AEW Five Fingers of Death 9/2 - 9/8 Part 2

MD: This was a jarring enough experience that Tim Livingston is tagging with me on it. His thoughts are below mine

AEW All Out 9/7/24

Bryan Danielson vs Jack Perry

MD: This is not necessarily the match I would have booked, but it was the match that we had. And this match had to carry weight. It had to carry more weight than matches I would have probably preferred. It did so admirably, valiantly even. This match had to lower the guard of nine thousand people in an arena and tens of thousands of people at home. It had to provide them with something meaningful, believable, understandable, acceptable, leaving them absolutely and completely unprepared for what was to come. It had to be conventional, predictable. Maybe it even had to carry its own flaws proudly, like a badge of honor. It had to manage this while following an emotional war in MJF vs Garcia, multiple spotfests that shot for the stars, and a physical war in Statlander vs Willow, plus Mone vs Shida which may or may not have hit as intended. It had to precede the angle, yes, but also the sickening spectacle of Hangman vs Swerve. It had to create a mood of complacency right in the middle of all of this.

Let's break down what this match seemed to be and what people's expectations for it were. On paper, looking at just the straight text, the TNT champion, much like the International Champion earlier this year, was challenging for the AEW World Title. Danielson had more or less made an open challenge. Perry was more than ready for it. I don't think anyone thought that Perry was going to beat Danielson, however. The subtext, outside of kayfabe, as it was, is that this was not the main event. Swerve vs Hangman was main eventing. It was a way to help keep Danielson active, to potentially give Perry some rub, maybe even to prove if he could hang on this level. People suspect that part of Perry's push was due to the reaction he got for the NJPW Strong show in Chicago. If this was somewhere else, maybe he wouldn't be in this spot. There was the usual chatter about Danielson being selfless and wanting to highlight new talent, etc., to help support the people that would be there after he was gone, and so on.

So that was the text and the subtext leading into this. Of course the context is that it had to set the stage for the angle at the end while taking advantage of the biggest thing the angle had going for it, the element of shock and surprise. Given all that, they treated it as if the subtext was really all that mattered. People knew that Perry didn't have a chance, so the match couldn't be just about Danielson beating him. The drama and the tension had to come from something else. Here it was Perry getting his comeuppance at Danielson's hands. Look at the first couple of minutes. The fans chanted for Perry right from the start but that wouldn't last long. He was quick to rush forth, to get an armdrag, to muss Danielson's hair, to be as insufferable as possible. He actually won the first exchanges but when Danielson rushed in to try to undo that, Perry escaped to the floor. In some ways this was even more insufferable than if Danielson had gotten an armdrag back before the escape because Perry wasn't even allowing him the chance at it. He took the tiniest of wins and scampered. Quickly Danielson DID catch him, reversing a hold and leaning hard, capturing him in La Tapatia so that he couldn't escape and going for what would become the central throughline of the match, the ultimate goal, to stomp Perry's f'n head in with the hands trapped. Here, though, in the first act, Perry slipped out beginning a dance of denial that would drive the proceedings moving forward.

Instead, Perry ate some feet to the face and Danielson's end-of-career flip dive but Perry rolled through the ring and caught him on the other side. The fans knew they had been denied the stomps, and now Perry would lean on Danielson in his irritating manner. That meant focusing on the neck, sure, but also false ten count punches in the corner, eyerake cutoffs, and plenty of posing and preening. Danielson came back with a huge belly to back off the top and got a modicum of revenge, but Perry snuck his way back into control with the Snaretrap, again being as irritating as possible with Cattle Mutilation and a couple of dragon suplexes. Danielson would even the odds with another huge suplex, this time a butterfly suplex off the apron, but they'd repeat it with another Snaretrap and escape to set up the ref bump. Maybe it was all a little bit long but everyone expected that to give Perry a chance to shine as much as possible. Normally a ref bump is about covering up a false finish. Here though, it was to deny the crowd Danielson stomping Perry's head in once again. Before he could the Bucks ran in. After they did their damage, Claudio and Yuta ran in, which made extra amounts of sense given they faced off earlier in the show. All of this set up a finishing stretch, full of Perry pushing Danielson too far and paying for it, and maybe one too many kickouts from Perry, which met well the suspected subtext of making him look strong in defeat Finally, the head did get kicked in, not once but twice, and to the tune of the Yes Chants, and Perry, all but asking for it, got wiped out by a third knee.

All of this met expectations perfectly. The match was set up in a way so that the crowd got satisfaction not through Danielson's victory but instead through Perry's comeuppance. It went long on a show that had already drowned people in sensation, but that worked well enough with the misdirecting post match angle: Killswitch attacking, Perry having a moment with him, Christian coming down to cash in. Moxley showing himself. It all would have been enough to push the ball a little further. In and out, nice and neat, Christian lurking in the wings, ready to prey upon Danielson's fatherhood as only he could. And how long could Moxley, up to whatever he was up to, coexist with Bryan? Both the text and the subtext were satisfied, closed off. Expectations, both positive and negative, were met. People sang along to the Final Countdown, were glad to see Moxley and Danielson reunited, were ready to move on to the gory finale of the main event. AEW is plagued by Excalibur (through no fault of his own), quickly transitioning to the next thing with a "But what about..." and there was no reason to think we weren't headed into a video package here. They burned down a house after all.

I don't think a shorter match would have worked quite as well. I don't think a different match could have worked quite as well. It had to be this, something people begrudged but accepted, something that was worked smartly and provided satisfaction in the moment even it was a little contentious just how much satisfaction that turned out to be, something that seemed to accomplish multiple things, that set up a perfectly conventional post-match that we were all too familiar with but were ultimately okay with.

I can't imagine anything that could have understood us as an audience more or brought our guards down more effectively. In this, our familiarity and our complacency were our undoing.

TL: As we tend to do with big setting AEW matches, the meta speaks much louder than the story trying to be told. This is (sadly) not a new phenomenon for the company, but it becomes weirder when the meta context rewrites or even overwrites what’s presented to the viewer. There’s little doubt here as to the result, and there’s no doubt at all as to the perceived gap in talent and stature between Bryan and Perry, even with Perry’s in-company position as the #2 guy with the title he’s holding. For three years, it’s been a guarantee that Bryan was the better wrestler in any match he was in; the challenge was always how to overcome that perception and tell a story that grabs. The larger the perceived gap, the seemingly more impossible the challenge. It just so happens to be a challenge Bryan relishes.

The setting had a few things going for it; Perry is absolutely loathed in Chicago for obvious reasons, is considered a failson even though his dad never wrestled, and he’s not above going low to get to his destination, as has been his MO for the last year. Fans are also happy to see Jack eat shit, slip on the proverbial banana peel, all the comeuppance tropes you’d want to see a heel take. To Perry’s credit, he's smart enough to troll, even if it’s the easy way out. It’s one thing to do the Cattle Mutilation to Bryan in a title match, or even do the Snapdragon Suplexes to show up Bryan’s first AEW showcase opponent and the man he usurped in The Elite, but he also does the charging corner lariat and reverse neckbreaker combo in Chicago, which is an easter egg for the sickos and an attention to detail that goes above and beyond what is usually the case for AEW house style references.

However, I feel the best thing it has going for it is it’s a Bryan title defense. For all the types of matches Bryan gets celebrated for, and all the matches he’s had in what’s becoming a career-defining run, it’s become a rarity for him to be The Man holding off a challenger. His last WWE title run was hit or miss save an all-timer of a reign ender, and while the ROH house style at the time of his monumental reign was 10-15 minutes too long on the regular, that run was rightfully celebrated for its breadth and depth given the quality of opponents was so varied. There are fewer matches sweeter than a Bryan title defense; he gets to show off a mean streak when he wants to, his technical superiority, counter wrestling smarts, all the beats that make him the all-timer he is. 

Put it all together, and while it’s probably not the match we wanted for Bryan’s first title defense in a half-decade, what we got was exactly what it should have been. Bryan hit all the beats expected of him; he hit the familiar high spots to harken back to his heyday, laid it in stupendously to the point where he was downright mean at times (the chops, the kicks/knees to the prone arm, the torque/technique on all his suplexes), played to the crowd even when they knew the result was inevitable; how do you not get involved in a match when someone is so earnestly making sure you pay attention?  Perry was given every opportunity to shine in ways that made sense, and on top of that, decided to bump like a madman in key moments. Say what you will about Perry, but his self-awareness has become one of his biggest strengths, if not his biggest. He knew when to stooge, knew when to gloat, knew when to die.

The post-match, though…5-year-old me should have never seen the Clash VIII post match during the awesome 1989 NWA Main Event two-hour Year in Review special when it aired that New Year’s Eve. Subconsciously, it’s difficult to shake, as you might imagine. So now imagine having that deep in your memory recesses, getting shocked to your core initially with the Claudio uppercut, the look on Bryan’s face in a close-up (one of the great AEW production moments), and then the plastic bag from Mox (making it THE great AEW production moment), all in the span of about five seconds. Now throw in Yuta crying helplessly while Claudio and Marina hold everyone at bay while Mox holds the bag over Bryan’s head for way longer than you’d expect.

Yuta unwillingly became an avatar of my now 35-year-old trauma being reawakened. I had to pause and walk away on my rewatch right after the BCC jumped the rail to stare away the Patriarchy cash-in attempt, right when my heart started trying to leap out of my chest. Bryan got me in Wembley by pulling at my heartstrings. I don’t think I can go back and rewatch the match because it is one of my favorite wrestling memories ever, and I want it to stay unaltered. Maybe when my own daughter comes of age (if she even becomes a wrestling fan) and I show it to her as an example of why it’s important to have balance between your dreams and family, hoping as we watch that it somehow grows in stature. 

Yet I went back and watched this match and angle until literally my brain told me danger was lurking around the corner and I needed to get away or something very bad was going to happen. You appreciate the story they’re trying to tell, but what it uncovers about yourself in the process might literally bring hidden demons into the light. The Sport of Kings remains, always and forever, undefeated.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 9/2 - 9/8 Part 1

AEW Collision 9/6/24

Bryan Danielson/Claudio Castagnoli/Wheeler Yuta/Pac vs. Jack Perry/Kazuchika Okada/Matthew Jackson/Nicholas Jackson

MD: Wrestling seems to be the easiest thing in the world and the hardest thing. It's creating a primal connection with people that touches the core of their humanity, denial and gratification that stimulates the endorphins in the brain. It's building imaginary towers, bigger and bigger, creating more and more emotions. Yet if you try to overcomplicate it in the wrong ways or if you don't control for extraneous bits, you lose people along the way and only end up with a ghost of what you might have otherwise built. Worst case, the entire structure collapses in upon itself. The main thing you're trying to do is build up a credible, believable reality while at the same time creating as few disruptions that hinder suspension of disbelief as possible. Wrestling isn't math, but if there was an equation, you'd have that positive element and that negative element summing up to create as much immersion and emotion as possible.

I wrote about alignment the other day and I'll double down on it a little bit here. The build for Pac vs Ospreay has been all about Pac ambushing the likable chap. Cheapshots, denying the crowd the first Ricochet vs Ospreay interaction, walking around with a chip on his shoulder. Maybe Pac has a point but the way that he's going about it is not buying him any favor with the crowd. Yet due to opportunity or circumstance, he's one third of the trios champs, with a group that he had grievances with just last year after their last attempt to team up. And here he had to be a fiery babyface. Yes, characters can be three dimensional and don't need to follow clear heel/face alignment, but they do need to be presented in consistent ways. Moreover, I have no idea what Pac thinks about his partners or how he feels about working with them. I don't have a great sense how he feels about the Elite right now. Here, it felt like a chink in the armor of the match, something that raised questions that weren't going to get answered, that took people out of the proceedings.

There were both structural positives and negatives as well. I'll get to Perry and his antics in a paragraph or two. Top of the list of positives was the denial and payoff of certain elements: Danielson getting his hands on Perry (an alchemy of its own), and certainly the giant swing, which was teased early and then cut off only to come back for the finish, denial and gratification just like it should be. Also there was a very strong face-in-peril segment on Danielson and co. with the Elite hitting a lot of interesting, dynamic, mean, credible offense in rapid succession. On the other hand, you had the big frog splash on multiple members of the babyface side at once, which probably took too long, and had things like Okada hanging on to the much stronger and not all that damaged Claudio for ages while they set it up. Another crack in the foundation. You can kind of get away with something like that if the babyfaces are doing it to the heels as part of a comeuppance laden comeback because you're expecting the babyfaces to be stronger and the heels to try to (and be unable to) wriggle away, but it doesn't work nearly as well when it's the heels doing it to try to get more heat. It's stuff that looks good on paper, maybe, but that ends up being more of a negative in the equation than the positive.  

And then there was the timing of everything breaking down only to come back together and calm down for the first ten minutes or so of Rampage. A match like this was always going to break down once or twice and probably needed to cover a few extra minutes to keep people engaged for the transition to Rampage. I'll admit that I was kind of ready for everything to go home shortly after the teased Okada dive. If they were going to go a few more minutes, just beating Okada around without major attempts to try to pin him wasn't the most engaging thing in the world. Another round of heat on someone like Yuta leading to a second hot tag and the actual finish would have reset the tension enough to get them over the finish line. I get that they had to get through the first commercial break for Rampage but the crowd was low again after the chaos of everyone hitting big moves in rapid succession and beating on Okada didn't really give them a chance to build up dramatic tension again for the finish.

Speaking of tension, let's talk about stalling. I'm still not quite over the lack of it in MJF vs Ospreay at All In, but that doesn't mean I want him to do it against Garcia at All Out. The situation is different. Vs Ospreay he was the blowhard champ and there was a real opportunity to figure out what the crowd wanted (in this case to see Ospreay do his stuff in a stadium and amass rating stars) and deny it completely while showing a cowardice and hypocrisy relative to what he'd been saying. Against Garcia, Max has a hierarchical advantage and while Garcia wants revenge, it makes sense to go a different route with layout and exactly how to heel. Perry's an interesting case. He claims to have just wanted a chance to prove himself but was benched, to be his own man and not Jungle Boy, that he was a scapegoat when he's really just a standup guy, that it wasn't his fault. But then in ring, he's been taking shortcuts and avoiding confrontation wherever possible. He'll get in when it's easy and hit the floor when it's hard. 

I never wanted stalling for the sake of stalling (I never want anything for the sake of itself!). For MJF vs Ospreay, it would have been purposeful, and I think with Perry, maybe it is as well. The heart of any heel is cognitive dissonance. Just like how comedy works by creating a gap between expectation and reality, heeling does as well. Within that contradiction, animosity can be created within the hearts of the fans. Heels can say one thing and do another and then deny that there's any difference at all. There's heat to be found there.

I think Perry's doing a pretty good job at striking the right balance. The first time he came in, the fans were happy to chant along with his catch phrase. But after he escaped Danielson kicking his head in (and that never did get fully paid off in this one; that's for the PPV), and after he popped in and out for a few cheapshots, they seemed a lot less willing to sing along and more eager to see him take a beating. Good! There's a place for all sorts of things on the card, and if he wants to lay claim to that, and if he can find the slightly shifting balance that really fits his character in different situations against different opponents, there's a real chance that Perry can find that niche after all. But like I said, while it's pure and primal, a burr in the heel of the audience that will drive them to care, it's not always easy. But often times, it's the hardest things that are most worthwhile.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 8/19 - 8/25 Part 4

AEW All In 8/25/24

Darby Allin vs Jack Perry (Coffin Match)

MD: I've noted this before but one thing I like about Darby being part of the 5 is that he ends up in more matches which, on paper, I don't necessarily want to see and that I almost certainly don't want to write about. This broadens my horizons a bit. It forces me out of my comfort zone. It's good for me. On top of that, he's a miracle worker, right? I've written about almost 70 Darby matches as part of this project and they've almost all been very good, and a number of them probably shouldn't have been (on paper).

This one should have had a fighting chance. I was never a fan of babyface tag team Perry. I imagine we have very different views on what makes for good tag team wrestling, most acutely when it comes how early in the match things should break down and the value of structure over well... cool stuff that pops the crowd. We haven't had a ton of chances to see heel Perry, but I will say that I think he did well enough against Hook in their two matches last year, including the All In one. I think there's something to him getting heat by just laying around with a shit eating grin during the TNT title ladder match too.

Sometimes his stuff seems uniquely orchestrated in a way that should take you out of the match, a bit too focused on "clever moments," maybe. Here it was during the glass pouring exactly as they went to a wide cut and it did take me a little out of the moment, but then he has the cover of egotism and the Elite angle. You believe that Jack Perry the character, knowing he'd set up the glass under the ring in a bag and planned to pour it, would tell the producers that when he had a chance to use it, they should do certain things with the camera. If anything, they should lean into that more overtly, make it clear that he's using his power like that. Here, it backfired on him. He was the one who went into the glass and maybe him caring so much about the moment getting caught on camera could have been part of that. It's okay for a heel to be full of himself and self-centered and desperately crave attention. He's a heel! In this case maybe we aren't supposed to think "Oh yeah, he has a point," but instead think he's full of shit and ideally people will want to see him get his head kicked in. If they try to play it with shades of grey though, it'll probably end up the worst of both worlds.

So the balance maybe felt a little bit off when it came to the big moments and how they were milked on this, but even then, Darby, in and of himself, in an environment where he could come in with tacks glued to his face, where he could crash in burn against the coffin, where he could get his hands tied up and still fight from underneath like that, well... it still should have worked. Watching it the first time it seemed almost too maximalist (everything was big, absolutely nothing was small) and too minimalist (there wasn't enough overall, including enough reactions; they moved from one giant thing to the next without anything getting to resonate), even at the same time.

There are always things that we can't know as viewers (reviewers/critics/fans/consumers, whatever you want to call it). We primarily engage with the text as it is presented to us, especially when it comes to current wrestling. Sometimes with older matches, you can carry a bunch of known context with you as well and that gives you different entry points into the matches. I'm pretty sure it was the Observer (Radio) that reported due to the firm ending time for the show, Darby vs Perry got rushed and could only go around ten minutes. No idea if this is accurate or how many more minutes they would have gotten if things had gone as planned. It does, however, offer a very feasible explanation for the weird feel of the match and why it didn't work relative to almost every other Darby match and every other Darby Coffin match. There is only so much improvisation one can do in a match with so many moving parts (tacks, chairs, the coffin, glass, the tape, the belt, and, you know, Sting). Certainly, a match with three more minutes of Darby trying to fight from underneath with his hands tied would have been far more interesting. Do I think if it was Darby in there with Christian things might have gone better? Maybe. But the match also more or less served its purpose, to give the crowd a few big memorable moments before the emotional roller coaster of the main event, to keep heat on Perry especially if he was to challenge for the world title at All Out, to provide the thrill of Sting saving the day.

None of that means I'm going to give the match a pass. As a match, it's not magically better because of mitigating factors. But it does mean I might give the wrestlers a bit of a pass. I'm not necessarily going to hold this against Perry too much (he has another chance against Danielson in a week). I'm not going to see Darby as any less of a miracle worker overall. And I'm certainly not going to write any differently moving forward. There are always going to be things I can't know. That doesn't mean I can't joust with the text as provided and put down my thoughts to the best of my ability. It doesn't make it a less worthwhile endeavor to try to make sense of it all. If new information comes to light, I'll readjust my opinions accordingly. Save for many the most dogmatic and driven of the listmakers, most of us aren't searching for some sort of objective truth. Our hands will always be a little tied as we're sitting on the outside looking in and discussing an artform veiled in secrecy and impossible, incomplete knowledge, but with the right mix of confidence and humility, we can make those leaps of faith just as well as Darby.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 6/10 - 6/16

AEW Collision 6/15/24

Blackpool Combat Club (Castagnoli/Danielson/Moxley/Yuta) vs. TMDK (Haste/Nicholls)/Lio Rush/Rocky Romero

MD: Right before the finish, Tony Schiavone called the giant swing a work of art. He was close but not quite on the mark. The real work of art was that entire sequence, everything from Danielson's knee (and Nicholls crashing hard into the ropes in a way no one ever does as they take the move), Haste's dropkick, Yuta's sweeping Angle Slam, Rocky's Shiranui, and then finally the double leg into the swing. All of that worked in a rhythmic motion to become something greater than the sum of the parts and greater than most "everything breaks down" finishing stretches. I'm not one to wax poetic about specific visuals in wrestling. I'm a substance over style sort of guy, but the "follow the bouncing ball" wind-swooshing motion here was truly spectacular. I can't really believe it was intentional because creating the sort of visual effect that pulls your eye in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time over multiple moves while still feeling at least somewhat organic would take immense coordination between multiple wrestlers at least somewhat unfamiliar with one another, not to mention the camera crew and producers. I'd worry that any attempt to intentionally replicate the effect would create the most tragically artificial and stilted pro wrestling imaginable. Honestly, I'm not even sure if it even hit anyone else quite like it hit me, but hit me it did.

Speaking of things that are just hitting me, there seems to be an extra bit of magic to Forbidden Door season this year. Part of it is that I wasn't a big 2010s New Japan guy so a lot of these dream matches aren't that dreamy for me. What does appeal, however, is the wild WAR feel of it all in the build, the sense that there's a greater world out there, one that is only enhanced by CMLL and Stardom being in the mix this year. With that in mind, and this being a cold match, I thought they made the most of it. That meant letting Lio Rush go wild against Danielson and Yuta to start. It meant having TMDK act as a unit in almost everything they did. It meant having Danielson play face-in-peril yet again, another stellar such performance in a long line of them now. It meant having Rocky get cocky and then having his coccyx crushed by the absurd and sublime top rope inverted atomic drop. It meant Claudio as the hot tag, running through every bit of interference they tried to throw his way, and Moxley as the monster unleashed who they had antagonized throughout the match but who didn't really get to come in until it was time to end things. Add in the pro wrestling version of The Great Wave off Kanagawa that I recounted in the first paragraph and you ended up with a very fun way to kick off a Collision during Forbidden Door season. Hopefully we get at least one more of these before it's all said and done.

AEW Dynamite 6/12/24

Dustin Rhodes vs. Jack Perry

MD: I had reason to watch some 1984 Tully Blanchard lately. Now, due to the law of transitive properties (We know Perry didn't listen to SOME advice. We know SOME people didn't listen to Tully's advice. Therefore...), we can assume that Jack has probably not been watching 1984 Tully. Tully had this amazing way of starting most of his matches like he was a gentleman, wrestling by the rules, going hold for hold, breaking clean. Only after the babyface got one up on him did he break bad. It made things somehow more hypocritical and underhanded and got him loads of heat.

So, Jack doesn't do that. Dustin came in with a punch to start and Jack immediately went for the eyes. He was pulling the turnbuckle pad off just seconds letter and tossing Dustin into the stairs the first chance he could. He was pulling the padding up and going for a pile driver. Then, later, when had capitalized on the exposed buckle, he hit a DDT on the floor. After that, he nailed Dustin with a (revenge, admittedly) low blow even when he didn't have to. And you know what, I have to admit that it kind of works for me. Yes, there could be some issues with it (and Perry's promos) being out of sync with the Elite's ironic gimmick but no one needs the dripping irony in 2024 anyway. This is far more genuine and visceral. In a singles match where he can be his own thing, he should be the most direct shitheel imaginable; just straight to the point, no filter, no hesitation, not an attempt at sportsmanship or even the very notion that such a thing might be worthwhile or admirable. It kind of works. It makes him stand out. You can have shades of grey matches. You can have Piper vs Bret. You can have Punk vs Page. But more often than not, there's something to the most direct and straightforward approach, especially if no one else seems to be doing it. No one else on the roster is an unmitigated, petulant jerk like Perry (not even the guy that maybe he is listening to, Christian, who professes to be a paragon of paternity, even if it is just the thinnest of patinas).

Of course, this is Perry having Dustin Rhodes, one of the best babyfaces of this century, to play off of,. Dustin is pretty much the only guy on the roster getting the the fans to clap up for him with his selling and his hand motions alone. But still, efforts like this matter. I'm rooting for Perry to build off of it.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/20 - 5/26 Part 2

AEW Collision 5/25/24

Bryan Danielson/FTR vs Jeff Jarrett/Jay Lethal/Satnam Singh

MD: I thought about skipping this because I already said everything that needed to be said for the Dynamite singles match. I thought about just mentioning how great the commercial break was with Satnam doing damage while Jarrett and Jay (and Karen) sat on chairs on the outside and Nigel had a great one-liner about how he never called Tony "Whipped him into the ropes" as that would be silly. I thought about just noting that I'll write five-thousand words if they ever give us a Jarrett vs Danielson singles match. But this was really good. I don't need to say too much about it, but it was really good. You had Danielson getting one upped by Jarrett early and then instead of it working into a shine where the heel gets his comeuppance, it not playing out until the end. You had Satnam showing how dangerous he could and should be by just reaching over and cutting off Dax's shine and draping him over the top; it's as easy as that. You have the protection of Satnam by him not doing all of his big spots every match. He didn't do the body press here. He did do the head-dribbling; he hadn't done that in the Danielson match. That's a huge failing of modern wrestling, the Andrade Effect. Andrade's double moonsault should happen one out of five, maybe even ten matches. He should hit the moonsault most matches and only do the double one on the rare occasion that someone is going to organically roll out of the way. It's 2024 here. We're not all so bull-headed that we're trying to power bomb kidman when we've never done a power bomb in a life. I know that Ric Flair felt like he needed to get all of his signature stuff in because he would have been disappointed if Ray Stevens didn't, but it's better to draw the crowd into something immersive than just give them rote ritual. Don't do anything for the sake of doing it. If Satnam has a number of physically amazing spots, the fans will appreciate seeing the one or two that they actually got to see that sometimes others didn't get to see, as opposed to everyone always getting to see all of them.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Danielson vs Jarrett. Jarrett feeding for Danielson's stuff was so great, just the way he'd slam his whole body back and forth in response. I hated that they were doing the quick camera cuts on Danielson's dropkicks. It's Danielson and Jarrett! We're not talking someone from the Nightmare Factory who only has 40 matches under their belt (and those people will get there but at least then I get the impulse, right?). Don't do the camera cut and rob me of the chance to see Jeff Jarrett respond and react to Danielson flying at him! It'll be ok. I trust them. They trust each other. Production guy who will never, ever read this; please trust them too.

So yeah, this was good. In this case, it was even better at 15 minutes than it would have been at twenty five and it gave them so much to go back to. I just hope there's time to before it's all said and done.

AEW Double or Nothing 2024 5/26/24

Anarchy in the Arena

MD: There's no way to talk about any of these matches coherently. So let me tell a story instead. I caught this the morning after but hadn't been spoiled. Kind of weird thing happened midway through, though. My 11 year old woke up. One of the firm and fast rules of pro wrestling in the household is that it never gets in the way of my family life. I've told this story before but I basically moved in with my then five-year old stepson the same month of the Benoit incident and it was very informative on how much wrestling I have the kids consume. My main feeling is that if they came across it on their own and took an interest, great, I'd show them stuff. Otherwise, there was a firm line. I don't necessarily hide it from any of them, but I usually do stop watching if they come around and want to do something. But she was up early and I wanted to see the end of the match so I tossed her a headphone and we watched the back half together.

I'm not saying this was absolutely her first match ever, but she really doesn't have a working knowledge of the tropes, even if she great at English and has a strong sense of fiction in general. We came in at the point where all of the babyfaces were put through tables which built to the fire spot. And I have to admit, it was pretty tough. I had to explain why they set up the table instead of just laying someone on and jumping on them. Thankfully pro wrestling logic more or less works out. More importantly, I had to explain why everyone was bloody right at the get go. The first time she saw Dax or Danielson, she let out a "Ohhh!" in shock, and then was even more so when I explained how that happened and she was aghast and wanted to know why anyone would do that, to which I reminded her that the second she saw it, she went "Ohhh!" She was more shocked by the fire spot as you can imagine. But she didn't get how he was able to recover and come back later. In general, I repeated, multiple times, that this is the sort of thing they only do once a year.

The nicest thing I can say is that overall, I was able to explain the way causality and consequence worked here. Once Darby got tied up, even as his partners tried to save him, there was a sense that he just had to end up hanging up. It was inevitable. Once upon a time, the sheer threat of it would have been enough, and it would have been like knights saving a princess from a tower before a dragon devoured them. Now, the fans demand to see the dragon devour the princess, even if he spits her out later. But the idea of the Bucks' shoes ending up in Danielson's hands made total sense to her. That sense of hubris and comeuppance is universal. The heels did something that was dangerous but also the height of vanity and it backfired upon them. That sort of thing is primal. All of that is to say that the match mostly held together. If anything, you could be annoyed as a viewer that Perry was able to come back in and even get the win but you're sort of supposed to be annoyed by that, so long as he ultimately gets his comeuppance later on. But still, it would have been better if something like that could have mattered more. But you could say that about almost everything on the card, right?

I did go back to show her the beginning again, because she likes Final Countdown and I thought she'd get a kick out of it. That meant I had to explain why Perry was the Scapegoat so that was another headache. The match was full of things (fire, exploding weapons, gimmicked shoes, the music) that all were callbacks; it's very true that this drained some of the organic sense of violence of it all and the next time they run something like this it needs to be raw. At times it felt more like the Jarrett vs Briscoe Concession Stand Brawl (a WWE style food fight) than, let's say Mad Dog vs Demus. Next time they run this, they should be sure everyone is expecting the former and lean hard with the latter. Some of the individual moments were transcendent though, most especially some of the things Darby let happen to him and the two big musical moments: Darby hitting the coffin drop right as the words hit and the shot of Danielson reveling in it all with the wide shot. Still, it's best to remind yourself that it only happens once a year, give or take Stadium Stampede. It just means that the rest of the year should try harder to be like the two Satnam matches and define a baseline of meaning so that the rare match like this can play off of it. Anyway, right after this we watched To Catch a Thief together and that was a more wholesome family experience.

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2022 Ongoing MOTY List: Gunn Club vs. Jurassic Express

 

33. Austin Gunn/Colten Gunn vs. Jungle Boy/Luchasaurus AEW Rampage 2/11/22

ER: You would not believe the far-removed-from-relevant-discourse wrestling I have cluttering up my DVR. Sometimes I watch it, other times I don't. I've been mostly writing about 1997 WCW for my book over the past couple years, so haven't been watching much AEW or WWE. Happening across it, rarely making time for it, only vaguely aware of either promotions' storylines through my Twitter feed. Sometimes I'll have it on in the background, only passively paying attention, and that makes me automatically impressed by any match that ends up capturing my attention. This tag did, in a way that most Jurassic Express matches do not. I thought it showcased how good Jungle Boy can be as a face in peril, and showed how really good the Gunn Club are at cutting off a ring. It's a great heel team performance, a strong face in peril performance, and a great choice to keep Luchasaurus mostly on the apron. The structure does mean we build to an inevitable Luchasaurus hot tag, and that's the weakest part of the match, but things run so smoothly when he's not there that most of this match hums. 

Colten Gunn was getting really good at this point, two years ago. I don't know if he's made strides since, but he was getting real good then. I like how he doesn't go over for everything Jungle Boy does, stopping dead on a rope flip armdrag, and how it makes it mean more when Jungle Boy hits him with a bigger lariat to knock him down after; and how the next time he tags in the very first thing he does is turn Jungle Boy's ass upside down with his own bigger lariat, and later on scouts and avoids the same lariat that hit him the first time. It's a cool story in a face in peril tag match where they show that the babyface should have saved a couple of his tricks for when the match was winnable instead of early on as an overreaction. Colten has good timing - both Gunns do - and does things that really good wrestlers do, like throw punches from a standing position at an opponent who's on his knees. That's cool heel shit. Austin is a good guy to work the Picture in Picture stretch, because he's strong at holding Jungle Boy in place with convincing grounded headlocks that stay active, and I loved the stretch of him making a wild over-exaggerated tag out to his bro that makes him fly over the top to the floor, but then runs around the ring in time to pull Luchasaurus off the apron before he could tag in. Austin is very good at naturally blending planned theatricality into a match, and that's something that stands out in a promotion filled with guys trying to do that but doing it badly. 

I thought the hot tag was fine and liked the way they had Jungle Boy take out Luchasaurus with his tope, but I also am not sure I can name a larger wrestler with worse chops than Luchasaurus. The crowd is really really into the guy working a masked lizard TNA Lance Hoyt style. Hoyt was bad then, but imagine if he was doing standing moonsaults instead of learning how to throw a better chokeslam? The Gunns do a good job of feeding Luchasaurus but it's their chemistry with Jungle Boy and their timing that elevated this. But nobody in AEW actually listens to Fire of Love. 

2022 MOTY MASTER LIST

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/22 - 5/28 (Part 2)

AEW Double or Nothing 2023

MJF vs Sammy Guevara vs Darby Allin vs Jungle Boy

MD: We're almost a month from DEAN's passing now. I think about him all the time and about how he'd feel about this match or that. I miss his presence IMMEDIATELY after every single pro wrestling show was over, when he'd drop his train of thought, endless paragraph full of all the DEAN-isms you'd want. He was wildly positive, so much so that I kind of hate invoking him at the start of what's going to be a pretty negative write-up, but for all that the DVDVR guys disagreed on, there was one thing all of them, even the big guy, were all sure of: four-way matches are terrible. 

And sorry, but so was this.

Let's pull it back a bit and generalize. Why are these matches terrible? On paper, having more wrestlers in there should lead to more possibilities, more interactions. It should allow for more creative nearfalls due to break-ups, a better ability to hit and protect big moves. There should be different stories you can tell: temporary alliances, betrayals, fighting against the odds, etc. Unfortunately, all of that comes at a price. Wrestling is ultimately subjective. We all know that. Different people value different things. I put a lot on coherence and consequence. I want build and payoff. I want things to resonate and matter. You can only get that build and you can only achieve meaningful payoff if everything matters along the way. You get that resonance, that stickiness, that mattering through struggle and selling, through measured escalation and bringing things up and down and up again, through leaning into certain expectations and inverting others. The thread that runs through any match is suspension of disbelief and the ultimate killer of that is anything that raises a question in the mind of the viewer. If they're wondering why something happened or why something more logical or reasonable or simple didn't happen, then something's gone wrong. Thankfully, wrestlers have a lot of tools in their belt. It's not reality or an assurance of objective truth that guides the viewer but instead those tropes and expectations. It lets them accept an Irish Whip or a head going down for a back body drop, certain aspects of physics. It allows the viewer to accept a lot of things, so long as the execution is sharp enough. 

Not everything though, and any four-way is riddled with contrived moments. The language of pro wrestling tends to be communicated with two people in the ring at the same time. That's how lock-ups work. That's how most holds work. That's how struggle-filled competitive spots work. When you put a third or a fourth person in there, it changes the dynamic. All of the tropes and expectations start to fall apart. The natural state of a four-way is to have people asking "why?" and questioning things that are generally accepted in wrestling. It's not sustainable in the way a double team during a 5 second interval or even things breaking down towards the end of the match in a tag may be. When it's an exceptional state, it can work. When it's the baseline for a match, it becomes far more difficult. Therefore, much of the match is spent figuring out how to get wrestlers out of the picture, how to leave them prone on the outside so it can slip back to a more comfortable one on one engagement. 

Then, you couple that contrived necessity with the need to stress all the inherent possibilities in the most creative ways. What's the point of having a match like this if you don't push the envelope with it, right? That leads to guys waiting around for complex and cooperative multi-man spots for the sake of clever visuals. That's not bad in a vacuum but when you're starting from a point where that all important thread of disbelief being suspended is already frayed, it leads to one "Why" moment after the other, when the answer, more often than not, is that in a match like this, the spots are the point and the creativity is the point. Instead of trying to use the inherent possibilities to create a more compelling narrative end, the possibilities become the point in and of themselves. It means you might get one or two very clever, character driven, logical moments, but they get lost in an overflowing sea of sensation and creativity. 

So, those are the generalities. I don't want to get too into the specifics as this had the deck stacked against it to begin with by the nature of the match itself. What made it worse was the metatextual underpinnings of the specific storyline. You already had the dual-pressures of getting guys out of the match temporarily and the emotional need to push the creativity to the limit. On top of that, the wrestlers weren't necessarily wrestling to win but to prove their own importance and show off their legacy and cement their spot. In a controlled environment, you can still make that work. In a four-way with these specific wrestlers in this specific moment? Even the good things (and there were good things, the best of all being MJF's reactions) were drowned out. Let's just leave it at that. 

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AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 5/1 - 5/7

MD: Going to be more words than usual this week. I can't fill any sort of void except for maybe in my own heart but I'm feeling inspired. I know to a lot of people Dean was a sort of distant memory, someone who inspired them years ago or that went to shows or wrote with them. Those stories have meant so much to so many to see. Eric's post was wonderful. To people still on the DVDVR board, however, and there is still a board, and it's a pretty damn good place to talk about wrestling in longer form with more permanence than you can get on twitter or reddit, he was still a fixture. Dean retired a few years ago and started to watch every bit of televised wrestling and drop a sprawl of text immediately after it finished. It was distilled DEAN and an essential daily part of my life even just two weeks ago. Go click on this and read some of his posts over the last few months; you'll be glad you did. 

As for AEW, I said I might shift to covering a the webshows a bit more and what they do? Kill the webshows. If it's really because their TV partners didn't want them pushing content out on YouTube and if it speaks to the strength of that relationship, great. I'm really going to miss Dark and Elevation though. Elevation especially was how I got into AEW the most in late summer and early fall of 2021. Squashes and competitive mid-card matches with no commercials or time constraints or even plot progression built up my connection to wrestlers unfamiliar to me, and there were a lot. I get that you don't want to put squashes on TV and I get that sometimes these extra matches wore out crowds, but at its best, it allowed wrestlers to experiment, to get reps, to figure out what worked and what didn't and let crowds see certain stars (the Matt Hardys of the world), pop for their entrances and themes and signature moves, even when they weren't going to be on the main show. It gave us an Emi Sakura or Nyla Rose tag week after week after week after week and they were all a blast. It let the Acclaimed figure out how to be the Acclaimed or the Gunns figure out how to be the Gunns and let Athena as hard as one could go during one night in Canada and suddenly become one of the the best things in wrestling. I'm not sure how things will shake out in the months to come, if Rampage will serve this purpose more and if we'll get that itch scratched with the ROH studio tapings or if extra matches even end up on Bleacher Report, but I'll miss goofy rookie Elevation commentary from Wight and Menard (and Eddie Kingston for a while there!) and even goofier expert Dark commentary from Excalibur and Taz. I hope we see the return of Super Strong Suplex Machine sooner than later.

AEW Dynamite 5/3

Jericho Appreciation Society (Daniel Garcia/Jake Hager/Angelo Parker/Matt Menard) vs Orange Cassidy/Bandido/Adam Cole/Roderick Strong

MD: Nice big 8 man tag with a lot of little story beats. It's nice to see Strong outside of the WWE system again where he can feel like a big deal. That's part of the joy of AEW. I don't usually have a ton to say about Cole. My main takeaway on him is that he's been woefully miscast as a heel forever. The fans want to cheer him. They want to cheer his song. He has the offense of a scrappy babyface. He has the size of a scrappy babyface. I've seen him in interviews say that it's not an issue because he gets the fans to boo him during the match, but I honestly don't think that has played out in practice, at least not in AEW. This feels fresh. They played up the relationship between Cassidy and Cole but never really did anything with it unfortunately. The only sign of anything off at all was Bandido tagging Cole by slapping him on the back.

I liked how the match turned on the caught dive on Cassidy (with Garcia coming out nowhere with a knee to the back). I like Cole getting taken out when he went for Jericho at first opportunity; in general, even with him getting to tag with Strong again, he portrayed a certain intensity from his entrance to his first big boot, to the finish and both charges up the ramp. The buried what I was looking forward to the most in the commercial break, but 2.0 feeding and stooging for Orange Cassidy was a ton of fun as you'd expect, as was the suplex spots with Bandido. Garcia was a glorious jerk during the beat down on Cassidy, walking over him repeatedly and stepping on the ankle to prevent him getting away. Everyone got to get something in down the stretch. I'm looking forward to Strong against any of these guys and certainly to Hager vs Bandido if they ever want to run that, but Garcia is a top potential AEW Cassidy opponent and they're running that next week.

Darby Allin/Jungle Boy vs MJF/Sammy Guevara

MD: I don't think anyone would say that this main event angle has been a total success, though people can definitely appreciate that they're taking this swing and trying to elevate the pillars like this. What has worked, more than anything else, has been the MJF/Sammy pairing. In fact, given that we're still weeks from the PPV, it's a shame they've gone away from it here. I wouldn't mind if they go back to it at some later point. They were full on Heavenly Bodies/Too Cool here, full of themselves, congratulating one another, constantly jawing (including with the crowd during the commercial break to get big heat), constantly posturing. I would have liked some dumb simplistic double teams but I was ultimately happy with what we got, including the assisted abdominal stretch and Hollywood Blonds' terrible towel with Max's scarf.

Darby and Jungle Boy hit everything clean and played face-in-peril well enough, though the focus was really on the heel antics instead of the come back attempts. It's a bit like seeing Jarrett again. AEW's tag scene has had such a focus on big spots and cut off near falls that bullshit like this is fresh and really stands out. I liked Jungle Boy as a hot tag. We saw him so long with Luchasaurus where he didn't get to play that role. And Sammy looked amazing taking the tiger driver and code red, almost as good as I've ever seen either taken, which was impressive in such quick succession. Max's convoluted killshot looked great too, though he'd probably be better served with something way more simplistic that is just put over as deadly due to superior execution or some such. The finish with MJF and Sammy hitting moves but the other wanting the pin contrasted Darby tagging himself in but to hit a move and then go for the pin instead, making the babyfaces look somewhat more respectable while still playing into the animosity between them and pushing the 4-way to come. I have no idea what Khan has planned between now and May 28 but hopefully it's even more entertaining than the Sammy/MJF pairing; that feels like a bit of a high bar to clear though.

AEW Rampage 5/5

Lucha Bros/Hijo del Vikingo vs QTV (Powerhouse Hobbs/QT Marshall/Aaron Solo)

MD: Figured I'd give this some time too. There are a lot of different possible structures and narratives in pro wrestling. It doesn't have to be shine/heat/comeback. As long as there's a narrative throughline and things have weight and matter, as long as they have some semblance of build and payoff, you can do a lot of different things. Some stories are easier to tell than others. Some are more natural. Some require less work on the viewer. And, it's valid to occasionally just do a your move/my move fireworks spotfest so long as it's driven by a purpose on the card and it doesn't have a negative impact on it. Even then, however, I tend to find that last option limiting. If you pull back just a little on that, if you just take a breath and think things through, you can still hit a lot of those spots but underpin them with a more compelling narrative. Doing that will only make the spots feel more impressive and compelling because there'll be something providing them with actual substance. It's almost always additive if done well and smartly. The best wrestling is when people combine working smart and working hard, when you have both "workrate" and narrative, when one is the means and the other is the end.

So often with the Lucha Bros, I see a heck of a lot of means and not a lot of end. That's most especially true when they're up against similar opponents with similar mindsets. They try to go over the top and in doing so end up completely untethered. It pops the crowd in the moment but you end up remembering spots and moments, not the match as a whole.

One of the great things about AEW is the WAR-like nature of the potential pairings. You'll see Lucha Bros and Vikingo against the most logical guys in the world (let's say Rush and Dralistico) but you'll also see them here against QT, Hobbs, and Solo, three guys with wildly different skillsets. After a bit of posturing, QT took all of Vikingo's flashy stuff. I'll admit I had mixed feelings about his basing. In general, we applaud wrestlers for getting into positions on dives and saving the spot and their opponent. That's outside of the ring; when it happens in the ring however, it always feels a little dodgier. That was the case with the implosion 'rana. QT rushing to position made it feel more impactful but also poked at the suspension of disbelief just a tad. Still, it felt novel for him to be taking all the offense instead of someone like Kommander or Gringo Loco. There's value in that sort of dissonance too. Then Hobbs came in and just shut everything down. Solo is a 14 year vet 34 year old still trying to find his way but he can hit stuff clean and is pretty punchable, so it's not like he's a bad hand to have in there and to follow up Hobbs' stuff with a bunch of annoying offense to get under the crowd's skin. The built through the commercial break to the comeback and went into a finishing stretch. That's where we got the dives and the real bombs and because of the anticipation everything felt bigger than it would have if they were just escalating and escalating through spot after spot after spot. Speaking of escalating, I'm glad we didn't get the 630 through the table here. That shouldn't be an every match move, even if it's teased every match. It's one of the biggest spots in the promotion and they should only use it when it really matters, not against QT on a Rampage with a weird time spot. It was ok to do it a couple of times early to establish it but now keep it in the pocket so that when it happens, it means as much as humanly possible and that it also doesn't devalue other big dives and spots people do across the promotion. The finish felt a little abrupt to me but ultimately worked; Hobbs was distracted. Why was Hobbs distracted? Because he was choking Abrahantes and that's the best reason to lose a match I can think of.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death: Week of 5/30 - 6/5

AEW Dynamite 6/1

CM Punk/FTR vs. Max Caster/Gunn Club

MD: Obviously, it's hard to watch this one back and not be on the lookout for how Punk is hurt. They really build to him coming in the first time and he's there for the hot tag at the end, so there's not a ton of it but it was a little striking how often he went up to the top in that short time he was in there, a double axehandle to start, the body block back off the ropes, the elbow drop on Caster, the springboard attempt that goes wrong on his way in. The Gunns, Austin especially, with his manic energy, have a lot of potential, but they're not there yet. I've come around on Austin's chop block to take out the legs. The first times I saw it, it felt inadvertent, a move of opportunity that shouldn't come up every match, but now he seems to look for it more, as part of his overarching strategy. He's great at reacting when he knows something is coming, when it's a planned spots, but you never know when the crowd is going to start an ass boys chant and he's not always so great at organically working that in. Punk, on the other hand, old pro that he is, can switch a facial expression or little appeal to the crowd mid-sequence depending on how they're reacting. Most of the match was the heat on Dax, and it was good, with a great cut off to lead into the commercial as Dax knocked two of his opponents out of the ring only to have them rush around to take out Punk and Cash off the apron. The fact he put them in position to do so made it even better. Having Billy to sneak in a punch and Bowens to use the crutch only helped matters. Any issues with the match down the stretch were due to Punk's foot, and the internal feeling in your gut that we'll be missing out on what this pairing might have been the start of.

Matt Hardy/Christian Cage/Darby Allin/Jurassic Express vs. Hikuleo/Young Bucks/ReDragon

MD: This was the homecoming match for the Bucks and was going to showcase them while also theoretically giving a little attention to Hikuleo in advance of Forbidden Door, given that Cole is apparently banged up. It wasn't going to be for me but I thought the structure was generally effective for what they were trying to do. Here, there the sort of shine where everyone got to get their stuff in before the dives were all to set up the transition, by clearing the ring so that you were left with Christian and the Bucks. The most interesting moment in there was Christian interacting with Matt Hardy for a moment. Anyway, it meant that Christian worked as face-in-peril during the commercial which is always where they stick the heat, and even though it was a fairly pro-Bucks crowd, by the end of it, there was a chant for him because he's one of the best traditional babyfaces in the company. I know people are itching for the Express to lose the titles and Christian to turn on Jungle Boy but I've always much preferred Christian as a face and there's about another thirty match-ups I'd like to see him have in the company before such a turn. After the hot tag to Luchasaurus it all broke down like you'd expect, an extended, chaotic finishing stretch leading to the Bucks ascendant. Hikuleo got to show a few things here defensively, jamming the chokeslam attempt, catching a dive, no selling Hardy's slams into the corner, but he didn't do much of anything on offense which seemed like a bit of a missed opportunity. This wasn't anything I was particularly looking forward to but it gave the crowd things that they wanted and had enough good things that it did me no lasting harm.

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AEW All Out 9/5/21 Pt. 1

Private Party/Jack Evans/Angelico/Matt Hardy vs. Jungle Boy/Orange Cassidy/Luchasaurus/Wheeler Yuta/Chuck Taylor

PAS: This was a match full of guys I am a low voter on (I like Jungle Boy, Hardy and Jack Evans a fair amount, the rest aren't for me), but this kind of fast moving 10 man is a good way to hid limited guys and keep things moving at a nice pace. The Private Party have some fun SAT's double teams, and didn't have to do things they couldn't do. The top rope blockbuster by Jungle Boy was a great spot, and they did some amusing Chikara stuff like the chicken fight and submission chain, and left slow motion spots and invisible grenades in the trash where they belong. I don't know why Chuck Taylor did two dives to the floor and Jack Evans did none and Luchasarus needs to dump the spin kick when Tommy End is in your fed, but otherwise this got Cassidy and Jungle Boy on the show and it is smart to get really over acts like them to open a show. 

Eddie Kingston vs. Miro - EPIC

PAS: The first real Eddie Kingston classic we have seen in AEW. This was King's Road Eddie, he maybe the only US wrestler to actually understand what made those All Japan matches so special, and it wasn't the moves it was the meaning. Eddie and Miro really beat the hell out of each other with Miro landing great looking kicks and straight rights and Eddie absolutely beating the hell out of Miro's chest and neck with blood blistering chops. I loved the little selling Eddie did throughout the match, eyes getting glassy after eating big shots, never fully able to get movement in his back after getting powerslammed on the floor, shaking out his fingers when Miro bit them, masterful stuff from one of the greatest sellers in wrestling history. All of the stuff with the turnbuckle pad was great business. Remsberg being a beat too slow on the Kingston pinfall, him stopping Kingston from slamming Miro into the turnbuckle only to be out of position and miss the low blow. This is how you protect an over babyface like Eddie, he was the better man, but lost out due to fate. This is another level performance by Miro and another feather in Eddie's all time resume. 

ER: Incredible, passionate performance for Eddie Kingston, a guy with a career's worth of great passionate matches. He's the guy I currently want to see against every other wrestler, the guy I think is most likely to have someone's best match (at least until Hero gets back). And if there's a Miro match I've ever enjoyed more, it's been many years since it happened, as these two really tapped into something. This is the coolest version of Miro we've gotten, and I love Eddie in big title matches so I was buzzed about it. Eddie got to have a great selling match, working a ton of match long bits in between quick bursts of damaging Miro. Eddie brings that ability to have a chance in any moment of the match, the same way Fujiwara was always in it. Kingston could lose every single match he's in for two years straight and people will still believe he has a chance the next match. It's a strong connection and it elevates his biggest singles matches. 

I fully bought into how big each guy was missing, both running hard into turnbuckles and guardrails, and I also bought into how both would immediately come firing back. Kingston firing off the guardrail with a yakuza kick or how Miro would scream into Eddie. Eddie's chops really did look blistering, and the way all of his offense had these triumphant builds due to the way Miro had avoided them really added to his aura. Seeing Kingston finally land his tope or his backfist really meant something, and the two suplexes he hit looked like a title change. I really liked all the nonsense with the turnbuckle, loved the way it played out. Miro's winning combo was like something Kingston himself would set up: A mule kick low, big high kick, and a big exclamation point running kick to turn out the lights. Great presentation, great title match. 

Jon Moxley vs. Satoshi Kojima

PAS: This was a solid hard hitting New Japan style match which I think was hurt a bit by following Kingston and Miro doing a better version of a similar thing. They really put Kojima over on commentary and it is cool he got to have a big US moment like this. Stuff landed with thuds and I thought Kojima got several big near falls (without ever hitting his Koji lariat), the DDT on the apron looked appropriately nasty and the bloody elbow from Moxley added a bit of spice to the match. But this had a lot of the elbow strike, make a face, elbow strike stuff which I don't like in current Japanese wrestling. Suzuki coming out post match felt like a big moment and I like how AEW takes advantage of an open door policy to have surprises like this.

2021 MOTY MASTER LIST

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2021 Ongoing MOTY List: Jungle Boy vs. Omega

23. Kenny Omega vs. Jungle Boy AEW Dynamite 6/26

PAS: This was a very good Race/Flair style NWA title defense from Omega, which isn't really something I have seen in him before. Jungle Boy is the fan favorite underdog who is there to prove he belongs in the ring with a champion. The crowd singing along to Tarzan Boy, the family in the crowd, it really gave him the local star feel even though this wasn't a territory. I thought the chop exchanges early really gave this a Pillman vs. Flair WCWSN feel, and I thought the back work during the picture in picture was cool, although hurt by the ads (they should really look into going commercial free for special main events like this). The multiple dives were really cool, and I liked how Omega didn't break out any dives of his own to try to outshine Jungle Boy, he kept it mostly grounded and worked as the bigger guy. I really liked both snare trap near falls, and Omega having to rip hair and eyes to get out of the second one really put over the danger of that move. I didn't care for the forearm exchange and thought it had a kick out or two too many in the middle of the end stretch, but that is 2021 wrestling for you. Omega finished it clean which was the right call and it certainly took no shine off of Jungle Boy to lose. The goal here was to give the young kid a couple of big moments and make the crowd believe next time he gets a shot he might have a shot, and they really did that here.  

ER: A smart match that really presented Jungle Boy like a real star, and if this was somehow your first time seeing him you definitely would have thought he was a star. The crowd reactions were incredibly strong throughout, and it made it really easy to believe we were going to see an upset. Jungle Boy was clearly the underdog, but it's cool seeing Omega actually work a bit like a heavy. I was expecting this to be Omega competing with JB as a flash contest, but instead it was Omega's overly complicated offense that kept giving Jungle Boy openings. Omega is good at getting under JB's skin, loved that weirdo bullshit in the beginning where Omega was gingerly removing hair from Jungle Boy's eyes, and loved the juxtaposition late in the match of Omega yanking that hair to get out of the snare trap. Boy's strikes looked good, his elbows to the jaw and back of the head genuinely did look like strikes that would stagger Omega, but they were also smart about not turning this into a big strike exchange. Boy outquicks Omega, nails a couple tope suicidas and a tope con giro, and manages to reverse the OWA a couple of times (which makes sense as it should be the reversed move in wrestling). The poison rana as a OWA is where that move actually makes the most natural sense, and I loved how the pulled it off here. I thought some of the kickouts or big moves were a bit much, and I hate spots like that superplex that Jungle Boy had to stand perfectly still for while Omega fiddled with getting his legs crossed just right, but the big beats were hit loudly, and hit well. 

2021 MOTY MASTER LIST

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 3/3/21

What Worked

-Shaq went through a table on a Wednesday night, and I cannot not enjoy that. 

-Even with a truly putrid Luchasaurus performance and a dumb finish with clunky interference from a "masked individual" (the return from a several month absence of the legendary Shawn Spears), it was impossible to not absolutely love the performance from Tully and FTR. They even got JJ Dillon (great touch) and he blasted Jungle Boy with his loafer. But Tully wrestled so much better than anyone could have reasonably expected, and I honestly have no clue how this guy hasn't been putting in a few high profile indy performances every year of the last 25. He had great body shots on Marko and some awesome knee lifts, and was great at working bullshit from the apron (like standing on Jungle Boy's hair!), and for a quick paced match there was not one moment where it looked like things had to be slowed down for him. He was integrated into things perfectly, and that's not really too shocking as his timing has always been excellent. But seeing how good he looked here just made me want to see more, and also want to desperately know how he worked off any ring rust. And that was BEFORE he hit a slingshot suplex! Seriously how has he not been cashing in on indy dates?? FTR also looked excellent, really brutal, Cash Wheeler especially. He was great cutting the ring off, threw a fantastic uppercut, really felt the most like prime Arn I've seen in ages. FTR worked quicker than the much quicker JX, and managed to look punishing the entire time. Awesome performance for all three of them, even though the Arn Horseman fingers during the post-match couldn't have come off more forced. 

-Max Caster's pre-match rap actually got me to choke a bit on my coffee when he dropped the line about Lady Gaga's dog walker. Caster's pre-match raps are easily the best thing about his act, but it's a good part of the act. Match goes below. 

-Marq Quen is great at taking high backdrop bumps and beals, and that is a genuine skill. His regular backdrops look great, but his flipping 450 "backdrop" that landed him on his face looked amazing, incredible height and a wicked landing. Everything else he does goes down below. 

-John Silver had a fun performance in the main, a guy who can chain combos together without making it look like the opponent is waiting to get hit, and a compact powerhouse who believably launched Quen around the ring. Silver beal tossing Quen across the ring looked like Bradshaw throwing around Kaientai. 

What Didn't Work

-Mixed tag worked about as well as it possibly could have, but it was quite the mess. A fun mess at times, but a mess nonetheless. The sight of Shaq in the ring was enough to make me enjoy this, loved how terrible his form was on his overhand chop and it still sounded like the hardest chop Cody has ever taken. The Shaq powerbomb looked great, and I thought it was incredibly stupid that Cody was up seconds later and actually body slammed Shaq. Bodyslamming Shaq 4 minutes into his first pro wrestling match is definitely something that HHH would have done had the WWE been able to bring him in (and seriously, how the hell did WWE never make Shaq a big enough offer to appear at Mania!?), but that doesn't make it any less stupid here. Jade Cargill is going to be a big deal if she sticks to it, but at this point she is maybe almost as good as Midnight? Almost everything she did looked rough (although I liked her spinebuster), and Red Velvet was not the seasoned pro who was going to be able to lead her to anything worthwhile. Nobody else in the match did Velvet any favors either, and having multiple people miss a catch on a moonsault to the floor is something AEW has shown to be unparalleled at. The table spot was great, Cody riding Shaq down into the ground, but a lot of this was bad, even with the lowered expectations of having essentially two non-workers in the match. 

-Fenix/PAC squash match stunk, but at least it was over quick. John Skyler waited bent at the waist for a PAC sliding kick that didn't look good, and Fenix missed a legsweep kick by more than maybe any missed kick I've ever seen. Fenix later did a cool rope walk punt on Skyler's partner on the apron, and that missed by at least a foot. Thigh slap was there though. 

-Tully, you're 67 years old. Just wrestle without a shirt, buddy. Nobody cares if you don't have abs, you don't have to dress like a bike courier.  

-Women's match was rough, so many of the spots looked downright bad. Rose had a really nice face first bump off the apron to the floor for a convincing count out tease, and almost everything else in the match looked bad. Rose seems to have no lifting power whatsoever, her slams all looked like Mizunami was doing all of the lifting herself. The superplex was so bad, and if you can't make it look like you're at least attempting to suplex someone, maybe you should not do a superplex. Mizunami didn't look much better, and her guillotine legdrop may be one of the worst in modern wrestling. The bad spots kept coming throughout, peaking when Mizunami had to stay hung over the ropes for 15 seconds waiting for Nyla's kneedrop, like this was a year 2000 indy match. And for as much as the commentary crew were blown away that that kneedrop didn't finish the match, Mizunami sure was back on her feet immediately doing her own big offense. Bad layout, bad execution, bad match. 

-Ten vs. Caster definitely felt like one of those dreadfully dull matches that would happen before a Raw main event, so it was fitting that this went on at 9:35. Ten especially looked bad, looked like a guy who was wrestling with a concussion. He moved slow, threw bad strikes, and laid around a lot, really odd performance. You'd think a guy would be more excited to get on TV. Caster is real hammy, which is fine, but he needs some offense that actually looks good. Everything looks way too light, bad arm strikes, soft stomps, uninspiring arm work, bad at tying any of the action together. Nice brainbuster, which is something. 

-On a night with a lot of bad offense, Marq Quen had the unreservedly worst offense on the entire card. Show me someone with worst stomps or worst strikes, and I'll show you someone who should consider another profession. You wouldn't expect a non-wrestler to have offense as bad as Quen's, and in fact this show had TWO non-wrestlers with better looking offense! Honestly he should just be a manager. He can take a great backdrop bump while managing, and then wouldn't have to do any offense, which he can't do anyway. 

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 1/27/21

What Worked

Eddie Kingston vs. Lance Archer - GREAT

ER: Opening a show with Eddie Kingston is always going to give you a good shot at landing up top, and the bonus here was getting one of the best Lance Archer singles matches. Favorite Archer Match is basically like saying Favorite Car Insurance Payment, but this was more Archer working Kingston's match before blowing Kingston up, and that's going to land well with me. Kingston makes Archer's offense look better than a lot of his offense against juniors. He has modern big man syndrome, meaning he too often tries to work down to his opponents when they're juniors, and seeing his offense take down a bigger guy like Kingston is more effective. Kingston takes offense really well; not athletically, but in terms of making offense seem effective. He lands in ways that you can feel. I loved him picking Archer apart with punches. He threw a straight punch right into Archer's kidney, followed that up with a couple body shots on the other side, kicked at the back of Archer's knee, bit and clawed at Archer's face, King shit. JR on commentary nicely pointed out that "Kingston knows all the right spots to hit someone" and they talk about him being a street fighter from childhood. 

Kingston takes an insane bump to the floor, looking like they were trying to recreate the Vic Grimes XPW bump from half the distance. King lands hip first on the apron, gets upended to the floor, could have easily landed on his head. Nuts. And King continues to get beaten around the ring (there's a great moment where Kingston gets run face first into a camera, which feels like the kind of shot that winds up in TV show intros), takes a bunch of hard slams, Archer hits a cool standing splash out of the corner, all building up to what looks like a Kingston dying on his sword performance. The finish could have been more interesting (Archer gets distracted by Butcher and Blade attacking Jake, Kingston hits the backfist) and would have played better if Kingston just won with a loaded backfist. You want to protect Archer, have him decimate King but then eat a roll of quarters to the jaw, don't make him stare away at his opponent for a long time and then lose. 

PAS: Great Kingston performance, which he really could have had against anyone. Eddie isn't really a stunt bumper, so that chokeslam hip first on the ring apron was really shocking. He also really laid out for some of Archer's slams, and did a tremendous job selling a back injury. Archer was pretty shitty in this though, constantly making "I'm Evil" faces in the camera, what a cornball. He stopped after every move to do a bug eyed glare, and mouth things like "you are in my playground" "death has come to take his reward". Just the worst home movie horror film shit. There are so many 6'6 guys who have washed out of WWE in the last decade, can't they dig up Mike Knox and give him Jake Roberts? Vladamir Koslov? Hell even Snitsky would be better then this. Archer also really has trouble moving, he executes his moves OK, but he can't really run the ropes or even walk well. Kingston is incredible and this is a virtuosos one man show, I just want a better dance partner. 

-Jericho ending his match with a great Lionsault and smug look to the camera is an awesome way to end a match a week after bouncing his head off the mat on a Lionsault. It's petty, but it was the right move. I liked the tag, liked that MJF is getting better at being a stooge heel, better at stooge heel bumping. Pillman and Garrison had good fire even though a bunch of their offense didn't look great (Pillman has weirdly been throwing a lot of his dropkicks over the shoulder just past his opponent, often enough that it has to be intentional), but I liked it. 

-Segment went way too long, but I liked Arn's promo, understanding that Cody's head wasn't all in the ring, focusing on the importance of his baby. It will probably end up feeling like a dumb thing to construct an angle around, don't think most within the feud have the acting chops to pull off that kind of family drama, but Arn is one of them. Arn's promo up here, segment as a whole down there. 

-Baker/Shanna is another match that felt too long, but it's the best I've seen Shanna look. She was on Dynamite in a couple longish matches a year ago and looked completely out of place. She whipped herself over on suplexes really well, missed a gnarly low dropkick that landed her hard on the bottom rope, and really I liked how she took all of Baker's offense. I even liked her jumping stunner! Baker had an awesome crossface chickenwing that looked like she was trying to misalign Shanna's jaw, and I think that viciousness throughout the match was more important than showing the ways Shanna has improved on Dark. Baker has a big match with Thunder Rosa coming up. She shouldn't be taking close 2 counts against Shanna. 

-Truthfully, I didn't pay a ton of attention to the main event. But John Silver really stood out above all the rest, a guy who has really been justifying his increased TV time and has been working like he's having the time of his life. That kind of thing is infectious. 

What Didn't Work

-I hate how Adam Page works his showcase "squash" matches. I mean it's kind of cool that a guy who washed out of WWF developmental could get a chance to show off his 2013 WWF offense for an extended TV look, but it's also kind of weird. Another thing I don't understand is him keeping his rope flip clothesline as his finisher. In this match alone he hit two clotheslines BETTER than his finisher, including one where he just brick walls Ryan Nemeth. If Page dropped the rest of his frilly shit, he's not far from being a guy I'm interested in seeing. 

-Feels rude to put Harwood/Jungle Boy down here but this went twice as long as it should have. I think things would have been just as effective as a normal match, and I thought the extended finishing run did them no favors. Jungle Boy worked a long fast home stretch segment without really missing a beat, but my problem with it was that it felt like a guy focusing on not missing a beat. He didn't look like a guy who had taken a pretty body tenderizing beating from Harwood, he looked like a guy keeping his steps straight. I really really liked everything up past Harwood's awesome slingshot sitout powerbomb, but once things went into overdrive I was ready for it to end at any point for several minutes. JB showed me some neat things in the first half, like I noticed how he was really sliding for Harwood's ankles on a dropdown, attention to basics showing how he's improving. Harwood ran into him hard a few times, and this felt like a really good Bret/Waltman tribute match. But then things shifted pace and it just felt like the exact same kind of match we get a couple times a week on AEW. The thousand yard stare on Jungle Boy's face, not thinking a lick of the beating he took, and practically mouthing the beats as he thinks about how to properly roll out of the kickout to the next spot, is the stuff I hate. 

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 10/21/20

 What Worked

-Wardlow/Jungle Boy was a decent enough muscle head vs. flyer match, maybe a 0.3 on the 2002 Brock scale. Wardlow is missing something with his offense that I can't quite put my finger on. He's a bit too polished, so doesn't have the joyful carelessness of a jacked up Power Plant guy, and he's missing aggression. Walking around and breathing heavily after hitting F5 variations doesn't quite do it for me. So this match hinged on Jungle Boy's comeback sequence, and that I liked. His forearms hit at least as hard as Wardlow (which really says more about Wardlow than JB), but the dropkick to the back looked good and the tope to the back looked even better. That tope is probably what got this up top. 

-With more practice, Kenny Omega's dancers could be almost as good as the fine Minnesotan dancers of Let's Bowl. 

-I could not be happier that AEW seems to have realized how fantastic Eddie Kington's weekly TV presence is and let him just scream into several microphones. The guy is great and you can tell anyone seeing or hearing him for the first time thinks he comes off like a major star. I am so excited at just the sheer potential of what they can do and how far they can do it with him. If you didn't watch Fenix/Pentagon and only listened to Kingston on commentary, you'd think it was an actual great match. 

-I watched a lot of bad dance routines masquerading as wrestling in the first 80 minutes of this episode, so I appreciated that Jericho and MJF at least did a bad dance routine masquerading as a bad dance routine. They obviously didn't have the chops of Bing Crosby/Donald O'Connor, but they knew the proper way to look into the camera while delivering a song's punchline and that goes a long way. The porterhouse ordering open felt far too similar to the Key & Peele Soul Food sketch for me to give it much credit, but I actually loved the bookended payoff of Jericho saying "we're going to have to send these back" after bluffing themselves into ordering rarer and rarer steaks. 

-Britt Baker's match lost the thread a little bit at times (a kick that was supposed to be caught wasn't, Britt's sling blade does not look great), but was more competitive than I was expecting and didn't overextend itself. KiLynn King bumped big for Britt's offense and got her face punched nicely into the mat on a curb stomp. A lot of AEW squash matches give their opponent way too much, or do something similar to Omega/Kiss where it's over in two moves. The finish of this was never in doubt but I liked the few openings that King got, and liked what she did with them. 

What Didn't Work

-Kenny Omega is an indisputable dweeb. Can't decide if commissioning someone to say "Broke the Meltzer 5 star scale" is worse than those Kurt Angle promos where he would talk about putting on a match of the year. 

-Thank god Eddie Kingston was on commentary during Fenix/Pentagon, because he was the only thing that could have made that pile worthwhile. You'd think Pentagon would be a little more inspired working opposite his flashier, more entertaining brother, but you would be wrong! I'm not certain I saw a single Pentagon kick that didn't show light, and the entire match was a full reset after every single move and kickout. The opening "I know my opponent" dance party looked lazy, like two people looking ahead to dance step 3 before they had completed step 2, so you had things like those garbage pinball attempts where the person pinning is already rolling themselves off before the person being pinned has even moved. Midway through Fenix appeared to brain himself doing a reverse rana off the top, just crunching straight down on his neck and head. It looked really really bad so things naturally got more disjointed after as it appeared they were stalling for time. Pentagon did a derpy rolling DDT that either shouldn't have been attempted or should have only been attempted if his brother could move, and so instead just looked like three separate blown spots. The home stretch was trash, just Fenix doing a big move for a nearfall, then rest, then both standing up, then Pentagon doing a big move for a nearfall. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, no consequences, no transitions, no interest whatsoever. Fenix hit a great tornillo, Kingston saved what he could. 

-I was not buying the "gritty fight feel" of Cabana/Page. This whole thing just felt all over the map. Both guys had moments of standing up from a strike with gritted teeth, you know, real cowboy shit, and a few seconds later Page would be hitting a standing shooting star or Cabana would be hitting a headscissors. They wanted to have a juniors match, then they'd want to have a war, then they'd want to do some nearfall kickouts, it all felt like pieces were pulled from different matches. The beginning had some "fast exchanges" that weren't fast, leading commentary to cover by calling Cabana "deceptionably" fast, which is not a word just as Cabana is not deceptively fast. I liked Page catching Cabana's stupid slow crawl through the legs spot and turning it into a pin, and Page's back bump to the apron was nuts (and completely wasted and unnecessary in a match like this, but I did like Cabana's follow up splash off the apron). Page's match finishing lariat looked like a finish, but man the flip portion of it is never going to be not dumb. 

-Tag scramble had some moments but was overall a big ol' mess. I am not sure if Marq Quen is a constant victim of bad catching or if he's just a man who is very good at diving one foot to the side of his opponent. I'm not sure if he's been doing super high tope con hilos onto concrete intentionally, or if I've been reading the move wrong and it's actually a flipping clothesline and I've just incorrectly been focusing on the future arthritis gifting flat back bumps on the floor. His shooting star press that always falls a foot and a half short falls a foot and a half short a bit later, so that might contain the answer. Things got really uncomfortable when Isiah Kassidy hits a guillotine legdrop that almost disconnects Alex Reynolds' head from his body. You can see his jaw snap over and his body goes stiff. Blade figures this out when he picks up his arm and realizes he's dragging a dead body. He drags Reynolds corpse into the corner and - a real pro - uses Reynolds' hand to tag in. But it looked like  nobody else in the ring knew Reynolds was out cold. He was motionless towards the corner with his legs crossed, people crashing into him on landings. Reynolds is a total nutbar, so the second he barely comes to he immediately goes into a sequence with Nick Jackson, which was really insane because the guy looked like he had no idea where he was. It was weird watching him move by pure in ring muscle memory and still manage to be a part of a three person sequence. You can't grade his execution but he hit his marks and that impressed the hell out of me. It was clear that he wouldn't have even been able to tie his shoes in his condition, and here he was taking a high knee in the corner and a bulldog. Silver and Reynolds were the saving grace here, and Butcher/Blade had some nice moments (I do like that suplex into knees), but the match got uncomfortable when nobody in ring or on commentary was acknowledging Reynolds was a dead body. Bad night for that to happen, after Fenix's near broken neck. 

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 9/16/20

What Worked

-FTR get the tag match up here, but Luchasaurus kept trying to drag it down. Luchasaurus is at his best when he's working as first year Test, and he is near unbearable when he is Test working as a Young Buck. Luckily, he worked more Test than Buck (the one stretch with him as an Cretaceous Buck was as bad as ever), and weirdly enough Jungle Boy is way better when he doesn't do as many moves. Jungle Boy is someone who actually does some small things well (I am a big fan of his dropdown) but I don't really love his highspots. Well, here he worked down as well and I think the match benefitted from that. It also benefitted from Cash Wheeler bumping hard (the Psicosis bump was awesome) and that sneaky pinfall win was legitimately the most they felt like the Brain Busters since joining AEW.

-What a great little Frankie Kazarian performance. That has to be the best Frankie Kazarian match since....well, I can't remember the last time I talked about a great Frankie Kazarian performance. The match went longer than it needed, but Kazarian working his age is a good thing, as Page was the one here who was working much more silly offense. Kazarian not only made some of Page's more suspect offense look great (Page usually has a weak pescado, here Kazarian made it look lung deflating), leaned all the way into clotheslines, always in the right place at the right time. What I liked most about Kazarian, and what felt most age appropriate about his offense was all of the right hands he threw. Kazarian isn't a guy I think of as a "puncher", and I'm not sure I've seen a match where he threw more. I like his right hand. He's got good form and it's a genuinely nice worked punch, and I liked the way he used it to cut off Page throughout the match. He tightened up elbow strikes too, and used that to nicely cut off Page as well. I hate the stuff like "run down the length of the apron just to get clotheslined without even trying to do offense, just running down the apron" or "I hit you and run but you run after me and hit me but then I run after you and hit you" and the match did have that bullshit. But it also had Kazarian blocking a bulldog by snapping off a Russian legsweep variation, and the Kazarian performance elevated this to a level I wasn't expecting. Good match.

-Kingston on the mic, gonna be up here. "Check the rules."

-I really liked Hager in that tag. Not sure what's happening tonight, but I didn't have Kazarian or Hager on my list of guys I was looking forward to seeing. Hager bumped super generously for Private Party without making it look ridiculous, and all his close range work looked great. I dug Kassidy ragdolling for the Judas Effect, and Jericho punching Quen across the temples, but Hager was the real standout for me here. He had an actual cool reckless shooter vibe that I think he's tried before but never quite nailed. The dives looked good, they got out of there at the right time, fun quick match.

-Thunder Rosa/Ivelisse was pretty messy, but I liked the layout and the messiness looked like it lead to more stiff strikes than we might have otherwise gotten. Hitting sloppy ranas and mirror sequences where someone is one beat off? That kind of thing sucks, but I laughed when Ivelisse cracked Rosa with a slap, and laughed again when Rosa stopped Ivelisse dead in her tracks by burying a hard dropkick in her stomach. Ivelisse worked a nice sleeper choke (sadly marginalized into picture in picture) and if the execution where stronger throughout this would have been quite good. I bet they could run back this same match and some sequences would come out tighter. Even with the flaws, it stood above most other AEW women's matches so far.

-I did not care about the Best Friends/LAX build, hate Chuck Taylor feuds, wouldn't have ever guessed it could go somewhere interesting. And then they go out and have an insanely violent Zona 23 style parking lot brawl. What? This had some spills in it (a LOT, really) that were as nasty or nastier than anything in the Finlay/Regal parking lot brawl. Am I stupid for saying a match with Chuck Taylor had tons of comparably violent moments to two a famously violent match featuring two of my 20 favorite wrestlers of all time? Possibly, but I loved the damage these four took. This match had some of the most gruesome vehicle-based spots I've seen. By the end of this everyone was bleeding out of places that don't typically bleed in a wrestling match. Ortiz got jammed under the hood of a car and crushed in painful ways by Taylor and Trent, Trent hitting a senton while Ortiz's leg was still hanging out. Trent got powerbombed into the windshield of a truck, and while the announcers were focusing on his cut up back from the glass I couldn't stop seeing the back of his head getting whipped into the top frame. Sure, that bloody back is gonna mess up the upholstery of his mom's minivan, but that check to the back of the head is gonna mess up his cognitive functions in his 60s. Trent also got slingshotted straight into a down truck tailgate, so he was really trying to be an equal opportunity brainpan destroyer. The board shots all looked nasty (especially Ortiz cracking Trent in the back and then blasting him in the ribs). Powerbombs on truck tops, backdrops on cars, spears into a car grill, and a piledriver off a truck tool box? Yeah, shoot that in my veins.


What Didn't Work

-MJF should get that mark on his neck checked out. I have an irregular shaped mark on my chest and getting it checked out was a real weight off my mind. Someone needs to be monitoring that mark and make sure it's not growing. Can we get some 2018 MJF photos where he's facing to his right?

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 9/9/20

What Worked

-Eddie Kingston used a microphone, obviously it winds up here. I giggled every time he yelled at the Lucha Bros. to separate.

-I like Joey Janela when he is a Jericho punching bag.

-ALL ELITE HEELS IS REAL!!!!! I saw something about it on Twitter weeks ago and thought someone made a hilarious meme.

-Dustin match goes up here, but it was close. Brodie Lee looked really bad here, looking like someone who had no idea where he needed to be and couldn't think of interesting ways to get there. Dustin made this as salvageable as it was, so basically Dustin turning in a typical Dustin performance gets this up here. If I wasn't lazy I would write the Dustin part here and the Lee part down below, but let's call it at 55% good. Lee stumbled his way through things and looked lame enough through parts of this that it made me think there's a chance he is pulling double duty as Luchasaurus. Lee had a bunch of moments where he was just waiting to take moves, with no artistry whatsoever. He telegraphs all of Dustin's offense by just standing perfectly still and waiting for it, just horrible at occupying himself. When he took Dustin's drop down uppercut he literally just bent at the waist with his head up, watching Dustin the entire time while standing still. What a fucking idiot. He was at his best when he was Godzilla, throwing tables and barricades into Dustin while Dustin scrambled to safety, Dustin throwing punches while working to avoid him. But Lee has been bit by that really contagious Dijakovic bug, that makes him chain together a bunch of offense that looks like total rehearsed shit. He make Dustin's bulldog look like shit, and the finish was especially risible. The finishing lariat looked good, but making Dustin bounce back and forth between the ropes and his boot might have sounded like a good idea on paper, but it was hilarious in execution. Dustin keeps this here - barely - and Brodie Lee's stock has fallen every single week he's been in AEW.


What Didn't Work

-You know who stinks in AEW? Luchasaurus. That's a guy who stinks up a match. I really thought he had made strides in Lucha Underground, but he is pro wrestling poison in AEW. He always throws off the timing of a match, as everyone slows down to work in his spots and he does bad slow versions of cruiserweight spots. It wouldn't be SO bad if any of his spots looked good, but the thing is, none of his spots look good. Fenix looked great doing Fenix things, loved his rope work and his big dive into Luchasaurus down the finishing stretch (that Luchasaurus caught by falling over), but the finish of this was as putrid as anything Luchasaurus did. This was one of the more idiotically laid out finishes I've seen in AEW. Lucha Bros. hit a package piledriver on Jungle Boy, the Fenix hits the dive, gets back in the ring, but Jungle Boy is apparently Actually Fine from taking a tandem package piledriver just seconds before, and tricks Pentagon into giving Fenix a flipping piledriver. Incredibly, impossibly stupid.

-I guess I should be glad that they didn't work a physical angle with Hardy, but once I saw Reby there with their child I thought "Oh man Matt Hardy is gonna get fucked up". And I'm a monster because I am left disappointed by a man who clearly got a very bad concussion did not get nuked on TV a few days later.

-Jack Evans has just been on the roster, not being on TV? And he's not even wrestling tonight, just appearing at ringside? There are plenty of chuds on TV every week that should be replaced with Evans. Cassidy/Angelico (oh yeah, they still have Angelico too. I have not watched any episodes of Dark) was ehhhh. I liked Angelico's Jerry bump, but th Navarro sub looked like it was the first time he was trying it, and all of Cassidy's offense landed feather light. Then we end the segment with some Best Friends and this is firmly in the bottom half of the page.

-Not only do we get a segment showcasing Kip Sabian's comedy chops (and an unexpected Puf appearance), but Rusev/Miro is here and lemme tell you people, he's got something things to say about SOME PEOPLE UP NORTH. We know who HE'S talking about!! Get outta here. Bring someone in and do something other than that, ANYTHING other than that. Also, Miro is absolute wedding poison. Nobody should want him anywhere near an official role in their wedding. You'd think he wouldn't even want to be involved. THOSE PEOPLE UP NORTH had me do some stupid
wedding cuck angle. I'm going DOWN SOUTH to also then do a wedding angle.

-Boy, Hager/Sonny Kiss is an ugly style clash. Kiss has been great in trios matches, awkward in tags and singles, and Hager is not going to help him look good. I liked Janela's big bumps to the floor, liked Jericho getting run into a chair, but there was a lot of clunk in this tag.

-I did not anticipate FTR being this toothless in AEW. I'd rather see them Old School Tag Wrasslin on Main Event rather than these weekly talk segments and disappointing matches.

-You know what the women's division was missing? Someone with another awkward style that requires matches to come to a halt just so bad looking spots can be done. Well, they checked that box with Tay Conti! Capoeira almost always translates poorly to pro wrestling (I have been a fan of some Arturo Ruas matches, others I found his capoeira getting completely in the way). He submissions looked slow, her kicks looked bad. She hit one nice knee on the floor. And she's going to be a babyface? She feels like a natural heel to me, but hey, they seem to know what they're doing with this division.

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