AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 6/3/20

What Worked

-Taz is a good choice as Cage's manager, as there's a constant cool visual reminder that they might have disjoined at some point. They're the only two guys left with structured and groomed Year 2000 sideburns (Jungle Boy gets a pass, his sideburns are grandfathered in), and Cage's HGH belly rivals Taz's pasta belly. It's too unlikely that they found each other, far more likely that one disjoined from the other.

-I really liked Jericho/Cabana as a 6 minute 2nd hour of Nitro match. Cabana hits a nice Asai moonsault (and then does an even crazier thing by slapping hi fives with several people and then immediately touching his mouth), and I loved his big bump over the ringpost after getting shoved by Hager. The layout was smart and kept things brisk, obvious that Jericho is so much better than Omega at pacing a match like this. Cabana got a couple decent nearfalls even though the finish wasn't in doubt, and the finish was perfect: Jericho crumpling Cabana with the Judas Effect as Cabana is bunny hopping off the middle buckle. And I'm not sure why, but I laughed hard at the specific way Jericho called Mike Tyson a piece of shit after the match. Man's delivery is still strong.

-Britt Baker with the segment of the week again, every second of it was so good. Locking the wheelchair in place to work the ropes, dragging that 2 lb. weight, the slo mo looks at the camera while being pushed across the field, all of it so great. Did I really sleep on Baker, or has she gotten really great in the past couple months?

-I liked Cody/Jungle Boy but something bigger was missing. I can't put my finger on it, so I'll just say that I much prefer Cody's style of working opponents into a match to any of the other AEW figureheads. Cody doesn't just step out of the way and allow someone to have a run in the middle, he makes space for convincing comebacks that works to an opponents' style. I liked how Jungle Boy's strikes got harder as the match went on, and how he went after Cody's cut. I was impressed with their fighting on the top rope, a moment that is hard to pull off without looking like two guys trying to cooperate to maintain balance, but I think Jungle Boy's best strike of the match was when he smacked Cody in the ribs up top, and I loved how Cody popped him right after. The table spot looked good, although I wish it was used as more than just a match reset. It didn't really play into the match and it's weird to use the most violent spot of the match as essentially a rest period. Still, strong match and I'll be totally fine with Proud Defending Champ Cody bleeding on TV in 10 minute matches every week.


What Didn't Work

-I'm happy that AEW sees black people as equal, at least enough to put a written statement at the beginning of Dynamite and making the brave decision to ban Linda Hogan from live events but how many cool black wrestlers could be on TV instead of these brutal weekly Kip Sabian matches. If AEW announced they were giving Kip Sabian's contract to literally any black wrestler anywhere, I would believe them. Making that statement at the top of your show and then cutting right to Kip Sabian and Jimmy Havoc in the first match fells like talking about how you support black artists while buying Nickelback tickets. I mean Omega/Page vs. Sabian/Havoc is literally the whitest possible match they could have booked. And yet, for all the deserved grief I give Sabian and Havoc, Omega was clearly the worst guy in this specific match. He hung both guys out to dry with improbably long wait times. Poor Sabian was sitting on the turnbuckles, plopped there like someone sitting backwards on a toilet, just waiting ages to take a backcracker. Omega's selling was laughably bad, with the biggest laugh coming when he took a Sabian springboard dropkick and did this amazing Little Tramp walk into the ropes while waiting for his cue to waddled backwards into a poison rana. And that rana magically allowed him to hit suplexes seconds later! Omega managed to look like more of a clown than Sabian and Havoc, and that's an impressive dedication to putting over your opponents.

-So Fyter Fest is an indisputably bad name, right?

-Nyla Rose took a nice big bump over the top and off the apron, and had a couple of really nice kickouts (well timed in accordance with the move she had taken), but I couldn't quite figure out if the layout of this was really dumb, or lazy, or just bad. It was a worse version of the mid 90s babyface Randy Savage formula where Swole took the entire match and then Rose just hit a rydeen bomb and called it a night. Swole gets hung up sometimes on timing and her strikes always look better when they aren't part of a combo (loved her backhand slaps here), but she came off weaker to me with how quickly she was dispatched, no matter that she got half a dozen nearfalls before that. Also, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and assume JR's use of the word "manhandling" during Nyla's matches is just because he only knows so many words.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 4/29/20

What Worked

ER: Cody/Darby was really good, while also having a finish I thought made Darby look like a first class dummy, and a bunch of knee work that added absolutely nothing to the match. I loved the smoke and mirrors and the actual big match feel that they worked, and all of the knee work could have played into something cool if they remembered to give it a third act. It was set up by Cody tweaking his knee while bridging up, which is a cool way to set up something like that. I tweaked my hip getting up too quick after napping on the couch, surely it's possible for Cody to tweak a knee while doing an off balance bridge. But neither ever seemed too interested in building off that, until they were suddenly VERY interested in building off that for two minutes, until they both decided that they can move past it. While Darby was working a kneebar on the knee that he didn't originally attack, that was probably my first clue that none of this was going anywhere, but I don't put that on Darby. I thought his cannonball into Cody's knee was cool, dug the floatover Indian deathlock grapevine, and was bummed that they couldn't find a way to close that story out. The rest of the big match stuff played nicely.

Darby was great at being bullied around by Cody, loved the spot where he got flung into Brandi and Cody still fit in a thrust kick before tending to his wife. Britt Baker hitting Cody with a shoe was weird, but kind of fun (even if it felt a little out of place in this kind of match. I mean would they build to Baker/Brandi or something? Plus after she hit him with her shoe I'm STUNNED that Jericho didn't say something like "She turned HEEL!"), and Cody really came off like a confident star in his beatdown. I liked the finish, until I didn't. Cody foolishly attempting the Coffin Drop really feels like something hubristic that Cody would try in a big match, only to have it backfire. But the finish was so telegraphed and only even works on paper if you believe that Darby is an actual idiot. Darby hits his own Coffin Drop right after, then pins Cody, but you see it was actually CODY who pinned DARBY! And for that to work, I am supposed to believe that for the first time in his life, Darby opted to pin a man in a position that he's never pinned anyone before, rolling himself back onto his shoulders ON THE MAT to pin Cody. This might have felt clever on paper, but made Darby look like a real dweeb in practice. Sometimes just a normal boring finish is better than a cute finish that requires out of behavior stupidity.

PAS: I thought this was mostly very good outside of the wonky finish. Cody doesn't really have the kind of offense or bumping or selling which connects with me. If he did everything 10% better I think I would like him a lot, but he is kind of missing that 10%. Darby is so good, he first showed up on people's radar as an insane bump machine, but now he can work a match like this where he hardly takes any big bumps at all, and just move the match along on his timing and the fluidity of his offense. I really liked Cody hurting his knee on the bridge up, and do wish that the legwork part of the match was done better, although I kind of accept that limb work isn't what these guys do. I haven't been watching much empty arena wrestling, but the AEW set up of wrestlers in the crowd works way better then the WWE setup. Here it just feels like an IWA-MS show with 30 people in the crowd, and that is still a recognizable form of pro wrestling


-I liked Wardlow yanking Musa off the top into a kneelift, and liked Wardlow's bump off Musa's kind of sketchy handspring spinkick.

-The Flim Flam Jam was fine for what it was, but the Manitoba Melee was entertaining and a fun use of quarantine. Good use of cameos, but I'm surprised they actually didn't do a sponsored ad with Cameo. They got Ferrigno, and I'm sure you can probably find people like Ted Beneke from Breaking Bad for a good price. And now I'm wondering if Larry Blackmon is on Cameo.

-Britt Baker's promo from her dental office was the kind of segment that is making me an unexpected fan of Baker. I wish her dental office was filled with more awkward sibling photos, the way my dad's dental office has pictures of my sister and I, with the most recent one of either of us being from 2004.

-Brodie/Marko was fun, which I recognize means that I now have to face myself in the mirror while trying to come to terms with how Deeply Disturbing my conscious has become. I am amused at moments like Lee swinging a clothesline from his normal arm slot and being surprised it missed, even though his normal clothesline traces 2 feet over Marko's head. But Marko crashed and burned spectacularly, the spinning slam looked great, the sitout powerbomb finish was disgusting, and him stepping right on Marko's face was maybe the coolest thing Lee has done in AEW.

ER: Dustin/Archer was very good, the kind of high class main event wrestling story that Dustin excels at. You need an irrepressible vet to die on his sword in an effort to keep this bad haired bad tattooed wrestler from fighting his brother? Dustin is going to deliver. Archer has come a long way and has some impressive big offense. I do think the seams in his game come out the longer his matches tend to go, and this was a match that got a lot of time. Against someone who wasn't Dustin, that would have been a big problem. But Dustin is good at filling time and good at building sympathy, and it's cruel that this match wasn't in front of any kind of pro wrestling crowd. Bloody Dustin is a babyface who NEEDS a crowd, needs to have fans losing it as his blood drips across his face at cool angles (seriously how great does Dustin blood always look as a visual). I love how Archer countered a lot of Dustin's signature stuff, like blocking the dropdown punch or stopping his momentum to block Dustin's powerslam, that kind of stuff is right up my alley. Archer busts open Dustin with a chair, and Dustin bleeding means his opponent is going to punch him in his cut, and that rules. Both guys traded some really hard clotheslines, Dustin finally does hit that snap slam, and I like the AEW Story is Obvious moment of Archer kicking out of the Cross Rhodes at 1. I can definitely do without stuff like Archer's long rope walk moonsault, which while impressive, felt completely out of place in a bloody fight. It's also a shame that a lot of Archer's weakest stuff came during the home stretch of the match (that repeated facepalm into the mat while just holding the other side of Dustin's head looks like something that would have been edited out in post), but overall this was a great presentation.

PAS: I liked parts of this a lot (The Dustin parts obviously), but I don't think this fully connected with me. Archer is so plodding and having him work this long section of dominance was tough. He wanders around, hits a mediocre punch or clothesline and wanders some more. He is supposed to come off like this vicious killer, but instead comes off like a big Power Plant guy with a couple of bits of big offense, but no idea how to string a match together. I think Dustin vs. Shawn O'Haire could be a good match, but not for 20+ minutes, with O'Haire lumbering around for 16 of it.  I don't know how many big Dustin main events are left, and each one is a treasure, but I wish he had a better dance partner for this one.


What Didn't Work

-Leave it to chuds like Chuck Taylor and Kip Sabian to make the No DQ stip as uninteresting as possible. When Jimmy Havoc is in the top half of workers in any given match, you know you've sunk to some depths. Taylor threw some strikes so bad in this match that were so bad there would be no way of describing them to a non fan as strikes. You've possibly never seen clubbing forearms as bad as whatever Chuck Taylor was doing. Some of the garbage stuff looked good, like Havoc blindsiding Orange Cassidy with a thrown chair, or Taylor taking a backdrop onto a ladder, but overall? Nah. This is one of those matches where the best thing you can say about it is "Well all of the people I dislike the most were all used in the same segment, which means their specific brand of awful was at least quarantined and won't infect the rest of the show."

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 4/22/20

What Worked

-I'm still not certain we've gotten an actual Sammy/Darby classic, and they've matched up several times. It's possibly because their best matches are against monsters and matched up against each other one on one they somewhat negate what the other is best at. They're easily two of my favorite five guys in AEW, but they can both likely have better matches against lesser opponents than against each other. HOWEVER, I liked this a lot, I just have a higher bar set here. It's strong throughout, but weirdly cut apart by commercials, which hurt the flow a bit. I could see the argument that the commercial layout was smart, as it allowed recovery time from some pretty big stuff, but I would have liked to see just how they handled that recovery. Instead we jumped right back into more big moves and it didn't feel right. It starts with Sammy blindsiding Darby with a tope and then hitting a nutso superfly splash to the floor, "putting" Darby through a ladder. Except the ladder doesn't budge and both of these two are going to be dealing with crushing rib pain for the next week. Darby worked on Guevara's foot and even ripped off his boot, that all lead to a cool kneebar that I would have bought as the finish. Both guys take some big spills (not a shock) and I liked Sammy's lunatic dedication to selling a foot by actually trying to do a one foot springboard cutter and a 630 where he was clearly favoring a leg. That's a great way to die, but I think he pulled it off. Love seeing these two do their thing.

-Best Brodie Lee squash so far, but I also think the other ones have been weak. His big windup clothesline looked great, that's really the only kind of stuff he should be doing. Drop the superkicks and somersault sentons.


What Didn't Work

-I was on a long phone call last week with a relative, and missed most of Dynamite. I *did* want to mention that I made it back in time for the Hager/Moxley match, and it was a real clunker. Easily the worst "Bloodsport" style match I've seen over the past few years, compeltely sluggish, both completely over their heads, no idea where to take the match, and it felt endless. In a just world, people would be dumping on that match as much as they dumped on Edge/Orton.

-To add to the discussion of Better Wrestler: Lex Luger or Kenny Omega, I like being able to throw on an old episode of Raw and see Luger take Tony DeVito to the woodshed. Omega always wants to have these extended squash matches, where he runs through a squash and then when the squash match is supposed to end he just stands there for awhile and lets someone do all of their kick combos. Alan Angels is fine I guess, but the Kenny Omega Competitive Squash structure is a real dud. He dominates, then kinda hangs around for awhile until he finishes it. Am I supposed to think Angels is a  future contender? Am I supposed to believe that every person on the roster is one quick pin away from the main event? Just squash a guy.

-"But right now, let's take a special look at Scorpio Sky" sounds like such an unnecessary vignette in 2020. But I look forward to the special looks at Scott Lost, several Gallineros, TARO, Hook Bomberry...

-Jimmy Havoc is bad, but THANK YOU Jimmy Havoc for just trying to have a normal match with Orange Cassidy, thank you for not selling the intentionally silly offense parts instead of doing that thing most opponents do where they bump across the ring for a finger poke. Most of Havoc's stuff doesn't look good (he had a nice punch and a nice forearm, and the former got a quick camera cut away because they knew Jimmy Havoc was about to attempt to punch a person). The Penelope/Kip involvement was really shoehorned in, and most of this didn't work for me. But I am much more interested in seeing someone work an actual match. Sadly, that person was Jimmy Havoc.

-Not buying Wardlow, and I'm about as easy as it gets when it comes to finding things to like about big gassed wrestlers. Lee Johnson has been the bump king of AEW squash matches, but there's only so much he can do.

-Liked the Brodie Lee squash, but that ring gear is B-A-D.

-I actually did not realize just how terrible Kip Sabian was until tonight. I know that I've never enjoyed Kip Sabian before, but I thought his match against Darby was fun (even though that was just a great Darby performance). But this? This was atrocious. Sabian looked like the absolute worst AEW worker on the roster in this match, and this was a match that had a Penelope/Brandi showdown that saw Brandi run straight past Penelope without either of them pretending to duck or act like they were avoiding each other in any way. This was Dustin working a Sabian match, and it was straight torture. Things got momentarily compelling with Dustin working a knee injury after hitting the turnbuckles. But then he had to keep selling for Kip Sabian's offense and that was when this whole thing got impossibly bad. Kip Sabian looked like he was trying out every piece of offense in his repertoire for the very first time, and I wish he was in with someone who isn't as much of a nice guy pro as Dustin. Could you see someone like Finlay bumping for that short arm clothesline? Finlay would have grabbed Sabian by the maxilla and elbowed his nose into oblivion. With no hyperbole, I can honestly say that was the worst short arm clothesline I've seen, completely beyond parody to have Sabian hitting offense lighter than the guy in sunglasses who purposely hits half of his offense lightly. I would have thought it impossible to have a 10+ minute Dustin match wind up on the bottom here, and that tells me everything I need to know about Kip Sabian. I encourage everybody to find and watch this match, just so someone can explain to me their theories on what any of Sabian's offense was supposed to be. Is Sabian's hiring like when Johnny Ace hired the wrong one legged wrestler? Was someone in AEW actually supposed to hire BLK Jeez?

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 3/25/20

What Worked

-Even though some spots got a little too "oh right this is Jimmy Havok", this was probably the most I'm going to enjoy a Jimmy Havok singles match. Havok shakes Cody's hand and Schiavone speculated he was playing mind games. I thought Schiavone was making a joke about Coronavirus but no he was just implying "I don't think that handshake was sincere". But Havok had a nice right hand after the handshake, and that's something I don't typically get to write about Havok. Cody took a couple of nice upside down bumps in the corner, hit a decent dive and a big ramp run lariat into the ring, Havok spiked himself nicely on a couple of CrossRhodes, there was a bad Havok armbar (well I tried going a sentence without dumping on him, but he made the top side of the review and that's something).

-Darby worked a match, obviously Darby is gonna be on the top side. Sabian and Penelope were fun foils for him, with Kip flying back on the John Woo dropkick and bring there to get flung by Darby on one of his sky high armdrags. Penelope tied Darby up nicely from the floor and it lead to a great whipping springboard kick across Darby's face. I loved the misdirection that played into Darby hitting his excellent tope, a nice bit of timing capped off with a perfect dive. I don't think I've seen him use the ankle pick to trap someone in the Last Supper pin, and I dug it.

-Brodie Lee holds his silverware like a convict.

-I'm a fan of whoever did the caricatures of the roster at ringside, but they needed to be driving tiny convertibles and holding tennis rackets.


What Didn't Work

-I thought the wrestlers in the audience was a nice touch last week. It was fun to hear guys talking trash and rooting on the matches. There was a chop in the Inner Circle tag last week where a chop didn't hit flush, and I heard someone go "Nope!" That's fun. Empty arena is just tough to get into.

-Jake Hager's theme music seems like it was written for someone else, and I'm sure we wouldn't have to go back more than a month on his Twitter feed to find him retweeting someone talking about how hip-hop isn't "real music". That and his weird patchy brown face tan made it look like he was wearing a prosthetic nose.

-If you're going to make Brodie Lee into the abusive father who red face screams "IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR ONE NICE EVENING!?" after his kids sneeze or accidentally drop a fork, you gotta have him go out and absolutely murder QT Marshall. What is QT doing even getting in one bit of offense? Lee can't go out there and do slingshot sentons that mostly miss. He needs to go back and watch some unprofessional Bradshaw syndicated squash matches.

-There was plenty I liked about the Guevara/Omega match, but the tone felt a little all over the map, and a lot of it felt like a real sluggish Omega performance. It also felt unnecessarily long, but that could be because so many big AEW matches are go go go that this one just felt like they were going slow just to go long. Omega seemed especially sluggish after the first commercial break, running at half speed and just dropping to the mat without his trademark derpy spring. Sammy did a running thread through the match attacking Omega's hand, and I liked the ways Guevara went after the hand. Some of Guevara's best shots where when he was going for an armbar and trying to get Omega to unclasp his hands, just punching at Omega's hand. He never went over the top with it and almost always used it to get out of a jam. He even resorted to biting that hand down the stretch. But Omega never really seemed to notice nor care, which fit nicely with his limp body language over the rest of the match. The final third of the match picked up nicely, we got a great Guevara dive, and several V Trigger knees from Omega. The first couple looked so-so, but the one he did to set up the OWA looked finisher worthy itself. Guevara came off way better than Omega in this whole thing, and I thought Omega's selling for Guevara's offense was flat at best, nonexistent at worst. This should have been better, and would have benefitted from being 15 minutes instead of 23.

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MLW Worth Watching: Low-Ki! Lawlor! Hager! Havoc!

Low-Ki vs. Ricky Martinez  MLW Fusion #12 6/7 (Aired 7/6/18)

ER: This was Ki's TV wrestling debut here (he had shown up before to assault Strickland and yell at people from dimly lit hallways backstage), and we get to see him savage some guy. Martinez took a rough enough beating that I'd like to see more of him, as we got no offense from him, but a guy who can take his ears being boxed can't be that bad. Ki sprints at him at the bell and really hammers him with strikes. As Martinez is on all fours Ki stands over him and throws these nasty swiping strikes to his ears and head, and throws some violent downward elbow strikes in the corner that looked like they'd bust open the top of Ricky's head. Ki boots him with his running dropkick, then grabs Ricky's beard and uses it to bend him and then snap the back of his neck over the top rope. Damn. Sure, this was merely a squash, but Ki is a guy I'll go out of my way to watch squash someone. Martinez was a good sport and I hope they give him some time.

PAS: This reminds me of the way Kevin Sullivan or Ronnie Garvin used to mess up jobbers. Ki running over and kneeing Martinez in the head and then following with hooks to the body and head was super nasty, as was Ki grabbing his nose and flying backward. Purpose of this was to make Ki look like a vicious bad ass and it delivered. Great call by Schvione too "Why are people like this?" Why indeed.

Tom Lawlor vs. Jake Hager  MLW Fusion #13 6/7 (Aired 7/13/18)

ER: This was really cool, much more of a grappling and submission match than maybe any other Hager/Swagger match I've seen, and a perfect style match-up. Lawlor's plan is to just swarm Hager, leap on him and work for counters, and Hager's plan is to try to throw Lawlor off of his body. Any time Hager would grab Lawlor, Lawlor would latch on and work for a choke, or a limb. Hager goes for a Karelin lift and Lawlor instantly gets scrambly, locks him up, climbs up his body, just acting like a total nuisance. Sometimes Hager is successful at shaking him off, but it's always fleeting. Hager gets a big belly to belly and starts grapevining a leg, and there's Lawlor scrambling to get a kneebar. Lawlor is the one to start working strikes, hitting a couple hard mule kicks to the stomach and some nice elbows, seemingly one step ahead of Hager. Hager gets the ankle lock but Lawlor rolls through and works for the rear naked choke. The whole thing was a much more interesting style than we usually get from Hager (although I've liked his recent power style), and it's clear he has the ability to work this style more often. I assumed a big Stud Stable/Team Filthy brawl was going to break out, and naturally it does, but they at least gave us a good 8 minutes before it got to that point. This was really good, the grappling and struggle was great, and the trios feud should be gold. Give them a few matches, and we all win. It keeps the Blondes away from having to sell for Jimmy Yuta and actually puts them in with some talent. This could be a killer feud.

Tom Lawlor vs. Jimmy Havoc  MLW Fusion #14 7/12 (Aired 7/20/18)

ER: This is one of those violent matches where you hope the owners of GILT Nightclub aren't actually watching the professional wrestling that's taking place every month in their establishment. The death match worker is certainly a bizarre niche within our bizarre niche. Necro Butcher gained fame doing death matches and also having a fantastic name, but once he started getting work in normal indy feds he toned down death match elements and kept the big brawling, stiff work, and stupid bumps. Havoc is keeping the stupid bumps and #PopularJapaneseFinisher, but he's still slicing himself up like he's working a match in the parking lot of a metal festival. It's not really that weird I guess, but it stands out on a nightclub show. Sure, nightclub owners are used to seeing shootings, but a dude blading his fucking arm might be too unexpected for them. This match has plenty of geek show elements, but also had some big time crazy and some nasty bumps, and would have landed on our 2018 MOTY List if the finish hadn't been so flat and cut short.

Havoc hits an early dive into the crowd and both guys take bumps through chairs. A cheese grate and stapler get introduced almost immediately, having getting a permanent sheet of blood running down his face as his forehead gets grated, then gets various staples into the head and we get a gross shot of him frantically pulling the staple out of his head. There's an adorable young girl near them in the crowd who is simultaneously terrified that these bloody sweaty guys might fall into her, and loving this professional wrestling. There also does not seem to be an adult claiming her or shielding her. They're good about not just trading geek show spots, instead nicely fighting over these weapons, Lawlor fighting off a stapling, and Lawlor bridging gaps to these weapons by kicking Havoc. Schiavone is damn funny on commentary as he dives into his knowledge of cheese graters, what each side is best used for, detailing different ways to grate parmesan depending on the dish, and how grating parmesan with almonds is delightful; important to note, that Schiavone made the almonds comment right after Havoc fought his way back to control by getting ahold of the grater and slashing it across Lawlor's nuts. 

We get some painful stuff on chairs, Havoc ends up taking a German on some and later gets dropped hard on a set-up chair that had fallen on its side. Damn, son. Havoc always amusingly transitions back to offense by producing an unexpected weapon, and while fading in a choke he gets a piece of paper, and eventually cuts Riddle in the finger crotch. Afterward he produces a lemon and squeezes it onto Lawlor's hand. It's like sadistic Bugs Bunny, but was plenty fun to see. The ending comes so suddenly, and it's really odd: Lawlor slices Havoc's arm with a pizza cutter, drops him on that chair I mentioned...but then Havoc just kind hits him a couple times and does a really sloppy Rainmaker to win. Huh? I don't mind a sudden finish to a match, but this just made no sense to me. It felt like they had a hard 10 minutes allotted to them and they suddenly had to go home. Very unsatisfying finish, and it's also a weird visual as you had Episode 13 ending with Lawlor  nearly beating Swagger before a DQ, and then the first actual match of the next episode is Lawlor just losing after a clunky lariat.

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