AEW Five Fingers of Death 10/6 - 10/12

AEW Collision 10/11/25

LFI (RUSH/Sammy Guevara/Dralistico) vs. MXM TV (Johnny TV/Mason Madden/Mansoor)

MD: Hey, it's a multifunctional TV match. In and out in under 4 minutes, not counting the set up. That gave everything the sense of chaos you want out of a Rush match. Now that Caster's no longer doing the challenge (at least temporarily), this fills that spot on the card, gives fans the surprise of not knowing who will come out, lets Mansoor stooge big (here flipping onto his face and then trying foolishly to attack Rush), lets the challengers figure out how to deal with the problem of Mason Madden (catching him mid-pose with tandem kicks and then dodging him as he crotched himself) and work fairly even with Johnny to start. They fit in a huge spot with Dralistico crashing Johnny into the guardrail on his 'rana, a bit of sizzle with Taya hitting one off the apron herself, and then, just like last week with DCF, the big bomb train on Mansoor. Put LFI over strong to set up their trios titles challenge, entertained the crowd, filled a few minutes, and set things up by having Eddie's music interrupt them for the next match. Perfectly effective pro wrestling right here.

Eddie Kingston vs. Beast Mortos

MD: Another week, another match, another step to climb. You watch Eddie and you feel his pain. When he gets knocked down, that hurts, yeah, because of course it does. But it hurts him to get up too, to turn the body, to get his feet under him, to press up against the weight of the world and find his way back to his feet. It hurts. It doesn't hurt Speedball when he gets up. It doesn't hurt Kevin Knight. It hurts Eddie. Every single time. 

It's a contradiction lately. Every time it gets harder than the last. Yet every time it gets easier too. Because he's working his way back out of his hole, working his way back up to the light, working his way back to who he was when he won the Continental Classic and held three titles at once. 

But yeah, it hurts.

He was more of himself here. Two weeks ago, if he tried a shoulder block on Mortos, he'd crumble. Now he stood firm. He forced Mortos out of the ring, forced him to ask for a time out, forced him to push the dissonance hard. He's so big and so fierce and he had to rely on an eye poke. That hurt too but it probably felt good and right, because Eddie forced him into that spot. That was a victory right there, the only sort of victory Eddie knows, the kind where he ends up with a finger in his eye for his trouble.

Yeah, he went for the uraken right off the bat, because Mortos is a threat and because Eddie's not yet Eddie yet, not really, not all the way. But when that didn't work, he didn't stop, he didn't look down, he kept on pressing. And that meant that while Mortos got the better of him for a time, that he was able to fight back, able to get under him and hit an exploder, and able to hit a uraken that didn't feel like a fluke for once, that felt instead like like a more commanding, more dominant strike. 

So yeah, it hurts, it all hurts, it'll always hurt, but with each step, Eddie gets closer and closer to finding himself once more. 

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D3AN~!!! Day 4: SAMMY~! MORTOS~! DRALISTICO~! CHEESEBURGER~! ISOM~! TITUS~!

DEAN~!!! 3 9/6/25

LFI (Sammy Guevara/Beast Mortos/Dralistico) vs Cheeseburger/Eli Isom/Rhett Titus

MD: Let's embrace the chaotic indie spirit of a random match popping up out of nowhere. We don't have a choice after all and embracing it would be a very DEAN thing to do. And why the hell not, right? Look, DEAN liked all of these guys. Yes, DEAN was great at finding things to like about almost anyone who had something to like, especially in the early 2020s, but he was also great at highlighting what those things were. More on this at the end because of Sammy's promo. 

This was definitely structured as an enhancement sort of match with name talent. Powers and Roma and Brunzell on a late 80s Superstars and that's okay. It meant that Isom could fire back a bit and give everything just a bit more dramatic weight. You know what to expect with Mortos (that headbutt) and Dralistico (throwing himself into his offense for good or ill, here good), but Sammy was the one to watch. 

Sammy's been paying his dues as Dustin's little buddy for the last year+, title belt or no, putting in the effort as a babyface. But now he gets to stretch and preen. They're still working it out. Him matching Rush's Tranquilo pose with his little bit of breakdancing works great. It didn't work quite as well with Mortos and Dralistico just standing beside him. Otherwise, they were a pretty well oiled machine here.

And of course the post-match promo was funny for what it was. Surreal to a degree to hear Sammy talk about Dean. Bobby Heenan is on record for giving someone advice in WCW that instead of saying they hated the fans, they should say they love them (the advice was not taken) and Sammy more or less did that here. Him referencing "pillars" in 2025 is a good bit. And then saying that he, and his stablemates were Dean's favorite wrestlers. Also a good bit. Sammy's online, of course. He's got that "Where are my five stars?" promo that he's never going to live down (Sorry), but I can't imagine him in these circles. So the fact that he didn't and wouldn't and couldn't know that DEAN was big on guys like Mortos and RUSH, but that he absolutely loved Sammy's JAS run with Tay, for instance, makes it even more funny. 

No, Sammy was not one of Dean's favorites, but in his own inestimable way, Dean loved wrestling more than anyone. And that meant he was going to find every awesome thing about Sammy and embrace them and shout it from the rooftops. There are absolutely things that Sammy does that I think are very good (and no, I'm not going to list them here), but I've written up a bunch of his matches with Dustin over the last year+ and while I’ve been fair and even-handed, I’ve not shouted anything from rooftops. So, though he didn't know any of this, though he was doing the right thing to get heat, what Sammy really did was remind me once again just what we lost when we lost the big guy. 

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 8/4 - 8/10

AEW Collision 8/9/25

Hangman Adam Page/JetSpeed (Mike Bailey/Kevin Knight) vs LFI (Rush/Dralistico/Beast Mortos)

MD: There's a fine line between genius and madness, likewise greatness and disaster. Sometimes the qualities that make wrestlers stand out, make them dynamic and brilliant, are also the factors that can drag a match down in excess, that can muddle a match in chaos and confusion. Likewise, if properly channeled, some of the worst qualities on paper can channeled into strengths. Sometimes all that matters is the sheer intensity of the qualities at play.

RUSH is as visceral as any wrestler alive. He's a seething, fuming, tinder box of pride (ego might even be a better word), aggression, and a lack of impulse control. He blurs the line better than most wrestlers of this century. You might be frustrated by a Rush match, but you're never going to be bored by it. If anything, you're going to be irritated because he manages to shut enough doors that you don't get all the matchups you want to see with him. Dralistico has his own issues, a tendency to go into business for himself and leave the match's purpose behind, a lack of cooperation, a certain bent for unevenness when it comes to how cleanly he hits his most spectacular offense. It's hard to say much negative about Mortos but sometimes I think he gives too much too soon and works too small. For instance, the tornillo is spectacular but it's not the sort of thing I want to see every match. It should be a huge deal when he goes to his higher agility offense. 

So many possibilities, so many things to be controlled for, some of them being entirely human instincts and emotions and not just something you can move around on a board.  

This was Hangman's homecoming, a rare Collision appearance, an attraction six-man tag main eventing a show just down the street from where he went to college. While there was an existing issue between JetSpeed and LFI, Hangman was here as the ace, the champion, the sheriff who's sick and tired of all of the injustice around him. He's a lead babyface who's going to support the rest of the locker room with his stare, and his words, and if need be, his fists. 

And it's a testament to how this was put together that it all worked exactly as it should have, strengths accentuated, weaknesses (or at least potential disruptions) channeled for the good of the match. Let's look at Rush, for instance, one of the most exciting potential main eventers I can imagine, and certainly a main eventer in his own mind. He was laser focused for Hangman for much of the match. Of course he wanted to go toe to toe with the champ. Early on, he gave just enough. In their strike exchange, he often had advantages, but he took them by switching gears first. He switched from forearms to chops when Hangman was starting to get the better of him. It created the illusion of being in control when he actually wasn't. Later on, he wiped Hangman out on the apron for absolutely no reason, exactly the sort of thing you think he'd do; at face value, it didn't fit into the match, not really, but it set up the big final comeback, as he tried it late in the match and Hangman caught him and nailed him, allowing for the hot tag and the setup for the finish. 

Likewise Dralistico. It doesn't always work out this way, but given the chaotic and bombastic feel of the match and opponents who could do things that were spectacular enough to stand out, that he was uncooperative at times, that he was blustery at times, that he played to the crowd at times, that things seemed a little rough around the edges at times, all added to the gritty fight feel. At times, Knight was forced to contort his body this way or that in order to try to hit a piece of an offense and that made everything feel all the more organic, believe it or not. And Mortos? Well, yes, he hit his dive, but it was perfectly placed and he took out both of JetSpeed in the process, before helping to base for Rush's subsequent dive. That made it feel larger than life in a way that you can't quite accomplish in a singles match against a smaller opponent. 

It was there all the way to the finish. Hangman got the better of Dralistico, planting him down and then scooting backwards to skin the cat and set up the Buckshot. He had to fight off first Mortos and then Rush on the apron, however. That allowed for Dralistico to recover, only for the math to play out and JetSpeed to take him out as well. They followed up with dives of their own (clearing the table for the finish, the real purpose for dives, being means and not ends, in so many lucha trios matches). And then Hangman could flip back over the rope to victory. In wrestling, anything is possible with enough thought and care. Likewise, the opposite. Negatives can be channeled into positives. Positives can decay and mutate into disaster. Thankfully though, this match threaded the needle and maximized possibilities extremely well.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/26 - 6/1

AEW Collision 5/25/25

Top Flight/AR Fox vs RUSH/Beast Mortos/Dralistico

MD: One of my favorite lines is that wrestling isn't math except for maybe when it comes to tag team structure. The idea there is that tags work best when the heat is longer than the shine or everything breaking down in the finishing stretch. That way you build up the drama, bring the crowd up for hope spots, take them down for cutoffs, and squeeze as much pressure out of things as possible before the hot tag. But so much of what I believe in is to set up baselines. Baselines are useful to ensure that the crowd has a certain expectation and reacts accordingly, but they're also useful because once in a blue moon you can subvert them to high effect. If you don't have baselines or if you subvert them too often, then you may create sensation in the moment, but it tends to lack substance and staying power.

If there was a set baseline for tag team wrestling in AEW (and I'd argue that it's iffy at best) this match would have done a great job subverting. It had everything break down right from the get go and only settle down into a sort of heat midway through before everything went wild again. LFI create a special sort of chaos that allows for this, the same way that Abby or Brody might in years past. Here, they ambushed right from the get go, tossing Top Flight to the floor and focusing on Fox. Rush pulled off the pad and they immediately made the exposed buckle dangerously important by having Fox do everything in his power to avoid being slammed into it. Because of their cruelty and hubris in not settling on violence but instead wanting to escalate things, Fox was able to get some space and set up a huge dive train (with Rush plastering Fox on the floor after he crashed into Dralistico and Dante hitting an absolutely crazy dive on Mortos before hyping up the crowd).

The heat then only started when they managed to finally toss Fox into that exposed buckle to cut off the early comeback. Chekhov's Gun loaded and fired to high effect. I would have liked to see the buckle play into things a little more afterwards but it was absolutely necessarily. After the break, Darius took the hot tag and hit his usual hot comeback sequence and everything broke down again, before LFI finally swept them under for a definitive win. So yes, way too much chaos and mayhem instead of building up pressure but by starting with the heels in charge and basically trading in the shine for that extra bit of heat and two comebacks, it all still worked out okay. Still, the more they stick to establishing that baseline, the more an exception like this will feel extraordinary and not just commonplace. 

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DEAN~!!! 2 Day 4: Slim J vs. The Beast Mortos

DEAN~!!! 2 5/24/25

Slim J vs. The Beast Mortos

MD: Probably the match I was most looking forward to on paper. It was one of those things that you didn't even know how badly you wanted until you saw the graphic for it. Look, I like Ciberneticos as much as the next guy but sometimes, you want wrestling distilled to its purest form as a starting point and then and only then built up and embellished with every enhancement imaginable. Contrast so often makes the world go round and that's what we had here, a monster of a base vs the most underrated babyface of all time. 

Let's talk babyface Slim J. It's easy to get lost in all the move innovations and clever ways to do things. You could stop and say "Hey, this is a half generation later Nova" and make all the jokes that go along with that. But that's not Slim J. Wrestling is symbolic. A move is nothing but a tool, a piece of diction, vocabulary. It's everything else: the selling, the overall body language, the timing, the placement, that makes up the syntax, that makes wrestling live and breathe and separates it from a video game simulation or simple acrobatics. It's the heart and the soul of pro wrestling, and that's where Slim J shines. That he's able to then marry it with all of that interesting vocabulary: entry points into moves, clever variations, the inventions that others have taken as their own for decades now, that's the best of both worlds, and he's one of the very best of both worlds. He uses his size and resolve and determination to draw sympathy and then makes the most of every opening with a souped up shotgun blast that still somehow seem organic and plausible within the narrative realities of pro wrestling. He draws you in and then stretches your suspension of disbelief instead of disrupting it. It's really a hell of a thing.

And this Mortos is by far my favorite version of him. Yes, he can do amazing, spectacular things, flips and dives and everything else, but so can so many others. It's more impressive in some ways due to his wideness, his mass, his imposing frame, but it's best done sparingly. He is best when he is the center of gravity that others must revolve around and must escape. I want to see him hitting those brutal looking strikes. I want him to catch people as they charge at him. I want people to have to solve the puzzle of how to stagger him, how to push him back, how to get him down. And then yeah, as an exclamation point, I do want him to do one or two extraordinary things, but that's the cherry on top, not the meal itself. 

They got the balance just right here. Slim J would chip away at Mortos only to get caught and stomped on and tossed about and hit with the nastiest strikes in the corner or the center of the ring. Then he'd use all of his ingenuity to create an opening only to get caught again. There was a sense of inevitability here but it was the journey that mattered, not the destination, and even then, he was clever enough and persistent enough and canny enough to just maybe, maybe give people some real hope. But hope just isn't enough when you're up against a wild man bull that can catch you in midair and obliterate you at a moment's notice. The only possible destination in that case is a final one. Hell of a journey though.  

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 2/3 - 2/9

ROH 2/07/25
AEW Collision 2/08/25

Athena vs Carolina Cruz
Dustin Rhodes vs Izzy James
LFI (Rush/Dralistico/The Beast Mortos) vs Ares Alexander/Brick Savage/Jay Alexander

MD: All squashes for my guys this week. So let's talk about squash matches and these ones in specific. A wrestling company should use every tool at its disposal. One of the things that drew me to AEW when I started watching in 2021 were the Dark/Elevation squash matches. I like contrast. I like a baseline that can be used to escalation from. All three of these matches had purpose, function, form. None of them went particularly long (though the ROH match had more time to breathe because ROH has less constraints). All of them allowed some idea or concept to be brought into the world in a way that felt organic and natural and not overly contrived.

Athena's match was at Daily's Place, and had that real Dark feel to it (with a crowd nutty enough to chant Blue Pants at Adam Priest of all people, even as he got over in front of them). It was her first match back after her time in Japan and it reminded people just who she was, that cross-section of intensity, unpredictability, and malicious mirth. She sat Billie down at ringside and made her watch. She menaced Paul Turner. She shook Cruz' hand clean but then assaulted her. And then post-match, she beat her around the ringside area like she was Stan Hansen. Billie interjected but it was both too late and too little (also too little to incur Athena's wrath). So it was a stagesetter to remind people where things stood and hint just a little of where they may one day end up.

Dustin's was reminiscent of one of his last times on Collision, then against Johnny TV. This was to heat him up for MJF and give him an excuse to do a post-match promo. The promo then had been on Jack Perry and him aping Hard Times. The last two or three promos from Dustin have been more from the heart and better off for it. This was only a few moves deep but I like that one of them was the Cross Rhodes because it was a big screw you to MJF for invoking Cody's existence and main event status, just a standing tall babyface act of defiance to show that Max can't get under his skin. I loved the MJF vs Templario and MJF vs Oku matches last year, by far my favorite of his (with the Strong match #3). I'd love that same invading heel champion spirit in Austin, like Flair in Dallas. I think it would work great over the crowd (if, as always, Max is just confident enough in himself to let himself stooge/feed/cheat/heel).

That brings us to LFI. No dissension between the brother and Mortos despite what we saw last week. This was each guy getting one shot in to set up a post-match. They'd focused so singularly on one opponent each getting over a big move, that the other two were fresh and fired back until they got swept under. That led to Komander trying to make a save but falling to the numbers game and Hologram finally getting to make his big return. All functional stuff that will likely set up a match between these guys who are generally used a attractions.

Three squash matches, three different purposes, all character driven and character based and all moving things along in their own way. These matches existing allows for a different narrative effect than just having backstage promos interrupted or having fairly even fifteen minute matches. Every tool at the disposal. 

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 11/11 - 11/17

ROH 11/14/24

Dustin Rhodes/Sammy Guevara vs Love Doug/TJ Crawford

MD: Dutch having Dusty's cowbell as one of his last students is a good compelling real life wrinkle to the feud. I think on some level, I don't want to think about Dutch having a life outside of being a member of the Righteous though. It's not like they're wildly fleshed out as characters. I don't know why Vincent became who he is. He's just here fully formed and snapping, so it's kind of weird to think of Dutch in development doing promo class with Dusty. It'd be interesting if they were able to link this to how he fell somehow. I guess it's a sort of "don't open the door, unless you are willing to fully walk through it" sort of deal. Unless they're putting the belts on the Righteous, they're kind of okay as two dimensional characters who serve as physical threats. If they're going to try to do anything more out of them, I think we need to get to the heart of what makes them tick more. This could be a good step along that road or it could be messy depending on how this places out.

Likewise, the idea of Dustin and Sammy having a tag match and the Righteous having one on the same show, with a Righteous beat down after the former, is a pretty good bit of work too. Just nice, straightforward booking keeping things moving. Here it let them introduce the cowbell too, carried by the commentary. And the Righteous' new finisher which is Vincent picking someone up in a fireman's carry and then Dutch hefting both of them over his shoulder. 

The match itself was fun fluff with Shot Through the Heart feeding and feeding and feeding, with no care for the rules. Normally, I'd cry foul but they basically just kept running into Dustin and Sammy's offense, save for a brief respite while they were waiting for Sammy to hit a dive. It fit the characters. It fit the moment. It put Dustin and Sammy over strong right before they were about to get wiped out and the emotional element was to be introduced. Just good episodic pro wrestling TV.

AEW Rampage 11/15/24

RUSH/The Beast Mortos vs Alec Price/Richard Holliday

AEW Collision 11/16/24

RUSH/The Beast Mortos vs The Acclaimed

MD: The squash on Rampage was effective. We've seen Mortos basing for smaller luchadores and working against other talent equal, but it was very nice to see him just crushing people. The Buzz Sawyer-esque power slam stood out as much as anything else. 

The Acclaimed match needs to be unpacked a little more. Let's talk about the Acclaimed first. Something has to give. I don't know what that is yet. Traditional pro wrestling booking would have it look like Caster was going to go with the Hurt Syndicate and Bowens be the one to do it first. That would be a mistake. For one, Caster can't be a babyface. He took the FIP here and it felt GOOD. It felt great to see Rush take the cord and flip him over his head to the floor. That was one of the most refreshing, rewarding, satisfying moments of the year in AEW. You want to see him get beat up. And it's wrestling, so he can use that, not as some sort of edgelord heel like he's been as a face, but instead as a stooging, heatseeking, scummy, scuzzy Eric Embry/Rip Rogers type. It's obvious by this point that Perry isn't going to really lean into that so there's still a window. 

That leaves us with Bowens. I think Bowens could be a successful aggressive, athletic heel, sure. But why? He's one of the two most likable guys in the company off screen. He's got a great story. People want to get behind him. He's short which would be a detriment as a heel but works fine as a babyface who can go and who can bring it. Look, I get it. Whatever the company wants to do right now, it's not Tsuruta-gun vs the Super Generation Army. Maybe we'll get there in a few months, maybe not. Daniel Garcia is Misawa in that case. He's 100% Miswa, unquestionably Misawa. Maybe Hook is Kawada, maybe not. There was a world where Yuta could have been Kobashi but he's Taue now, the turncoat. Bowens is one of the only guys in the company that can be Kobashi, that can push up against monsters bigger and stronger with him through heart and intensity and passion alone. Just let him be himself and let him face off against all the darkness in the world. The fans will get behind him. They got behind the Acclaimed an idea, a concept, a hand gesture, an attitude. They'll get behind Bowens as a person. I'm sure of it. He just needs to believe in himself and to have the company believe in him. The fans believing in him? That's the easy part. 

And then there are RUSH and Mortos. Given what's happening with the Acclaimed right now and just the general positioning of LFI I would have much preferred a roll up pin after Mortos wiped out in the corner as opposed to him eating the Arrival/Mic Drop combo. It might be counter intuitive but one protects him more than the other. You can forgive a banana peel roll up more. 

Here's another "Look". Look, I get that RUSH has a history of... you know, everything under the sun, right? Being uncooperative, having a few injuries, supporting Cuatrero, all sorts of stuff. But if you're going to have him on your roster and pay him well and use him steadily anyway, USE HIM. There are maybe four people on the roster (with two of them being Mox and Athena) who can bring the same level of seething, immersive intensity. Rush is a generational talent. When he was gone more often then not, it was fine to use him as a sort of gatekeeper/mercenary for bounty situations because he's instantly credible just by showing up in the ring. Now that he's a more of a weekly character, he can't just be a normal guy. 

I'm pretty sure that one of the biggest matches they can put on for the Texas All In, at least if you care about walkup, is finally getting LA Park to put his mask up against Rush's hair. Rush's hair was one of the biggest draws in Mexico for years in the 2010s. Granted, I don't know the lucha politics nor do I want to in this case. The point more is this. He draws the eye. He captures attention. He has that feel to him of "Well, it's not all real, but maybe it's a little real when this guy is in there." Someone said a few days ago that if Rush knew what Caster had been saying on his rap, the match might have gone very differently. Obviously on one level you don't want that, but it's a double-edged sword. Genius and madness go hand in hand in pro wrestling, and you have to tap into the talent you have as much as possible. Give him a brass knucks title and feud him with the wildest people on the roster. Build to he and Moxley completely dismantling the set in the world's craziest no contest. Make him the threat that Bowens has to overcome over time like Hansen to Kobashi. Something. Anything. He's lightning in a bottle. Use him to light up the world.

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

AEW Rampage 11/1/24

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

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

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

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

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

ROH TV 10/31/24

Athena vs Abadon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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2024 Ongoing MOTY List: The Beast Mortos Debuts in AEW

 

6. The Beast Mortos vs. Rey Fenix AEW Collision 4/27/24

ER: I love a debut that feels like a real debut. The Beast Mortos is new, Debuting. Black Taurus is not new at all. Black Taurus has been almost everywhere, all over the place, constantly, for at least 5 years now. You have had multiple chances to see Black Taurus wrestle live in a city near you within the last 5 years. He's done all of the Super Indies, he's been one of the few hundred people on MLW's roster, one of the few dozen to wrestle on a show where Ric Flair died, he even wrestled multiple matches on AXS TV for a mudshow fed that airs after old episodes of That Metal Show with Eddie Trunk. He's been everywhere, doing his great thing, and now he's on real TV against a guy he's been doing that great thing against for over a decade. AEW putting guys on TV specifically to try to capture the magic of someone seeing Rey Mysterio vs. Psicosis for the first time is message board pro wrestling and it's hard not to appreciate someone paying money to try to recapture it on TV. Rey and Psicosis got to do their great thing in front of increasingly larger crowds before unleashing it on WCW, and the Beast Mortos has been doing the same. Now, wrestling is a lot different now than it was when Rey and Psicosis did Their Thing on PPV (nearly 30 years ago!). Now everybody frequently gets the chance to do Their Thing and it feels rarer and rarer that someone can show up doing something Unexpected. If you've been paying attention, there should be nothing Unexpected about The Beast Mortos. He's the best of the dozen or so animal's head wearing luchadors that have come to prominence in the last decade, and this was him doing his thing in front of the most eyeballs of his career, and he completely crushes it.  

His AEW debut is so good, that it essentially overshadows the fact that Rey Fenix hadn't wrestled in over 6 months. This is Fenix's big return and while he did Rey Fenix things, people were now also getting to see a ton of Beast Mortos things. I loved Mortos's NOAH-like sicko dedication to going after Fenix's knees after Fenix has been out a half year because of his knees. Jun Akiyama hated Kenta Kobashi's knees so fucking much and I support Mortos's hatred of Fenix's knees even if Fenix didn't seem to mind too much.  It is a fool's errand to go into depth describing what they are each capable of. I can tell you that The Beast has an incredible tornillo, with an improbably tight spiral and amazing impact, but it's something you need to see to believe. I can tell you about a bulldog that spikes Fenix vertically, but that's something you will want to see. I have no way to describe Fenix leaping onto The Beast's shoulders and kicking him in the back of the head - while standing on his shoulders - and I can tell you how cool it looked when Mortos headbutted him out of the sky but I wouldn't be able to do it justice. To see how fast and far Mortos takes a Jerry bump and how well he can catch a complicated dive, why would you just want to take my word for it. The match was filled with things almost beyond description, unless you are someone who has been seeing The Beast and Fenix reinvent how things are done for nearly a decade now. But thousands have not, and this match was for the thousands. Even for the dedicated, it played as fresh. A debut of a known quantity that felt like a new debuting force. Mortos lost this battle, but I am sure that after this he will be doing nothing but winning in AEW. 

2024 MOTY MASTER LIST

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 10/21 - 10/27

AEW Collision 10/26/24

FTR vs. Rush/Dralistico

MD: Look, I got exactly what I wanted out of this match. The initial pairings were Dax and Dralistico and RUSH and Cash. While Dax has a good punch and all the personality you'd want and a Foley-esque sense of knowing how to create big, meaningful moments that stand out, there's just something to Cash. My go-to description of Ashura Hara is that he wrestles like a guy with a gambling problem in the best way. Cash wrestles like a guy who's just one bad day away from snapping. In any other walk of life, that wouldn't be a plus. In pro wrestling, it's a godsend. Of course, RUSH had his bad day close to fifteen years ago, a series of them, one after the next, when the Arena Mexico crowd refused to get behind him as an up and coming young tecnico and he decided that the world just had to burn down. He never looked back. All I wanted from this one was the two of them, either with an early exchange or one in the finishing stretch, getting to slug it out with each other. I knew RUSH would awaken something in Cash, the sort of thing which could make him a top singles act if he could channel it constantly without going so method that he was in constant backstage altercations. And so he did. All it took was one little slap and Cash was all over him. RUSH turned Cash into CASH. RUSH is less about big spots and more about cracking people in the jaw. No one else in wrestling is going to do a complex bypass only to slap someone. Only RUSH. What a guy.

Prior to that, we did get Dax and Dralistico to start. Dralistico's an interesting case. People more focused on lucha tend to have disdain for him, but I think he's kind of self-aware. How do you stand next to RUSH as your brother and see how Dragon Lee carries himself on the other channel and not, after all these years, have some sort of self-awareness? There's another reality where Sin Cara became a big star up north and Dralistico got to coast on being Mistico II forever (whether the crowd was behind him or not). Here though? Here I think he kind of gets it. He knows he can walk all over Dax (literally) and then after getting smacked slink off to the corner and tag in his brother to hide behind. I kind of wonder if he doesn't get quite enough credit for his act. Maybe he doesn't stick to it consistently enough, but there's something to "failed idol who decided to go into the family shitheel business," right? If you squint, the lack of smoothness at times can almost be a boon if he's leaning into it somehow. It's the little things. After RUSH redirected Dax into the corner to set up the heat, Dralistico added insult to injury by giving him a halfhearted shove into the post again. It's a little bit understated in a world of larger than life characters, but I kind of dig it. Eric's already the world's biggest Bestia del Ring fan so maybe I should watch myself here. 

I got what I wanted right from the get go, so the rest was sort of gravy. They focused on Dax's shoulder. RUSH knocked Cash off the apron to delay the hot tag. Dax had to really work for it. Cash came in hot. Dralistico hit that wild crucifix driver. They went home strong with the Mortos miscommunication. Maybe you didn't want LFI losing so early into their revitalized run, but this is the RUSH/Dralistico pairing where the money pairing is the RUSH/Mortos one. They more or less got their heat back after the fact. It'd probably be good for them to get a couple of single wins coming out of this even if you don't necessarily want FTR or Outrunners to lose on the way to whatever they're doing. Run Truth vs Mortos, Dax vs Dralistico, Cash vs RUSH (Yes, please, run CASH vs RUSH) next week. Have them split wins 2-1 with LFI on top. Then figure out how to glue together a six-man or eight-man. They can get a few more weeks out of this on Collision. That's the joy of Collision. This was great fun. Now we just need that CASH vs RUSH super libre match. 

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