walls, and they're great at it. They know how to make slamming into a flat wall look really painful, and both find interesting ways to make hitting a turnbuckle look like actual offense. The best was at the finish, when Kendrick threw Gallagher by the front of the trunks chin first into the top buckle, and Gallagher just smashes into it. The match had a ton of cool things: Heavy deadlift back suplex on the floor by Gallagher, Kendrick throws an actual damaging superkick out of the corner, Gallagher pays him back with a nasty corner dropkick, and I loved Kendrick rolling through to make the Captain's Hook last even longer. But kendo sticks in 2019 are pretty lame, and Gallagher taking forever to go grab a kendo stick and truly contemplate the seriousness of the line he was about to cross by using a stick was some dumb stuff. Gallagher throws harder strikes with his head and all four limbs, who needs to go get a stick?

Oney Lorcan vs. Ariya Daivari vs. Tony Nese

ER: This was like "The Problems with 205 Live: The Match" in a lot of ways, but had a ton of endearing qualities that it kind of won me over. This had all the bizarre bad 205 Live tropes: It was absurdly long for (I still cannot get over WWE having weekly 18 minute cruiserweight matches), the worked it as a slow burn with the crowd actively turning on the match because of how long and slow it was, before Lorcan and some crazy bumps actually rallied the crowd into a satisfied submission. This was flawed, but I actually liked the different tone and pace they worked. It seemed ridiculous at first (and was actually ridiculous in several ways; we did NOT need a 90 second Tony Nese chinlock in the middle of this while Daivari disappeared on the floor), but they won me over with their dedication to the specific match they were doing. It was slow, it defied the crowd reaction, and it peaked strongly after the deliberately slow first half. I liked Daivari a lot. After this match I think he's officially a guy I'm going to remember I like. Tozawa was that guy last year, a guy I kept forgetting I enjoyed. Then finally it stuck. Daivari doesn't get talked about much, but he's been kept relatively strong on 205 for a guy who loses a lot on 205 Live. When he is given the time to look tough, he always looks great. He had a squash a week or two ago with Chris Bey bumping huge for him, but he looked real mean in it. He plays a real good Yoshinari Ogawa heel in multi mans. He went almost exclusively for sneaky schoolboy roll ups for the first 8 minutes of this, and it was pretty great. His bumps have snuck up and become one of my favorite bumping styles in WWE: He goes does hard with his legs shooting out first, like he's actually sprinting straight into a clothesline he didn't see. He ping pongs around for Lorcan uppercuts and also gets good lift on slams and suplexes. He's a strong addition to a match like this.

Now the match does have a lot of Nese just Nese-ing it up. I hate his kick combo that looks like an elaborate Bash Brothers celebratory handshake. But his athleticism can lead to fun spots, and he showed a really smart understanding of peaking a sequence, with a real deft closing sequence. I loved him climbing to the top to hit Lorcan with a 450, seeing Daivari getting up on the floor so opting to hop down and take him out with the Fosbury Flop, then going back to hit the 450 only to find he gave Lorcan too much recovery time, realizing it when he smacks his face into the mat on a missed 450. It's smart scene construction that you don't always get in these matches, and Nese - while throwing out shitty looking offense sometimes - also feels like he now has equal amounts of offense that look good, is getting better at building a match, and will still take a violent bump. He gets knocked off the top rope to the floor and flips head and neck first onto the apron.

Lorcan keeps getting a restless crowd back on his side, really fighting to hold their interest, and I think succeeding. He flew into horizontal full force uppercuts in a way that demanded attention, and his two reckless flip dives to the floor back to back got rewarded for giving that attention. I liked all his work around the half nelson suplex, when he caught both Daivari and Nese in them and when he would get them reversed; Nese landing on his feet off the half nelson and hitting a perfectly timed double stomp to Lorcan's chest was a strong moment. The whole finishing stretch was the best thing on this 205 Live episode, and even if I wasn't along for all of the too long match, I appreciated a ton of it.


Smackdown 10/18/19

Drew Gulak vs. Braun Strowman

ER: A fun squash featuring someone I'd obviously rather see not squashed. These two could easily match up and have a great 8 minute match, both are smart enough to work that, but we knew that's not what this was going to be. Gulak at least gets to work the mic and begin showing his PowerPoint, but after that it's a mauling. Gulak added little things where he could, my favorite being him eating a headbutt and falling to the floor, but desperately grasping for the bottom rope as he fell off the apron. Braun hits a big avalanche, crazy good shoulderblock on the floor, big powerslam, all cool things. But shit have him do all those things against Tony Nese, not Gulak.

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WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak 9/7 - 9/14

205 Live 9/10/19

Jack Gallagher/KUSHIDA vs. Brian Kendrick/Akira Tozawa

ER: We're back to appropriate match length on 205, and this was a bunch of fun. I thought everything in this was great...up until KUSHIDA's hot tag. The opening scramble with Kendrick/KUSHIDA was really cool, and filled with little things that make me love Kendrick: blocked headlock takeovers, refusing to go down on a drop toehold until forced, clasping his hands on a hiptoss armbar until KUSHIDA starts throwing fists at his hands, even doing a leapfrog much more like he was jumping a hurdle in competitive track so that he lands in a more advantageous position. Kendrick is a great logic  wrestler and I love seeing his tricks. Gallagher and Tozawa are always fun together, and I dug what Kendrick did with a blind tag as Tozawa baseball slides to the floor making Gallagher think he had been too much for him, only to turn around and take a nasty posting from Kendrick. Tozawa trotting by on the floor and rustling Gallagher's hair while he was still hung around the post was an excellent touch. I loved Tozawa's short punch, and seeing Kendrick and Tozawa corner and isolate Gallagher was great stuff, but it all built to a KUSHIDA hot tag that I didn't think was very good. I don't think KUSHIDA's stuff looks very good when he rushes through things, as he's a guy who always looks like he's thinking too hard about the next part of the sequence, so all of his strikes looked more like someone practicing a sequence than actually doing the sequence. We still get Gallagher spilling to the floor and Tozawa pasting him with his cannonball off the apron (Gallagher always seems like the guy who gets smooshed into the barricade with that, and it always looks great), but overall I think things wrapped up way to neatly once KUSHIDA came back in, match could have used another twist or two.

PAS: I thought this was really good, I am not a New Japan guy, so my KUSHIDA experience was his not very good Gulak matches from NXT. I think he may be better suited as a tag worker, where he can do some cool opening mat scrambles, let his tag partner do the majority of the actual in ring work, and then tag back in for a hot tag. Gallagher was pretty great in this taking a huge bump into the ringpost, and taking a pasting from Kendrick and Tozawa. Kendrick has been a bit of forgotten man in 205 lately, but man is he great, I loved him escalating the violence, and his smaller stuff is about as good as it gets in wrestling. I thought KUSHIDA's finishing armbar was pretty great looking and the coolness of that allowed me to forgive some of his awkward moments.

Drew Gulak/Ariya Daivari/Tony Nese vs. Humberto Carrillo/Gran Metalik/Lince Dorado

PAS: This was a long trios match with some cool moments, but some real stinkers too. Nese is really bad in this, at one point he puts on maybe the loosest crappiest chinlock I have even seen, he might not have even been touching Dorado's body. Lince Dorado being shoehorned into the PPV title match is really weird. He isn't even a top 10 2008 Chikara roster member (Hero, Claudio, Quack, Colin Delaney, Brodie Lee, Whatever Ant Tracey Williams Was, Tim Donst, Jigsaw, Mitch Ryder and Kingston for sure would have a better match with Gulak) and the third best guy in his stable. Watching both him and Metalik in this match, it is even weirder that they are pushing Dorado. Apparently WWE bought the Dorado gimmick from Chikara, which is amazing. How much could they have possibly paid? It can't be more then a 100 bucks. I just imagine Quackenbush buttonholing Helmsley after Quack's training center gig "You know Hunter technically we own the Lince Dorado IP, you really should buy it from us, if you are going to use it on TV." and Helmsley just handing him whatever he had in his pockets "I got 67 dollars and a GMC gift card with an unknown amount on it, take it or leave it."

Gulak was good as usual, the crowd was clearly not paying attention to the match and chanting for a baby in the crowd. Gulak starts rocking Dorada like a baby as a taunt to get the crowd back in the match. Total pro move.

ER: I was hoping Phil hadn't noticed Gulak's extremely pro as hell reaction to distracted fans, because I was more blown away by that than anything that actually happened in the match and wanted something to talk about. Can't be much more of a bummer for wrestlers than a fully distracted crowd, and Gulak improvising and rocking Metalik like a little baby to instantly get all eyes on him was one of the more brilliant things I've seen. I mean, Tony Nese lost their attention like 12 seconds later, but I'm not letting Gulak get dragged down just because Tony Nese sucks. I really like Phil's 2008 Lince vs. Chikara exercise, and you can easily add Hallowicked, Sara Del Ray, Cheech AND Cloudy, Pantera, Larry Sweeney, Drake Younger, really Lince is nowhere close to 2008 Chikara top 10. He's a guy battling to get on the 25 man roster.

The match itself was too long, though the length did give it more time for nice moments, and there were plenty of nice moments. I don't think the whole added up to much, but you stick a couple interesting guys in an 18 minute match and something decent will shoot out the other side. There was some fun stuff on the floor, Metalik always breaks out a couple of impressive flips, Carrillo had a couple big dives, Metalik had an outright awesome rana leaping over the ropes to the floor, and Daivari took a fast splat bump off that rana. But there was also a lot of really awkward shifting into position for offense, lotta messy stuff, and Phil didn't even mention Nese's awkward loose body vice. I will say, that I think these guys are all at least trying to have bangers out there, and that counts for something. That enthusiasm can help lift up matches and I hope the show goes on a good run.

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