AEW Five Fingers of Death 11/10 - 11/16 Part 1

AEW Dynamite 11/12/25

Death Riders (Wheeler Yuta/Daniel Garcia/Claudio Castagnoli/Jon Moxley/PAC) vs Darby Allin/Orange Cassidy/Kyle O'Reilly/Roderick Strong/Mark Briscoe [Blood & Guts] 

MD: Everything was going Jon Moxley's way. 

It was a long road, but this was where it always had to be headed. Blood and Guts. 

Yes, October and November hadn't gone to plan. He'd quit against Darby Allin at WrestleDream. He'd been on his back foot, barely surviving without quitting (twice) against Kyle O'Reilly. Roderick Strong defeated him by countout to decide the advantage.

But it didn't matter. None of it mattered.

They were in the cage and everything was going his way. 

He'd turned on his partner, his brother-in-arms, had started a reign of terror, been champion and locked away the belt. Even though he lost the belt, it could all still be worth it. He was a mad king, an emperor that had been deposed, but he could get all of it back, and even more than that, he could rain vengeance down on all of his enemies. 

Hangman wasn't there, but the rest of them? Front and center. 

And they were bleeding out. 

The advantage might have been an issue. Yuta had been sent out first, the sacrificial workhorse. He'd stalled and drawn Darby out after him, had been tossed into the cage and used it as a weapon himself. He'd been opened up by Darby's modified skateboard (after going for it himself), had been thrashed further by Darby and Cassidy when it became two-on-one. But he just had to hold out long enough for reinforcements, and he did. Garcia came out to even the odds and two-on-two with one man just a little fresher, they fought even. Until they didn't. 

When Mark Briscoe's music hit, they were wrapped around in a chain, beaten and battered. But that's when everything turned. 

Briscoe had been left laying in the back. Maybe it was the Don Callis family, maybe it wasn't. It didn't matter. Moxley didn't care. He'd take opportunity where he found it. 

Roderick Strong came out to make it 3-on-2, but the advantage time had been cut into severely. He hit a few moves but that was all he could do before Claudio's music hit back.

The plan was always Claudio, infinitely strong, infinitely reliable, always a step behind. He tossed Strong into a chair and then swung both Darby and Cassidy at once. O'Reilly came out next, but by then it was too late. Even with a 4-on-3 advantage on paper, the damage was done. This wasn't the happy-go-lucky world of the Conglomeration. It wasn't even Darby's world, one with open skies to leap and dive and crash. It was the post-apocalyptic world of the Death Riders, and they made use of every weapon, every opportunity. Here, no matter what the numerical advantage might say, the odds were always in their favor.

So instead of sending PAC out next, Moxley himself came to survey his gloriously ruined kingdom, to inflict violence and vengeance. He came in with a fork and immediately opened up O'Reilly more (for his transgressions were the worst of them all). He jabbed it into Darby's back, scraped it up and down, offered it to his newest disciple Garcia in a morbid ritual that let him join in. The women had set the stage for this earlier in their own Blood & Guts match and Moxley casually walked behind the timekeeper desk to seize all of the weapons they had left for him. He dropped broken glass in the ring and scraped a shattered mirror across O'Reilly's bloody skull opening him up more. They dropped Darby on his skull and dragged him across the glass for good measure. 

Life was good. All that he had lost? None of it mattered because he'd craft a new gospel in blood and viscera. He'd show the world that everything he'd always said was true. He would be vindicated and validated. 

And when Darby climbed to the top of the inside of the cage and dropped down upon all of them, even that didn't matter. Because that was just one last gasp of futile hope from a man not meant to climb mountains but to fall off of them and PAC was the last man in. Chaotic order was restored. The door was locked. The key was stolen. The Death Riders had a 5-on-4 advantage and could now punish their enemies to their hearts' content.

Everything was going Jon Moxley's way. 

But fate had a way of turning, bolstered by hearts that simply wouldn't quit, hearts very different than the beleaguered, hypocritical organ beating all too quickly in Jon’s own chest.

Despite being ambushed and assaulted and left for dead, Mark Briscoe arrived, wild look in his eyes and bolt cutters in hand. 

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Let's stop there. You know how the story ended. Briscoe turned the tide. Yuta faced him on the top of the cage and despite multiple cheapshots ended up eating a Jay Driller onto the steel. Kidd interfered and they put Darby through a flaming table. The Death Riders were ready (with a stapler of all things) for Cassidy to put his hands in his pockets only for Orange to care more than he'd ever cared before as he ripped the staples out of his own flesh. That let him save a defiant Kyle O'Reilly who was being choked out. Kyle refused to quit and in due course, with a few more twists and turns, he made Moxley tap out once more. A poetic ending to the last month and maybe, in some ways, to the last year. Questions remain: Who attacked Briscoe (the Callis family denied it)? Will this elevate Kyle to the next level? What does this mean for an increasingly out of touch Moxley and his leadership of the Death Riders?

As War Games go, modern ones always lean more towards CZW than JCP, more weapons and theatrics than wrestlers just beating the piss out of each other to solve their issues. In some ways, I thought this was a better mix than usual though of course Mox is a Cage of Death guy, so you knew what was going to happen when he got in there. I'd like to see them try the other way just once though. There are enough opportunities especially now that they're doing two of these on one show. 

That led to its own issues too, where they had to switch things up and play around with the advantage. Between Briscoe being taken out, Strong having less time to press the advantage as a substitute, and the sheer force that is Claudio, I thought they handled it remarkably well. Before and after, the characters drove things in interesting ways. One quick example. Right before Briscoe's music hit, when it was two-on-two, Garcia and Yuta had Cassidy down and were kicking him. Garcia, full of bluster and attitude, did the mocking Cassidy kicks and threw it over to Yuta but Yuta, like an animal that had been kicked too many times itself, couldn't help but kick him full-on. The match was full of little interesting character bits like that while maintaining the overarching story. 

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Feedback I've gotten lately is that people really like the dramatization approach to reviewing these matches, where I dig deep into the characters and emotions at play and recount the narrative as presented on screen. It feels almost like 80s PWI or something to me and I don't want to lean too hard into it all the time as opposed to a more analytical approach. 

But here's the point: I can only do it at all because the coherency, consistency, and commitment in what's being presented. If wrestlers are just doing a bunch of stuff, even if the stuff is clever or full of workrate or stiff or whatever else, you can't necessarily draw those throughlines. It's the selling, especially the emotional selling, like what Jon Moxley has been doing as of late, which lets me even find the dots to connect. 

Not every match has this. Not every conventional five star match has this. A lot of times, maybe there's some lip service towards it but it doesn't hold up under scrutiny no matter how exciting and action-packed the match might seem in the moment. You don't have to sacrifice it for "Greatness," because if done with care, it enhances it in every way. It just takes more effort and care.

Maybe that's self-evident, but I honestly don't think you can as easily do what I did up above for the Forbidden Door 2025 cage match main event in the same way. There were too many goofy tonal shifts and funny spots that were done just to pop the wrestlers involved. Specific moments stood out and popped and were impressive but it didn't come together as a narrative in the same way. 

Pro wrestling is an amazing narrative artform that can tell amazing stories almost entirely in ring, through the work alone. This Blood and Guts was built from the Foundation of the I Quit match with Darby and then the subsequent O'Reilly/Strong vs Moxley matches. It was built upon pro wrestling matches that were full of emotion and character development and great emotive performances. That's what made all of the excess here resonate and matter. 

There's a lot to be learned from all of this and I hope the people who make decisions and the wrestlers of both today and tomorrow take the right lessons and not the wrong ones.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death (And Friends) 10/27 - 11/2

AEW Dynamite 10/29/25

Jon Moxley vs Kyle O'Reilly

MD: I covered their last match last week and people seemed to enjoy it. Part of me wanted to go super stylized once again. 

Kyle O'Reilly was a man who lost it all. 

After failing to defeat Jon Moxley for a world title opportunity in 2022, he underwent neck surgery. He still does not have full strength in his arm. There was a time immediately thereafter when he never knew if he'd be able to hold his newborn.

But what he lost in strength he gained in focus, redoubling his efforts to train and to let technique push him back towards victory. Along the way, he found friends and lost them again, Paragon only barely forming before Adam Cole ended up on the shelf, possibly indefinitely. But he's a man who rolls with the punches, and with a smile on his face, he found the fun-loving whimsy still within him that was necessary to be the heart and soul of the Conglomeration. 

So on and so forth. I'd write about how this time, after scoring one of the biggest victories of his career but having been robbed of an even greater one by Jon Moxley's cowardice, he marched down to the ring with a more serious expression, how he had one more chance to snatch glory long past a point that anyone thought he'd still be in contention for it. 

But then he hit the ring and Moxley, after taking a few shots from Marina to warm him up, followed him in, and I saw the match and now that's just not what I want to write. 

I think that was a great way to remind everyone of the greatness of the first match, but here, it's worth really delving in to the storytelling at play.

Look, we take it for granted. In 2025, just as often as not, maybe more often than not, the logic is flipped. Wrestlers think up big spots and then they work the match around them. They work backwards from the special effects instead of crafting a story worthy of those fireworks and then inserting them in.

This was the very opposite of that.

What I wrote above and what I wrote last week... those things aren't just fluff. They're not just stylized dramatizations. They distill characters. Characters have motivations, hopes, fears, things that drive them. In a perfect world of fiction, these things then intersect with their attributes, physical and skill both, and impacted by environment, then underpin every single action and reaction. This should be the bare minimum in any fictional narrative but all too often in wrestling, it's an afterthought at best or ignored or shoehorned completely in order to try to pop people with something cool or with endless excess.

Not here. 

You could see it from the initial exchange. Character drove the strategic approach of both wrestlers. O'Reilly rolled to try to pick a leg right from the start. Moxley backed off and then tried to bully his way into holds, combining technique with aggression. O'Reilly had an answer to everything, in part because his technique was superior and in part because Moxley was out of control. Mox would go to the eyes, to the nose, to the ear, to anything soft to try to squeeze out an advantage, but O'Reilly was ready for it. In countering those underhanded tactics, he got a little hot though, could maybe feel Moxley's desperation and he charged in with a knee in the ropes that Moxley was then able to use to heft him up and over the top, truly taking over for the first time.

You can continue to follow these threads. Moxley attacked the hand first, worried about O'Reilly's cross arm breaker. But he couldn't help rubbing it in, couldn't help grinding down, couldn't help stomping away. That gave O'Reilly an opening to snatch the leg and starting to work upon it. Moxley, panicking, went right back to the eye and then, not just wanting to win but needing to main, shifted to the neck, the same neck that had been damaged out of their match back in 2022. But O'Reilly knew he had him rattled and he met him standing with strikes getting a seeming advantage but really falling into Moxley's trap, a pile driver.

It's all right there in the text, all shaped by the context, driven by the subtext. Moxley had his back against the wall, respected his opponent, hated his opponent, wanted to stick it to the fans. He'd not just run him to the stairs to slam his head in but would carefully bring him over in a full nelson. He'd lose the advantage by focusing too much on the fans and charging shoulder first into the post, allowing O'Reilly to utilize a dragon screw leg whip. He was cruel and careful one moment and entirely erratic the next. When he was in the ankle lock this time, he was staring at Aubrey Edwards and everyone had to wonder if he'd slug her too.

And O'Reilly balanced the opportunistic counters of a level-headed practitioner with a man with so much left to prove. He occasionally overshot but never so much that he couldn't recover. Moxley would catch his foot when he tried to stand even with him and throw punches and kicks, but he'd be able to spin out and hit something else. When Moxley went for the Gotch Pile Driver, he kept a cool head and turned it into a triangle. This match was his moment, and while he never stopped knowing it, he refused to let it shake him.

Watch this again. At every moment, it was character driving the action, character informing the reactions, character creating outcomes. 

That took them all the way to the finish. This time, back in the ankle lock, Moxley doesn't attack the ref. He dives towards the ropes instead. That throws O'Reilly off but they both end up on the floor. After one or two rotations, O'Reilly locks in a floating guillotine. The count ticks up and Kyle, lost in the moment (his moment), loses sight of the bigger picture. Aubrey counts them out, Moxley survives again even in symbolic defeat, Shafir turns out to be the one to attack Aubrey, and the tension builds in a very organic way for Blood and Guts where Moxley will not be able to escape. 

It's all right there, and in truth, it shouldn't be worth me having to lean so hard into. In a perfect world, I wouldn't have to. If every match operated like this, like so much of other fiction does, then we could take this for granted. But matches aren't like this. This is an outlier. This is special, and the only reason I even could dramatize it and stylize it like I did last week is because they put so much into it. We should expect more. We should expect this. But until we get it match in and match out, we should raise this sort of pro wrestling onto the pedestal it deserves.    

Darby Allin/Orange Cassidy vs Wheeler Yuta/Daniel Garcia

MD: Just a couple of paragraphs about this since Darby is someone we write about and I really enjoyed this match. It was there to further the Death Riders vs Darby/Conglomeration story. On paper, you wouldn't necessarily want this to be a tornado tag, even if it does suit Darby, but the four way for the tag title shot was going to follow it, and the two matches needed to feel different. 

With a tornado tag you usually get a spot-first approach as mentioned above. Here, the characters were really driving it, Darby's intensity, Cassidy's mind-games, Garcia's chip on his shoulder, Yuta just being an irritating menace. Garcia's particularly great at showing (selling) how Cassidy going to the pockets gets to him, but he also got drawn in by Darby teasing with the skateboard. Character-driven spots. My favorite bit might have been when Cassidy leaped over the rail to stymie a Garcia whip only for Yuta to nail him from off-screen (both for Yuta's trademark appearance from off camera to cheapshot, and because of Garcia's reaction). That led to Darby diving onto all of them. Or it might have been how, after jamming Cassidy's skull onto the guardrail with a brainbuster, Yuta shoved Darby off the top and Garcia and Yuta both jawed with the fans, drawing real, true, honest, genuine heat in 2025 by being as obnoxious and proud and unlikable as possible. Yuta going under the ring and only finding his middle finger to piss off the crowd would be a not distant third.

They built to a big comeback (set up by Cassidy putting his hands in his pockets while the two were on the outside) and them paying off what they had set up earlier (including, literally, a table). I hadn't expected Garcia and Yuta to lean into each other like this. It felt like they were heading towards immediate dissension. Bowens/Caster and Takeshita/Okada are already in that lane though, so it can always come later though. For now, this is a (death) ride worth enjoying.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death (And Friends) 10/20 - 10/26

AEW Dynamite 10/22/25

Jon Moxley vs. Kyle O'Reilly

MD: Jon Moxley has mouths to feed.

He's got bodies to stack up. He's got things to prove. He's a strongman with an army. But that army needs to eat. He's convinced them that it's the post-apocalypse, that it's kill or be killed. 

And he went and got himself killed. He lost his title. He won a battle against Darby Allin but not the war. And there, in the center of the ring, he was made to quit. 

He feels the wolves nipping at his heels. He's supposed to be the wolf. He'd been the wolf with his back against the wall but then the wall fell in on him. Now they're behind him, getting ever closer. Now forget wolves. The chickens are coming home to roost. 

But he's still Jon Moxley. He's a barefist fighter. He's a bloodspot warrior. He's a submission scrapper. He's the best at what he does. And there's opportunity around every corner.

Kyle O'Reilly is a perfect opportunity. He represents everything Moxley claims to hate, everything that he rails against, the world that he's trying to destroy. O'Reilly has all the tools, all the training, all the skills, all the fight, but a weak liver, a tender heart. He wants to sit on a couch and make funny videos with his friends, wants a cheesy sitcom theme song, wants to make faces for memes as Mark Briscoe comes up with the word of the day. All this instead of being a champion. He's everything the BCC was created to stamp out and everything the Death Riders were escalated to burn to ashes.

So he faces him in the middle of the ring. He scraps with him on the mat. And he comes up lacking. O'Reilly wrestles him even and then takes it a step further, flying over into a cross arm breaker, outwrestling him. Moxley immediately grinds his heel into O'Reilly's face, bites at his ear, stomps his hand on the steel steps. So what if he got outwrestled. So what if he even got outstriked. He's Jon Moxley and he'd outrough him, would punish him for his foolishness, his temerity. 

But Mox wanted it too badly. He needed it too badly. He overextended, went sailing over the top rope, ended up on a chair with O'Reilly's feet slamming into his jaw. 

Even that's okay, though. Because he's Jon Moxley and finishing stretches are where he rules supreme. That last bit of a fight, one last gasp, one last takedown. A pile driver. A lock in of that bulldog choke, using his strength, leaning into his toughness, riding over, pressing down. O'Reilly kicks out, putting up a fight, but that's okay too. That'd just make Moxley look stronger in victory like he had so many times.

Except for that's not what happened. This isn't the same Jon Moxley. This is a Jon Moxley that's bleeding out, that feels those wolves getting ever closer, that can hear the rumbling of his men's stomachs, and that knows it's only a matter of time before he starts looking less like predator and more like prey. 

O'Reilly has an answer to everything Moxley throws at him. He snatches an ankle lock. He crashes down off the top rope with a stomp onto the leg. He is unrelenting. No smiles. No funny faces. No laughter. Instead, everything Moxley claimed he wanted out of him, wanted out of his competition, wanted out of AEW. Mox didn't want it all that much anymore, did he? 

He felt it all slipping away and so he did the only thing he could. He pulled himself to one foot, the other grasped, twisted, contorted. He used the referee to pull himself up and then, instead of quitting, he overturned the board, smashing the ref, drawing the DQ. One might say that he took fate into his own hands, but then surrender manifests itself in many forms, doesn't it? 

What a performance then from these two. What a complex, desperate, human story that they told through our beloved, rarely stretched and rarely challenged, all too comfortable and familiar medium of pro wrestling. There were strands of Hemmingway here: short, stilted sentences, the depravity of humanity, a man at the very end of his rope. 

What's really exciting though, even more than what they were able to accomplish here, is that Moxley hasn't even begun to hit bottom yet.

There's more to come.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 1/20 - 1/26

AEW Collision 1/25/25

Undisputed Kingdom (Adam Cole/Kyle O'Reilly/Roderick Strong) vs. Daniel Garcia/Matt Menard/Angelo Parker

MD: I haven't made it a big secret that I'm high on Daniel Garcia and what he's trying to do. We've got a few heels who are showing signs of life when it comes to stooging, mugging, stalling, getting actual heat (Nick Wayne was great against Samoa Joe along these lines for instance). You need babyfaces willing to be earnest and honest and vulnerable, to show that they care even if it means they're not "pro wrestling cool." A lot of my problems with Adam Cole last year is that he's come off as a "Cool Face" who refused to take any real responsibility for what he did with MJF or his heel run in general. Maybe there's something to that in 2025 when you're supposed to just tweet through it, but I refuse to believe that life or pro wrestling works like that. I believe that things can matter, that choices made in and out of a match can matter, that believe need things to believe in and not just to blandly root for because they happen to win.

It's not easy though! It's not easy for people to be vulnerable, especially when not everyone's doing it. Cole refusing to do it doesn't just hurt the fans' ability to connect with him, but it potentially hurts the fans' ability to connect to anyone. If Cole doesn't care and Garcia does, it risks presenting that openness in the wrong way. The trick is being consistent, refusing to falter, not giving up. That's what a babyface is all about in 1985 or 2025. 

The problem is this: Garcia needs contrast to work against, and a "cool face" or a "stoic face" like Shibata aren't enough. Mark Briscoe, the only other guy on the roster who can match that same level of earnestness, is definitely not it. Garcia needs heels. I get that there have been some weather-related issues, some scheduling issues, but they've spent the last month putting him up against other babyfaces. This is the time where he needs to establish the ten count punch, to establish the charge at ringside, to get over the jackknife pin all the more. And by putting him up against faces instead of heels, it's been setting him up to fail. 

But he hasn't. Maybe the crowd didn't go up for his entrance, but they were absolutely with him by the end. What did the trick? Part of it was having Menard and Parker at his side. Menard's affection for him is so honest and believable that it's infectious and he's so over the top that you buy into everything he does. 2.0 was always a breathe of fresh air in the tag division because they were able to act as contrast for the more high-impact, spot-heavy teams while still taking all of their stuff. It was great to see them back together again.

It was the spots during the commercial break that really got the crowd going, exactly as they were meant to: the multiple ten-count punches, the body slams one after the next. They built to each bit, both in the moment, and by doing three in a row, and by the end of it, the literally freezing cold Jacksonville fans had been heated up not by crazy spots but by simple things that the wrestlers put their heart into.

And the Kingdom did their part. O'Reilly and Strong make for such a fun babyface duo, both in how they interact with one another, and in their tandem offense. As did Shane Taylor Promotions at ringside, the Infantry being over the top, Taylor being full of bluster, and Moriarty seething at the spotlight that he was denied.

Garcia would have been far better served by knocking down heel after heel for six months (and getting knocked down a few times and getting back up along the way). Then, once his act is established, he can go up against faces more frequently. It's asking a lot to get the fans behind what he's trying to do, when it's so different from what anyone has been trying to for years otherwise. It's reeducating the fanbase from scratch, but if it's allowed to work, the gains for AEW could be huge. Its an investment though, and it's working through willpower, talent, and dedication alone, but its up to Khan not just to be a matchmaker here, and to make exciting matches, but to ensure that the investment is protected and set up to succeed. If he does, we'll all benefit.

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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 Five Fingers of Death: Week of 5/23 - 5/29 (Part 2)

Double or Nothing 5/29

Darby Allin vs. Kyle O'Reilly

MD: I had to run this one back a second time to get a better feel for it. First time through, it felt sort of disjointed, with Darby getting opened up immediately and that botched first dive not helping things, plus the finishing stretch coming off as a deflation instead of impactful (more on that in a bit). Second time through worked better. The skeleton key here, which Ross missed completely and Excalibur came to too late, was that this wasn't just a match for the sake of a match. The whole point was Darby going for revenge while it was just business for O'Reilly. O'Reilly had lured him out and he was prepared to capitalize on not just mistakes but on basic emotion. O'Reilly was ready right from the get go, countering the initial single leg and opening Darby up. Darby was able to hit his counter-based offense (like the flipping stunner) but his dives and drops were themselves countered. Then, towards the end, O'Reilly used Darby's chain necklace against him to set up the choke, the kicks, and the knee drop off the top. I fully admit I haven't seen a ton of O'Reilly's AEW run so if they've built up the PKs as a deadly finish for the crowd, I missed it. They didn't look all that great and the kneedrop was to the side and not the skull, and it's Darby whose whole deal is resilience so I'm not sure I bought the finish. Overall, though, the underlying story worked for me, even if the announcers could have told their side of it better, with the choppiness chalked up to Darby being out for revenge.

Anarchy in the Arena: Danielson/Kingston/Moxley/Ortiz/Santana vs. Jericho Appreciation Society (Jericho/Menard/Parker/Hager/Garcia)

MD: Sort of hard to write about this. Obviously the finish absolutely worked. Danielson had Jericho beat. Kingston marched back to the ring covered in blood, murder in his eyes. He was ready to set not just Jericho on fire but Danielson as well. Danielson ends up the one who pays the most for it setting up whatever's to come next. What might have been most impressive here was the production, from the looping music (with the fans popping big once they realized it was looped) and Jericho shutting it down to the fact that they were able to capture so much of the action overall while never making us feel like we were truly missing out. We were missing out, absolutely. We missed transitions. We'd come in and one guy would be winning the fight, cut to something else, and come back to have the situations reversed. It didn't really matter though because it all felt like a welcome part of the chaos. We didn't really see how people got opened up. We didn't need to. The blood on their faces and their chests were enough. We have no idea what happened in the freight elevator with Kingston and Garcia. That's fine. We saw the aftermath. I did feel Regal's absence here but I'm not sure how you would have best utilized him in the match. Overall, Jericho actually carried the emotional brunt of this, first with the brawling with Moxley, which was entertaining and had history behind it, and then by being front and center for everything that happened at the end, but everyone had their moments and Parker and Menard bleeding, stooging, and clowning really deserve recognition too. One of my lowkey favorite moments was Garcia hitting a shining wizard in the middle of the concessions area on Kingston obviously as tribute to his new mentor. He should start using that to set up the 1990s style Liontamer instead of the lean-back Sharpshooter. Anyhow, the match lived up to its name, but that almost goes without saying.

CM Punk vs.  Adam Page

MD: I am relatively new to Adam Page. I hadn't seen any AEW until Punk and Danielson showed up and it's not like the blog has gone out of its way to cover 2010s NJPW. In fact, given the prevalence of that style in the overall community, one could argue that we went out of our way not to cover it. I like the interviews I hear from Page. I appreciate his social media presence. I admire that the guy has persevered through his issues and has been open with them. I think there are certain things he does very well in the ring. He emotes well. His stuff hits hard and clean. He brings a lot of energy and aggression and dynamism. We all liked the Archer match from earlier this year. In general, though, his matches kind of drive me nuts. He goes straight from punching and chopping to the fallaway slam/kip up/springboard clothesline spot, usually followed by a dive, and he never looks back after that. I don't know if it's taken from an all-bombs NJPW style I'm not familiar or just Brock-ism, and I get that I'm an outlier on both fronts, but the lack of mid-level offense that lets a match build before escalation really gets to me. There absolutely isn't one way to do things and there shouldn't be, but his matches somehow both seem to miss a chunk of something integral while still being overflowing with stuff. 

Meanwhile, CM Punk has been all over the promotion, and he's brought with him this sort of Neo-Bret-ism: slowing things down, fighting hard over the value and payoff of single spot, bringing the bodyslam back into wrestling, heavy focus on limb selling that reoccurs throughout a match and drives narratives, interesting match layouts that work around the commercial breaks. Danielson, on the other hand, has brought a sort of hard-nosed, forward pressing aggression that interfaces with whoever he's in the ring with. It meant that Page's matches with him ended up less of a clash of styles but instead a merging of them. 

In the ring, this match embodied the underlying stories of the program far better than the lead-up or promos or announcers had been able to present them. It felt like a battle between at least what I imagine the AEW of 2019 and 2020 to be and what the AEW of 2022, with a broader roster and more diverse inspirations, seems to be. Page had overcome his demons, overcome the challenges that plagued him in 2019 and 2020 and finally conquered the AEW that he helped create. In the meantime, however, he had taken months off for the birth of his child and the AEW he returned had grown and changed, in ways that were not at all aligned with his norms and values. Despite that, he had overcome Danielson, only to see that CM Punk was in the center of every promotional image, only to watch Punk lay down those bodyslams and start to pull things back to a world that he felt that the Elite had transcended, building back up old idols that they had successfully torn down, just as the successful NJPW of the 2010s didn't resemble the NJPW of the 80s or 90s and as the Young Bucks continuously have immense success tearing down the norms of traditional tag team wrestling. He finally won, finally reached the top of the mountain, only to realize that it wasn't everything he had hoped and dreamed for. He faced down the challenge of Danielson, a physical challenge, one based on hard work and toughness, only to realize that there was a more invasive, more perfidious challenge before him and his kingdom, in the preachings of Punk. And Punk, who was working with all of the younger talent, who was putting the time and effort in, who was trying to be a decent human being no matter how much of a strain it was when he's just naturally a grumpy bastard, didn't see why Page was so upset over a little thing like his heresy. But a king has to defend his kingdom, from ideas most of all, and Punk, more secure in his own skin after all he'd been through, realized he had the higher moral ground for once. And he acted upon it.

So the match, a match still between two crowd-favorites, between two babyfaces, became less about who would win and more about who was right? In the end, that mattered far more to Page than to Punk. Page had his doubts. Punk had arrogant assurance. Punk wanted to win more, but he had his ego and he believed in his values, and he was going to return Page's affronts within the match with ones of his own. As the match went on, it got both of them in trouble. It took both of their eyes off the ball and the fans, otherwise equal, united in expressing their frustration at either when that occurred. You rarely see that in a match where the fans were not booing the wrestlers, but instead passing judgment upon their actions. You'd see it more in older Japanese matches when someone took a liberty. Here it was when they stopped and taunted, when they refused to follow up but basked in the moment instead, when they tried to prove something instead of trying to win. Maybe, just maybe, Page could beat Punk in a wrestling match all things equal. There's no way in the world that Page could win a pissy bitching content with Punk, though. No one could. That's what he chose to fight, and in the end, after he tossed Punk over the table, after he watched Punk stumble about failing to hit Buckshots, after he hit a GTS of his own, he stood there in the center of the ring, belt in hand, living a Wrestlemania 8 Bret vs Piper moment, and completely lost and adrift. How had he gotten there? Who was he anymore? What had he fought so hard for? It certainly wasn't this. He tried to change course, tried to get back onto the path, but it was too late. 

So, yeah, I liked it.

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2021 Ongoing MOTY List: Lorcan vs. O'Reilly

22. Oney Lorcan vs. Kyle O'Reilly NXT 5/11

ER: It's still kind of weird to me that these kind of fights are on WWE TV, two smaller guys scrapping and trying to cauliflower ears with headlocks and headscissors before graduating to wearing each other out with stiff kicks and finishing definitively with a brutal brainbuster. It's a cool match to see anywhere but still weird to see here. This is Oney Lorcan's kind of match, and I will always look forward to seeing him grind his arm over O'Reilly's ear before elbowing him in the throat. I love how these two attack each other, throwing a lot of strikes but never feeling like either guy knows when the other was going to throw. There were a couple cool off balance kicks and Lorcan really made O'Reilly's kicks look damaging. Lorcan was great at working differently throughout the match, working as a guy losing energy and conserving himself for big explosions while weathering strikes. O'Reilly hit him with a quick strike combo that ended with a mean legsweep, and Lorcan looked like a tired guy who couldn't defend himself properly and not a guy just waiting for all the steps of a combo. There's cool stuff like Lorcan catching a kick and throwing a downward elbow into O'Reilly's knee, and I liked how when O'Reilly went into his strong finishing run he really went for it. Lorcan is the perfect guy to have in with you when you need your finishing stretch to pop, and O'Reilly was throwing hard knees, suplexes, and a brainbuster that would have made Kawada turn away. The kneedrop off the top is so cool as a mic drop finish after laying someone out with a brainbuster. I don't think anyone does a top rope kneedrop anymore and I honestly don't think anyone has done one since Bobby Eaton or Rick Rude. It's an insanely hard move to pull off and it looks awesome. 

PAS: NXT is dead now, and this was a nice example of what they did at their best. O'Reilly is a guy who went from skippable to can't miss during his NXT run and this was a vicious little fight which he does great. Lorcan is constantly moving forward and throwing big shots and O'Reilly is a very good counter wrestler. He provided a bunch of the fancy stuff, while Lorcan mostly provided the force and intensity. I thought O'Reilly's strike combos were really cool, and that leg sweep was killer. I second how great the finish was. I think if this is on the indies Lorcan kicks out and they do three more things, and I like how this was a precise and meaningful finishing blow.

2021 MOTY MASTER LIST

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NXT TakeOver: Stand and Deliver Night Two 4/8/21

Night One turned into a really great show after we got past the first two matches. I'm less excited about the Night Two lineup, but they got a lot of good will from me after the last 80 minutes of Night One. 

Santos Escobar vs. Jordan Devlin

ER: I think modern ladder matches have done passed me by. There hasn't been enough "new" done to the format or match layout to keep me interested. On paper I thought this was a cool pairing, but in execution it didn't work for me. You know there are going to be a couple of cool spots, and there were, but these matches are just designed to be 3 minute YouTube highlight reels at this point. That's fine if that's their purpose, but it doesn't make for an interesting match. Escobar seemed off through the first half of this, moving through spots real tentatively, like he was overly focused on hitting his marks, and it made the opening exchanges look really bad. Devlin had a few big bumps, like his fun one bouncing from a ladder to the top rope to the floor, or that nasty bump getting shoved backwards off a ladder into another ladder. We got a nice dive that plastered both guys into a ladder, and Devlin's moonsault off the ladder looked great, but took an eternity to set up. And "looked great, took an eternity to set up" is a great masthead for WWE ladder matches at this point. This was very disappointing, would have been better off with a normal singles match. 

Candice LeRae/Indi Hartwell vs. Shotzi Blackheart/Ember Moon

ER: The Dusty Classic was filled with great matches, and I'm all for this because I would love a serious tag division. And while the match itself got a bit messy at times, I liked the energy and they never let the messiness divert from the match. Now, it is true that one of my favorite things about the Dusty Classic was how focused a lot of the tags felt, like each team was bringing in their own style, and this match felt more like WWE Great Match Style, which isn't nearly as interesting. Dusty Classic had a lot of personality, this was more cookie cutter "plug in fast workers" style, and I think the personality aspect is what made those matches shine. Indi and Candice felt like a typical workrate team here, not at all like how they've been the past several months. Ember had a couple fun sequences, got an unexpected laugh out of me when she finished a strike combo with a Suck It. Shotzi will always be Shotzi, and that leads us to Shotzi spectacularly splitting the uprights on a tope con giro. I have no idea how it happened, but Shotzi has this magical ability to find no bodies on dives, and she somehow flies right in between Indi and Candice and straight into the barricade. This felt too rushed, never got the time to settle in and get anyone isolated, felt way too get in-get out the whole match. A couple double teams looked good, like the Indi/Candice pancake slam. Ember's double team Eclipse was a bit too ambitious, not sure it really worked in practice, but Shotzi's big senton landed heavy and I loved the way Indi sold it. 

Bronson Reed vs. Johnny Gargano

ER: I've been really loving NXT the past several months, and it's because they've gotten away from the house style that ruined much of 2020. This match went back to that style and it sucked. Reed used to work as a big guy, but now that they don't have Keith Lee on the roster it's like they needed a big man to work 50-50 exchanges with a 160 pound man. It sucks so bad, and we all knew it was going to suck 20 seconds in when Gargano hit a sloppy headscissors and Reed missed a beat before doing a cartwheel. The cartwheel looked entirely disconnected from Gargano's headscissors, and Beth Phoenix screaming "SHADES OF BAM BAM BIGELOW" really hammered home how shitty this was going to be. Last night we got an insanely good women's main event, with Raquel Gonzalez doing an excellent job of selling for someone so much smaller than she, and here's Reed working as Gargano's equal the entire match. I hate it. This brought back all of my least favorite parts of NXT house style, the mirror exchanges, the selling entirely disconnected from the moves that each man just took, and the stupid offense that spins somebody into position to hit their own offense. Reed is not good at working equal to Gargano, so you knew they were going to throw out the stupidest tropes of the style. Was there a poison rana? Brother you bet there was, and brother you better believe that it looked like Reed leaping backwards onto his own head. Gargano was just dangling off Reed's neck, hanging there, no momentum, and Reed just threw himself over. Reed was always a second behind on every exchange like this, the entire match. Did we get a superkick exchange? Brother you KNOW we did! Reed hits a tope on Theory (he's a big man, but look at him MOVE!!) and I cannot tell you how uninterested I am in modern big man "moving like a cruiserweight" wrestling at this point. I thought Reed's crucifix bomb from the ramp into the ring looked great, but it meant nothing whatsoever because this is throwback NXT house style baybee! That move should be a finisher, not a forgotten footnote in an uninteresting match. You're a big round man, think of all the cool big round wrestlers you could be, Reed! Instead, he's like my old boss's dog who was 50 pounds and was scared of 15 pound dogs, like he had no idea what size he was. 

Karrion Kross vs. Finn Balor

ER: Feeling bad for Ray Rowe here, as they gave his whole look to the new bald guy. And it wasn't going to take much of a match to look better than the trash that came before, and it was fine! I can't really get into the Kross character, still really don't know what I'm supposed to think about him. But the Reed match set a low bar, and it looked like gold coming after. I liked how Kross actually recognized that he was larger than Balor. I personally always know if someone is larger than I am, or if I am larger than they are, but a lot of people in NXT do not know that! So when Balor locked up with Kross and Kross threw him down on the mat, I thought "Now there is a man who recognizes when he is larger than another person." And that's why this match is a win! Balor didn't play total underdog, but didn't play equal, and that's important. I like how Kross threw him around, dug how it looked like Balor was really getting upended on every big Saito suplex. We didn't go overboard with shocked faces and kickouts, no surprises whatsoever. It was just a bigger guy throwing a smaller guy around and eventually beating him, and that's all it takes to stand out in my brain right now. 

Kyle O'Reilly vs. Adam Cole

ER: This match is unsanctioned. It's on Peacock, broadcast from their own Performance Center, with commentary just like any other match, but someone back there does not agree with it and will not sanction it. Men fell dangerously into ladders an hour ago, and that was sanctionable, but one of these men is now wearing a denim vest and we cannot sanction that. The problem with giving a couple like this too many toys to use in a match, is they get too cute with their toy usage. We can't just have a couple guys braining each other with a chain, we need to have one of them bent at the waist for an eternity while the other takes forever to wrap his boot in a chain. Just hit Cole with the fucking chain, Kyle! You're holding the chain! Hit him with it! You knew this shit was going to be unbearably long, and even though it was UNSANCTIONED I wish we could have sanctioned some time limits. Save the fans from the unspeakable actions these gladiators were going to put themselves through. We go through all the same tired stuff that they always go through whenever any indy fed goes through an unsanctioned match, other than the actual ring being taken apart. You know what makes a brawl interesting? Blood and guys beating the shit out of each other. If you have a chain, you can just hit a guy with a chain. But the spots get way to cute way too fast, and you know these two are absolutely killing each other out there, but it's the worst combination of painful violence and cornball violence. I knew they were going through the ramp, I knew just knew it. It was either going to be the ring taken apart or the ramp crashing through, and I'm most shocked that it wasn't both. There were parts of this I liked, with my favorite spot being Cole grabbing the chain and clotheslining O'Reilly with it. But this was predictably long, and had too much over thought out bullshit. There's no excuse to go 40 minutes in a match like this. Going that long makes the punishing things you are doing come off LESS punishing. Cut this in half, focus on the violence rather than the humanity, and then maybe you have something. 

ER: Well, this was easily the worst of the two nights. This show was bad, not even sure what match I would most recommend to someone (probably the tag match? It was fast paced and didn't step on its own dick), but a lot of this show was a MAJOR step back. This show was a microcosm of every single thing that I hated about 19/20 NXT. I've been loving 2021 NXT so far, it's my favorite weekly show, and this show was like they decided that EVERYTHING they've done this year hasn't been working, and throwing it into reverse to bring us back into the worst era of NXT history. Absolutely terrible. 

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2021 Ongoing MOTY List: O'Reilly vs. Balor 2

1. Kyle O'Reilly vs. Finn Balor vs. NXT 1/6

PAS: This isn't something I would normally seek out, but enough people I trust put it over huge, and damn does it deliver. Balor isn't a guy who has done much for me his entire career (he had one great Brock match, and I don't remember much else noteworthy) but he was awesome in this. This opened with some very cool matwork, with Balor working an abdominal stretch in really awesome ways. I loved how he shifted O'Reilly's body away from the ropes, forcing him to break the hold by grabbing the rope with his teeth. This sets up the story of the match, with Balor kicking the rope and damaging O'Reilly's jaw (which was a payback from their first match). Balor spends the rest of the match viciously beating on that jaw, with crossfaces and rakes. O'Reilly counters by attacking the arm, including some really great looking chaining of submissions on the ground. It looked less like a guy doing catch and release submissions and more like a grappler taking openings and capitalizing on them. Finish run was very cool, with Balor cutting all of the fat out of his offense, and focusing on making sure O'Reilly can't chew for a month. I loved him going back to the ab stretch at the end of the match and transitioning to an almost Rey Hechicero grounded stretch with a forearm on the bad jaw for the tap. Fuck me, I could actually see this ending up as the 2021 MOTY at the end of 2021.

ER: I think Phil was harsh on their first match, as even though it was nearly a half hour and had some extra NXT melodrama, I was a big fan of what they did. But I understand being a little more down on that match if you watched this match first, which trims some of the fat and less desirable moments of their first match. No doubt it runs tighter and the tighter runtime lets the physical damage come off more believably (ironic, since they legitimately put each other on the shelf for a couple months each in their first match). This had all of the violence of the first match, and it benefitted from having less NXT drama. The violence felt more mean and vengeful, and it does have the first match to thank for that. They played off that match a lot here, and while this match stands on its own even without the story continuation, it does benefit from it. This had the feel of two guys who had been waiting for their next chance at each other, and I thought it was maybe the best O'Reilly has looked since joining NXT. There was always a wink/nudge element and shoehorned comedy by way of heel stooge facials, or worse, unintentional Davey Richards "too serious" comedy. He's cut a lot of that out and is now able to make matches serious from strong work, and not just making dumb faces. 

All of the mat scrambling is tough, and it reminded me of the best Catch Point stuff, then only got better once Balor kicked the middle rope while O'Reilly's teeth were holding it. O'Reilly's jaw selling was really good, and the selling never overshadowed the actual punishment he was being put through. There were several surprises, things like O'Reilly hitting a desperate running kick on Balor but immediately taking a Chris Hamrick worthy flying back bump to the floor, or Balor getting busted open in a way that made a lot of his offense look cooler. Balor was good at selling his left arm, including using it as a blunt weapon to do one of his best ever sling blade clotheslines (where he faked with his good arm and lead O'Reilly directly into the clothesline). O'Reilly's kicks really sang, the standing high kicks looking like Balor was taking them full power off his bad arm and chest. It was two guys presenting nothing but receipts, and I bought into the full presentation. Balor was really cruel about locking in headlocks and crossfaces across O'Reilly's hurt jaw, and everything O'Reilly did felt like a justified response. 

2021 MOTY MASTER LIST

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NXT TakeOver: WarGames 2020 Live Blog

I don't think we've gotten a good WarGames match from NXT...yet. That said, I think this looks like a really good card on paper, and I'm excited for both WarGames matches, really like how both teams match up. 

Toni Storm/Dakota Kai/Raquel Gonzalez/Candice LeRae vs. Ember Moon/Rhea Ripley/Io Shirai/Shotzi Blackheart

ER: Shotzi comes out in her new deluxe tank, with TCB on the front (I assume that means Tankin' Care of Business?). I like Dakota Kai to start the match, but I don't think Ember Moon was a great choice. Ember Moon is someone who always does a disservice to her own offense, because she chains it in a way that you see her opponents brushing things off quickly just to take something else. She has a very good low superkick to a kneeling opponent, but it's always done just to set up something else, even when it looks better than a lot of her other offense. I don't think her chaining things through the first 5 is a good thing, but I liked Kai a lot. Some of her offense isn't as plausible, but she uses her thrust kick wisely and it always looks good. 

And somehow they make the rookie mistake of letting the babyfaces add a man first. WHY would you voluntarily set up Dakota Kai as de facto babyface? It's the easiest mistake to avoid under the specific booking parameters of a WarGames!! Commentary keeps trying to think of things to say, and every single thing just makes it sound like Kai is a valiant babyface. "This is the hardest 3 minutes of Dakota Kai's life" or "you remember Kai was out of action with a knee injury", just everything they said about her pointed out how hard she was fighting through this genuine disadvantage. I don't know how you lay this match out and decide to make Dakota Kai the top babyface, but this is what they did, and Kai is putting in the best babyface performance of the match. She gets powerbombed down the cage by Moon, who then hits a sick crossbody into her. But Kai fights back, and soon she's down two to one, but she jumps on Shotzi's back and tries to fight off the unfair double team, gets dropped with a great Doomsday Device missile dropkick, but somehow fights back from that! Later she gets beat up by Rhea Ripley the second she entered the cage, eating a ton of short arm clotheslines as the commentary continues to struggle with the undeniable fact that Kai is the babyface here. Shotzi was so incredible in the build up to this match, and she is the most afterthought person in the entire match. This makes no sense!!

They are also working this WarGames the least interesting way: Pretending the cage is not there. The knock on a lot of these NXT WarGames is that they are normal matches that happened to be surrounded by a big cage. This is that. Kai takes a nasty spill into the cage 2 minutes in, and the rest of the match is as if the cage is only there to obstruct our view. And since you can't bleed, it means the match becomes an exercise in Singapore cane shots, which is not as interesting to me as someone getting their face smashed into chain link. Ripley eventually takes a bump into the cage 20 minutes later, and Io Shirai does a Great Sasuke tribute by flying off the cage into everyone while entirely in a trash can. Raquel Gonzalez makes a great catch in the middle of it all, really absorbing all of a tiny person wearing a trash can. Kai even gets walking tall moments down the stretch!! It's amazing! She hits a killer double stomp off the top, flatting Shirai under that trash can, then triumphantly beats down Ember Moon and stands tall with a chair. Things do finally get good and heated after, with Moon hitting a pretty disgusting Eclipse, with Kai whipping her neck across the back of a chair. I didn't think Moon was doing that move anymore (don't think I've seen it since she came back), and it's cool when someone breaks out something big like that in a big match, and I like that Moon crashing through a chair taking Kai out of the match also took her out of the match. LeRae kicks a trash can lid into Ripley's face, Shotzi sentons LeRae off a ladder, Shirai eats a Gonzalez powerbomb through a ladder, tons of great stuff down the stretch. But I gotta say I'm pretty stunned how marginalized Shotzi was in this match, for a match that really felt like it was announced and built as HER match. I don't know if anybody would have picked Gonzalez pinning Shirai for the finish of this, but most of this was brutally backwards. 

Tommaso Ciampa vs. Timothy Thatcher

ER: I've really been digging Thatcher bullying guys on NXT, but I like when we get big match Thatcher. I think a lot of this was really good, and I bought into a lot of the attacks from both. Thatcher really looked like he was choking the life out of Thatcher (Ciampa's head veins are a gift when it comes to selling a sleeper), and Ciampa's bully choke down the stretch with Ciampa attacking Thatcher's freshly bloodied ear was great. Rhea Ripley got an earring ripped out of her ear against Io Shirai, then competed in a WarGames without a drop of blood, and then immediately following WarGames Thatcher gets his ear ripped open somehow. Ciampa's back neck is a compelling match story for me, and Thatcher is a guy who can do painful looking things to a neck. So I bought into Ciampa's neck selling and also loved when Thatcher would whip his head back with uppercuts. I do think the match went way too long and really didn't need to be worked as an epic, didn't need stuff like Thatcher bumping for 6-8 straight clotheslines (things like that felt transported from a different match), and I think Thatcher should have won here. I don't want them to fall into the temptation of turning Thatcher into a shoot guy who only picks on guys that can't defend themselves but never uses those skills to beat better guys. 

Dexter Lumis vs. Cameron Grimes

ER: Trevor Lee was someone who always wanted to work long matches and big title defenses in CWF Mid-Atlantic, and he seems like a guy who would get into trying to have interesting matches within somewhat limited match gimmicks. So far his performances in a cinematic match and blindfold match have been appropriately stoogey but perhaps too silly. And he brings strong stooging to this strap match, but just like the WarGames match earlier in the evening, it is a gimmick match that keeps pretending like the gimmick isn't there. Long stretches of the match are spent without them tied to a strap, and I was actually interested in how they were going to work in turnbuckle touching until realizing that of course it would just be a normal pinfall match. The best parts of this are Grimes taking a hard beating around the ring. He did a really good job at getting dragged and flung by the strap, including two painful bumps into the protective hockey arena siding, got pulled nicely into an uppercut, did a great job of falling while being yanked. My favorite bit of Grimes offense was when he just punched Lumis in the eye, and Lumis sold it like a guy who just got punched in the eye. They worked a few good spots around getting tangled up in a strap, and I loved when Lumis wrapped Grimeses' ankles and yoinked the strap, sending Crimes crashing head first into a chair. The finish submission looked good, like Grimes getting hogtied into a choke, overall liked what Grimes tried to do with the gimmick. 

Damian Priest vs. Johnny Gargano vs. Leon Ruff

ER: I really liked the two quick Ruff/Gargano matches I've seen (I'm a couple weeks behind on NXT TV, not sure what happened right before this show), and would have preferred seeing a PPV level Gargano/Ruff singles. I am also a guy who isn't a big Priest fan. However, having one much larger guy in there could make for a fun dynamic. The story of Priest not wanting to bother with Ruff because he only cared about taking his pound of flesh from Gargano was strong, even though Gargano's work with Priest is nowhere near as well done as Gargano's work with Ruff. All the Gargano/Ruff portions were good, but the Gargano/Priest stuff had awkward timing on several spots (including stuff like Gargano having to redo a tornado DDT spot, and a silly missed ear clap from Gargano after Johnny ducked early). Ruff eats a big razor's edge through one of the safety shields, and I really wish I could hear a real crowd during his eventual comeback. I think he would really be connecting with fans and I think the Gargano angle would play great in front of real crowds. I really wanted that Leon Ruff/Mikey Whipwreck story to keep going. Ruff keeping the title is could have given him a little more legitimacy, leaves you with a Gargano/Priest #1 contender match while moving Ruff onto someone else for a bit, and instead they just have Gargano win the title back. Ruff's involvement still felt like the best thing about this to me, and right up to that spike DDT that ended him he made everything look good. This was better than I was expecting as they dealt well with getting the third man out of there, but I also didn't love a lot of the Priest/Gargano stuff. The Scream mask guys were the absolute pits and killed any chance at the match being actually good, and I can't get excited in any way for an Austin Theory higher power situation. Nobody wants that. 

Undisputed Era (Roderick Strong/Kyle O'Reilly/Bobby Fish/Adam Cole) vs. Pat McAfee/Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch/Pete Dunne

ER: Pete Dunne moves to Florida and within a couple months he's already getting that Crossfit body. He also might have jaundice? But I liked the opening with O'Reilly and Dunne, thought their mathwork had several fun scrambles, and had nasty things like Dunne kneeling on O'Reilly's arm while attacking the body. This WarGames is already so much better laid out than the women's match, with McAfee doing an awesome job being the guy acting like he wants in that cage, and Lorcan being an excellent choice to help Dunne dismantle O'Reilly. Lorcan dropping KOR with a half nelson suplex before Dunne runs in and kicks KOR's arm out from under him is a great asshole move, and seeing Dunne and Lorcan work as real assholes is great. Lorcan is also great at eating offense, so when Bobby Fish runs in Lorcan is expert at taking the UE double teams (I especially liked him getting pump kicked into a suplex). Weapons in WarGames is pretty stupid and unnecessary (you are in a cage you should act like you're in a cage and use it) but the cricket bat is a more interesting weapon that other played out stuff we've seen. Burch smacking O'Reilly in the bad arm with a cricket bat at least gives off a good sound. But we also get way too much table set up. I do not need all of these tables set up!m You have a whole cage, use the cage! WarGames matches do not need long spot set-ups.

Pat McAfee is a real genuine standout, a personality so strong that it only highlights the personality flaws in every other person in the match. It's incredible how much he gets about what he's supposed to be doing in there, and having him hit a moonsault through a table is the best kind of icing on that cake. The home stretch of the match had good energy, but also a lot of misspent energy? All of Adam Cole's offense runs looked bad, and the best use of Cole was when McAfee clipped his knee. Also, Wade Barrett refers to Pat McAfee as "one of the dirtiest players in NFL history" and...I guess I would really need to see footage of a punter who is also a dirty player. That sounds like a hysterical character (that Pat McAfee assuredly was not). I HATE the Undisputed Era "fight between the two cages" trope in these WarGames match. How does a team with guys I like keep doing things that I dislike? And this thing just goes WAYYYYYY too long. Way too many comebacks, way too many "peak" moments to build to, soooo much fat that could have been trimmed. It just felt like they kept building to the same big moment over and over again, like we were trapped in a loop and nobody knew how to actually finish the match. They build to McAfee and Cole alone, everyone else laid out, several times, and it never finishes anything. Every big move would just get a kick out, and then everyone would lie around for awhile before doing it all over again. McAfee completely knocks the wind out of himself when nobody decides to catch him on his bonkers cage swanton, Lorcan and Burch pull off a sick Doomsday Device, McAfee kicks out of Adam Cole's bunny hop flipping piledriver, everyone in the match lies in one part of the ring while Dunne and O'Reilly fight and also refuse to get pinned. This whole thing was 20 minutes too long and they kept building to things they had already built to. I like both of these teams, and like both of them against each other. But this was TOO MUCH of them against each other. I was totally burned out by the home stretch of this match, because it felt like we got too much wasted time and it felt like they were needlessly filling time. No main event should feel like it's just filling time. Still, Pat McAfee is a star. 

This was a disappointing show. But, up until the part of the main that started taking too long, I was still really enjoying this show. It was an underwhelming yet entertaining show, until it felt like I was trapped in an endless series of big encounter kickouts. There were plenty of strong individual performances, in fact every match at minimum had one real standout performance. So we end up with a show that underdelivered on quality, while also having no true bad matches and thus having an entertaining floor. You can't really call that a win, but it's not a terrible loss. 

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NXT TakeOver 31 Live (Until 49ers) Blog 10/4/20

I'll level with you, this card does not excite me. Phil asked me yesterday if there was anyone I even liked currently wrestling in NXT, and I actually had to think about who that would be. The brand is really stale to me right now, and the few people I have been still tuning in for are not even on this show. The brand was great when there was frequent promotion turnover, but ever since it began being promoted as its own thing it has stagnated and seemingly run out of ideas. Maybe guys on the roster realize things have been blah, maybe they take this opportunity to put on a show that will get people talking. I don't care one iota about the AEW/NXT online feud, but maybe a few of the guys on this show DO care about it and want the internet to buzz about it for a few days. Or, maybe it will be the uninteresting show that it looks like on paper, and I will only have myself to blame.

Also I saw HHH called this new performance center something like "The ultimate heavy metal soundstage" and I am curious see what that means. From Damian Priest's entrance it looks like they have a large tron and a screen wrapping the lengths of at least a couple sides of the room. I'm more excited that there are at least some people (in masks) around the hockey rink baseball backstop like guardrail shields. We still have the home viewer screens in the majority of the crowd, but down front is actual people, and it's good having actual people there. On commentary is Sebastian Gorka.


Damian Priest vs. Johnny Gargano

ER: I don't think Priest is a bad wrestler, in that I think he has the tools to be a compelling wrestler, but he would have to be completely broken down and retrained to not be 2020 Edge. Like Edge, Priest is someone who loves to work even sized with small guys, and it comes off like a large dog who doesn't understand that he's a large dog and gets bossed around by tiny aggressive dogs. Priest is 6'5 and 250, similar size to Edge, and yet he works matches like he's a bad version of Billy Kidman working Ultimo Dragon. And I do not like this match. It came off like a modern update of a Lance Storm/Jerry Lynn match from ECW. 20 years ago that was a match and match type that felt fresh and was done well by then. But it's not a style I want to see in 2020. There are other things from that era that I'd rather seen updated than that specific counter based evenly worked style with some extra shitty If-Nova-Was-Taller embellishments from Priest. Priest's tope con hilo looked good, and a couple of the reversals do work, Gargano takes a hard powerbomb on the apron, and a couple of the nearfalls were effectively placed, and Gargano's low blow kick leading right to the finish looked great, but overall I just didn't like this.

Velveteen Dream vs. Kushida

ER: Dream is dressed like Doc Brown to counter Kushida's McFly, which sounds like something I'd shit on but it's also a fact that I went to a high school dance as George McFly. It was a Hollywood theme dance and you were supposed to come as a celebrity or movie character, and I had found a neat vintage suit jacket at the Salvation Army, and a character with big nerdy black glasses was easy for me to aim for. Now, I suppose I was also 16 years old, and not a grown man playing cosplay dress up as one of my last appearances before pressure mounts to have me punished for being a nonce, so I think I can still shit on Dream.

But I thought their match was really good, albeit perhaps a bit too long. The chemistry between them was stronger than I expected, and the strength was that there was an impressive (and unexpected) amount of struggle to everything that happened, so no parts of it felt like a competitive partners dance. Kushida kept going after that arm for the hoverboard lock, and I liked his tenacity. Dream kept using energy to fight back in cool ways, like refusing to go down on drop toehold and making Kushida work for moves like that. It looks so much cooler when Dream struggles and fights before getting dragged down, makes all of Kushida's passes look fought for and earned. I loved how Kushida rolled through to an armlock after finally getting the drop toehold. There was a lot like that, and Kushida built to some vicious stuff like kicking the ring steps while Dream's arm was pinned between stairs and ring, or catching Dream in various triangles that always felt important. This had the feel of a match that was writing Dream off for a bit, which is a thing that I think will only continue to be demanded. The finish felt like a big FU but a cool finish, with Kushida taking working the arm and Dream powering to his feet for a dream valley driver, only Kushida doesn't let go of the arm and gets the immediate tap. Kushida attacked him too long after the match though, and Dream was doing this weird theatrical screaming and crying. It felt like Kushida turning heel and them making Dream a sympathetic babyface, but I hope that's not what they're doing. I hope it was them just writing Dream off TV. We'll see I guess.

Isaiah "Swerve" Scott vs. Santos Escobar

ER: This had a lot of moments I liked even though I think a lot of Scott's embellishments are really annoying. The match really came alive when Scott hit a one man dive train, and that Fosbury Flop was a cool highlight of that. I like Escobar's stable and would like to see them do things other than feud with Scott, but this match felt like the best case scenario for the pairing. Scott's big stuff looked good (one of Escobar's strengths is taking offense, and that shines here) and Escobar got to plaster Scott with his great tope. This one also could have used an editor, as I think it would have been more effective under 15 minutes, but I also think they did a good job at filling those 15 minutes. Ashante Adonis came back for (I believe) the first time in NXT since his name change from Tehuti Miles, and I could see him having fun matches on this roster. He's a guy who is low on offense, but works a similar style to other offense deprived wrestlers who I enjoy (i.e. cruiserweight Stevie Richards is more interesting to me than Isaiah Scott). I'm glad Escobar retained and would love to see his group presented as an actual threat, even pushed to the level of Undisputed Era.

Candice LeRae vs. Io Shirai

ER: I think this one had the right energy and built in a nice exciting way, but the Wife Guy Johnny stuff coming out for the finish and bumping around like he was on a trampoline while making shocked Gargano face was something the match really didn't need. The ref bump to set up the Gargano new referee silliness was inventive and fun, with Shirai eating knees on a moonsault and letting her momentum carry over and basically Pele kick the ref. The ref bounces to the floor and LeRae's curb stomp looked really gross, mashing Shirai's face into the mat. I think the Johnny stuff really took away from all the drama they had built in the match, as it came off cartoony in a way that the match hadn't been. I liked Candice here more than I did the last time these two had a big singles match (last year at TakeOver Toronto). She kept taking me out of that match with weird selling and getting into position too early for Shirai, and she worked this better as an aggressive heel. I don't think Shirai was as strong in this one as that one, but she made the big moments count and took offense nicely. Still, I thought some of the 50/50 stuff in the middle lost track of things, and then when they won me back Gargano took me back out of things, plus the finish looked a little ugly. Toni Storm and Ember Moon returned in two different post match segments, but it's really weird to bring back two people to the same division in segments immediately following each other. It kind of lessens the impact of both, although I can't deny that Toni Storm is a welcome return. Anything that gets a little less Tegan Nox blandness off the weekly show.

Kyle O'Reilly vs. Finn Balor

ER: Watching this one got delayed by me watching a mildly crushing 49ers loss, with an uninspiring Nick Mullens performance paving the way for an exciting but ultimately futile comeback from CJ Beathard. George Kittle is a more fun to watch wrestler than anybody on TakeOver tonight. I want to see Timothy Thatcher work a shoot style match with Kittle, based around Thatcher being unable to take down Kittle but being persistent about it. Brandon Aiyuk hit a ridiculous leapfrog hurdle for a touchdown, the coolest and best utilized leapfrog spot I've seen tonight. But the Niners lost and this match will now lift my spirits.

And this one won me over early, overcoming it's NXT Main Event Epic Drama layout with compelling selling and nice targeted attacks. Kyle O'Reilly put on one of his strongest singles match performances that I've seen, coming off like Bryan Danielson working like a 2001 NJPW kickpads junior. We get the cool story of O'Reilly exacerbating a Balor shoulder injury early, leaving him susceptible to a near match ending attack on a different limb. Both guys hit the strikes and offense harder the longer the match goes, justifying the overly long near half hour match length. It felt like things really ramped up throughout and never skipped ahead at any points. O'Reilly has a cool set of rolling double underhook suplexes and some knees, but gets a rib kicked in by a great solebutt and then run sternum first into the turnbuckles. From here on out O'Reilly is gamely selling a rib injury and while it was dramatic I also thought it was effective. O'Reilly had a couple of big comebacks (I especially loved him dumping Balor with a real high bridged Regalplex on Balor's neck) but Balor did cool things like work an actual persuasive abdominal stretch and stomp the hell out of O'Reilly's guts.

Both guys bleed from the mouth, and there's some some strong camera shots of O'Reilly stuck in a nice sharpshooter while blood cuts down his cheek. They also do some nice close up magic, as the closest the camera ever got to an O'Reilly knee strike it happened to be the hardest knee strike he hit all night. Finn stomps him in the ribs more, and O'Reilly fights back with a cool standing guillotine that looked nice and snug. O'Reilly played well as a lower rung FUTEN guy who hangs for 13 minutes against Katsumi Usuda. O'Reilly catches Balor with a couple of dragon screws over the ropes, and then hits a totally killer kneedrop off the top rope directly onto the back of Balor's thigh. O'Reilly's kneebar he locks on is some righteous Volk Han shit. He really twists and bend the ankle and when Balor tries to kick him away he grabs that leg and twists it violently over Balor's other leg. The kneebar was so good it made me suddenly start rooting for O'Reilly to win the title here, wanting Finn to tap. That kneebar got me Immediately invested in seeing a specific result, made me spontaneously root for a guy I've never been super high on, and that kind of moment is special. Balor doesn't tap, and he does finally make the ropes no matter how much I wanted him to tap. And, somewhat disappointingly, while his double stomps to finally slam the window shut on O'Reilly's ribs looked really great, I wish more respect was paid to the tendon damage that kneebar should have caused. Even so, I think the double stomps were a fitting end to the match and worked well in context. This was an unexpectedly strong main event within a style I don't adore, building to actual drama and justifying the overly long runtime with some stiff work.

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WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak 3/1-3/7/20

Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Kyle O'Reilly/Bobby Fish NXT 3/4

ER: I thought the first minute of this was pretty dumb, one of those four man strike exchanges where someone hits a chop and the others all stand around reeling until someone else hits a forearm and the other three stand around reeling. They mixed up that kind of thing more interestingly than it typically looks, but when the ceiling of a spot is "pretty dumb" you're just throwing good money after bad. But once O'Reilly and Fish spilled to the floor and Lorcan hit a double blockbuster off the ring steps, I was into this the rest of the way. We built to an early and good Burch hot tag, and some of Burch's best work is on quick hot tags (Lorcan rubbing off on him?), and I like the twist of a hot tag leading to Burch getting separated from Lorcan. Burch hits hard on straight rights and uppercuts, and I dug Fish and O'Reilly holding him back with bullshit. O'Reilly would get on him and just slap and palm strike him, drop short knees, nothing that was going to finish him but just slowly grind him down at the farthest spot from his corner. Fish was really good from the apron, great little moment with him hooking Burch by the trunks and yanking him back to their corner. Of course we built to Lorcan's big hot tag, him flying horizontally with uppercuts, hitting the blockbuster, throwing heavy chops, hitting a big tope con giro on both guys at once. I like how we got to see Lorcan taking on both guys throughout the match with moves he usually only hits on one guy, and then moments later it's over. I was really satisfied with the sudden finish, as we had seen Lorcan going up against both men at once and having nothing but success, and it made sense that luck would run out. Back in the ring post-tope Lorcan was running buckle to buckle with elbows, and just like that he was taken out by a legsweep/elbow combo. I could have stood a couple more minutes of this, but like how the finish played out.


Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Tony Nese/Mike Kanellis 205 Live 3/6

ER: We've been getting a lot of Burch/Lorcan tags on TV lately, often getting two per week so far in 2020, and I like how they rarely feel the same. Lorcan and Burch always mix up who is hot tag and who gets heat (and really the way to mix up their matches at this point would be to have them as the team in control), and this was another fun pairing. Lorcan and Burch work a lot of atomic drops, and work in cool spots like sending a Nese tope right into Kanellis on the floor (basically sidestepping Nese in ring and sending him matadoring into Kanellis). Nese may be at his best as part of a heel tag team, and now that 205 Live is 30 minutes we likely won't get any more 18 minute Nese epics. Nese and Kanellis together on paper didn't do much for me, but the execution was much more interesting, and Kanellis is a good odd couple pairing. The two of them don't have similar movesets in the least, but they complement each other well. Kanellis looked really good here, with a great straight right, some buckled knee selling on multiple atomic drops (there were both inverted and regular atomic drops here, which made me realize how seldom those are used anymore), and it's clear that he's a real good hand who has been underutilized. I'm here for the 2020 Kanellisance. Nese straight up dunks Lorcan's throat over the top rope, and I dug Lorcan's staggered sell across the length of ring ropes after Nese missed the follow up moonsault. Kanellis and Nese take Burch's DDT really well, and I love their finisher: Nese holding Burch up for a powerslam, Kanellis leaping off the middle buckle with a knee right to Burch's head, into the Nese powerslam. I wouldn't mind seeing a series with these teams, which is not something I expected to find myself typing about a Tony Nese match.

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NXT TakeOver: Portland 2/16/20

ER: I was seriously consider going up to Portland to see this, but instead I am sitting at home wearing soft pants. Nobody I knew was interested in either a) seeing this with me live, or b) spending a few days in Portland, and that is fine. It's a place I frequently look for excuses to travel to, so I will surely be there in the next couple months anyway. Let's see if friends and well wishers were correct to convince me not to go. Although, to be clear, this show could be terrible and I would have had a great time in Portland. Plus I can go up there and eat at Screen Door any time I like without having to also sit through an Adam Cole singles match.


Keith Lee vs. Dominik Dijakovic

ER: I saw the hype video with Mark Henry talking about how big these two are, and how unfathomable it is for big guys to do what they do. And I am so happy that Mark Henry did not do what these two do and instead wrestled like Mark Henry. I want to see a hoss fight, not two big guys cosplaying an Ospreay match. And this match was definitely these two having their match, and their match does very little to excite me at this point. It is their collection of "Isn't it crazy that THESE two are doing THESE moves!?" exhibition, and I have seen it a lot and I hope this is a blow off match. I think all their stand and trade spots look badly rehearsed, and Dijakovic always seems to be 25% off on every super complicated thing he executes. So these matches are always filled with "MAN that's impressive for a guy his size. Imagine if it landed!" moments. The whole thing is one Eliminators move set up after another, with one big move leading to rest, leading to the other guy doing a big move, and then more rest. Dijakovic keeps breaking out new things, and they are impressive, like his twisting moonsault in ring or his gigantic swanton to a seated Keith Lee on the floor, but these moves always seem to get sold about as long as any other less dangerous move he could have done, and that's a "him" problem. We get a lot of "your big move/strike made me recoil off the ropes/mat and bounce back with my OWN big move/strike" and that's something I typically hate from 160 lb. guys, and lemme tell you that it sucks even harder with 290 lb. guys. For every move I liked, there was a moment that immediately showed that it wasn't actually that devastating, and Dijakovic doesn't have the acting chops to pull off the bad fighting spirit faces he always attempts. This was the match I was expecting, and I probably would have praised it to the heavens if they came out and worked a Mabel/Diesel match instead.

Street Fight: Tegan Nox vs. Dakota Kai

ER: I haven't been sold on heel Kai, but her street fight gear is legit. This is the coolest that Dakota Kai has looked. Kai is channeling mid 90s AJW street fight attire and it rules. Meanwhile, the person I'm supposed to root for is just wearing her normal wrestling gear and has her hair bumped up to absurd levels. I think a lot of the small stuff worked here, while a lot of big stuff did not. This was my favorite Kai performance, and it worked because she was making small things look as good as big things. She took an early drop toehold into the barricade and just went into it mouth first. And she continued to pay that kind of attention to every little spot, and it elevated things. My favorite moments of the match were not complicated, they were things like Kai snapping off a quick kick from the apron to Nox's face, or Kai splatting hard on her stomach on the apron, or Nox calculating wrong and throwing a low right while Kai is meeting her head with a trashcan lid, or Nox swinging a chair right into Kai's knee and Kai going down like someone who actually had her bad knee beaten with the odd angle of a trash can. When they kept it to basic street fight elements, I thought it was working well, and only fell apart in the moments where they got too cute or overthought what they were doing. No matter how nice Kai's kicks looked, duct taping Nox's wrist to the ringpost comes off a little silly when Nox is watching you do it, and her hand only shoots up to stop you the second you stop wrapping duct tape but not a moment before. But I liked stuff like trapping Kai's knee in a chair and smashing it, the German suplex into a trash can was nasty, and the visual of Kai's head in the chair on the table was strong. Now, using this street fight as a way to reintroduce Reina Gonzalez (with a painfully flat "Oh My God That's Raquel Gonzalez" read from Beth Phoenix) came off more than lame. She looked bad in her big moment, futzing around on the top rope with Nox, before Nox has to jump entirely on her own "through" the table. Gonzalez took forever and couldn't get into a good position to throw her, so Nox did everything on her own (no camera angles could make Gonzalez look good) and the painful bounce off the table came off much more accidental than "intentional badass move" from Gonzalez. Bad reintroduction, flat finish.

Johnny Gargano vs. Finn Balor

ER: This one was one of the on paper matches I was mildly dreading, having those "I just volunarily agreed to watch a show with a likely hour worth of Balor and Cole matches" thoughts, and then this started out just fine. The problem was that it kept going, and I did not want it to keep going. But I was fairly involved with this when they weren't doing "well scouted like looking into a mirror!" wrestling. Heel Finn don't interest me, Face Finn don't interest me, so there wasn't likely much they could have done to win me over other than surprise me with something different. And I was into this, until I wasn't into this. Once this started getting overly sequenced it got the same kind of silly I was expecting. It's so funny that they work on crafting these fast elaborate reversal sequences, and I am into stuff like Finn catching Gargano's spear from the apron. But I can't help but giggle when they run this fast sequence, Balor drapes Gargano over the top rope, sprints to the apron...and then carefully climbs up every single buckle on his way to the top rope. No matter how quickly and ironed out these sequences get, I'm always left with silly little moments where someone is holding themselves in an awkward position waiting to take a move. And so before long Gargano is doing that offense that Gargano does with a lot of pointing, and I chuckled at Balor kicking him off the announce table. Went too long, but the odds of this ever being "for me" left the building pretty quick.

Bianca Belair vs. Rhea Ripley

ER: This was the match I was most excited for, and while it didn't hit the high level I was hoping for, it was still a good match that delivered much of what I wanted. This was a tough position for Bianca, as the match has clearly been treated like a lame duck to Charlotte/Ripley in all of the build. This match was so clearly second banana, with a result so obvious, that getting people invested was going to be like not getting robbed blind in a trade after the player publicly demands a trade. So they don't work this cute, and they throw hard shots, and the occasional messiness on suplexes added to things for me. NXT has had to much cleanness in their main events, I like a little mess. The important thing is that Rhea threw harder clotheslines to the chest and harder knees to the head than Lee and Dijakovic earlier in the evening. I enjoyed how they handled learned behavior, like Belair eating a big boot after going for her series of leapfrogs, and Ripley scouting the hair whip after taking one to the midriff earlier in the match. I really wish Bianca had been treated like more of an overall big deal, as she's lost on every single TakeOver I've watched so has that "Luger always loses" mid 90s WWF feeling to her. Belair as Luger isn't actually crazy now that I think about it...and I really like Luger...and I really like Belair's power here. This was good, and pretty easily my favorite match of the night so far, even if I am getting very tired of Charlotte.

Kyle O'Reilly/Bobby Fish vs. Matt Riddle/Pete Dunne

ER: This was good! I expected this to be good! Some restraint would have been welcome, but the NXT house style is getting further and further away from any kind of restraint. I got into it from the beginning, with UE jumping Riddle and Dunne in the aisle way, babyfacing themselves by stopping the awful Bobby Fish song, which had the special power of getting less funny every time it was spoken. I thought this was an especially cool showing for Fish and O'Reilly. Bobby Fish is basically the least talked about member of UE, but he brings a cool salt and pepper old athletic guy energy to things. Fish is like the best possible Frankie Kazarian, that tanned guy in his 40s who is now leaning deep into his aged hair, only Fish does great offense catered to his age, and is maybe the finest example of a silver fox wrestling has seen. Dude was owning the silver and I thought he came off with actual star appeal. O'Reilly had a real nice very fast kick combo, that didn't actually look like he was just thinking about the next step, it really just came off like he was winging kicks. Sure he had some silly wobbly legs down the stretch, but there were a lot of things O'Reilly did great in this one. My one hang up is that I don't really think the Riddle/Dunne team works as well as I thought it would. There's something missing and they just aren't as complementary as I thought they'd be. I like both of them, Riddle especially, but the team just keeps coming up lesser than sum for me. Riddle is always going to do things I like, and here he's hitting sentons and taking big bumps barefoot and tossing out Germans and I'm just going to like that. I don't think this reached the kind of fluidity that some of the best of these NXT go go go tags can hit, and of course doesn't touch the same kind of match from To Infnity and Beyond or Philly-Marino, but this was very fun and part of a really enjoyable 1-2 with Ripley/Belair.

Adam Cole vs. Tommaso Ciampa

ER: Nope.

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NXT TakeOver: Toronto 8/10/19...Everything Except...

ER: So I was unable to actually watch this as it was actually airing, but I always look forward to big NXT shows (no matter how much I've been dreading their main events the past year) so I figured I would watch as much as possible tonight before getting sleepy, then finish the rest tomorrow before Summerslam (and then do Summerslam)!

The Street Profits vs. Kyle O'Reilly/Bobby Fish

ER: I thought a lot of this was pretty boneless and emotionless, big parts feeling like O'Reilly especially were some kind of automated driverless wrestler, just mechanically running through spots in really unattached ways. But Montez Ford brought some actual personality and freak athleticism and salvaged a match that felt too long. Ford seems to glide sometimes and it's cool to see, watch him hit a neat kip up and standing moonsault, super graceful tope con giro, and an absolutely great top rope splash for the win. People had moments in this, liked some Dawkins cut off spots, liked O'Reilly kicking Dawkins in the inner thigh, but a lot of this felt a little phony and I couldn't match the crowd's appreciation.

Io Shirai vs. Candice LeRae

ER: This was up there with the most I've ever enjoyed Shirai in a singles match, but I really didn't like LeRae and thought she kept screwing up the pacing and doing terrible drama. LeRae leads off with a terrible double leg takedown and everything else seems about as out of place from there. She was really obnoxious about immediately getting into position to go back on offense, right after taking a KO move. She takes a nasty 619 to the back of the head, and she sells it by standing up immediately, bounding off the opposite ropes, and hitting a tope tornado DDT; later she eats a huge German suplex and sells it by getting immediately to her feet and waiting patiently in place for Shirai to bounce back off the ropes to run into LeRae's obvious offense. It made things pretty uninteresting to me, and creating drama by merely taking a big move and having it not affect you, is not drama in any way. Shirai hit some of the meanest stuff I seen from her, a crazy double underhook backbreaker, Spanish Fly that landed hard, wrenching LeRae around with a backbreaker, but none of it ever felt appropriately absorbed by LeRae. LeRae's emotion and fighting spirit and selling were all over the map, and even though the match had some fantastic moments and a more grown up Shirai performance (still overshooting that genius moonsault though), but Candice kept taking me out of things.

Velveteen Dream vs. Roderick Strong vs. Pete Dunne

ER: This gets a fun personalized Canadian entrance, with what appears to be the Raptors dance squad coming out and jamming to The Mountie's old theme song (a personal favorite) before throwing it to the Dream's entrance (who comes out in Canadian red and white). And I had a blast with this match. I t was a really great showcase for Dream and Strong, and Dunne was also in the match to mostly add stupid offense but also take exciting offense. They kept up a really insane pace for the duration of the match, without anyone getting crossed up or standing around waiting to hit their marks. This had some pretty impeccable layout, with nobody really having to get up and hit a spot right after taking a beating because that's what the layout dictated. Three ways are difficult to pull off, because you need to get it into singles action a lot of the match but also believably get the third man out of the ring during that time. Most 3 ways a guy just rolls to the floor after taking a fairly standard move and then disappears for 4 minutes. Here we had regular involvement from the 3 players with nobody feeling like they got in the way.

Strong really stood out like a big deal to me. Funny thing is, he almost always does. Strong has been consistently great for probably a decade now and it's still somehow surprising to me when I watch another great Strong performance. I don't think this thing works as a Dream/Dunne singles or as a 3 way with somebody other than Strong. He kept peppering this match with big backbreakers and suplexes, big kneelifts, and appropriate bumps and selling for his opponents. Dream really seemed to benefit from being in their with Strong, as Strong took every axehandle like a gunshot, went down hard for every long arm lariat, and seemed to be orchestrating every car crash spot involving all of them. Dream has really great body movement. He's not a very large guy, but he throws his most simple attacks with such unique movement and flexibility that he comes off like Mr. Fantastic. There was a stretch where he whipped off a couple great punches, threw a couple weird straight arm lariats, hits a Rockette kick, the way he rubber man bounces out of the DVD, and he gets such great stretch from his limbs that it makes him look like he could catch you with a strike no matter where either of you are standing in the ring. Some of the spot set up is brilliant, like Dream slithering away from Dunne only to get his legs grabbed by Strong, who crotches him around the ringpost; or Strong running around dropping both with back suplexes on the apron and barricade; or Dream hitting that big elbow all the way across the ring during a tree of woe spot. The big moves hit big, and they even did some stuff that comes off silly during 3 ways but I think was elevated here by Strong. Really the only thing I thought looked bad was whenever Pete Dunne would try to do any strikes. I don't know why he thinks his slap fight girly hands look good, but he looked like he was defending himself from a backseat big brother attack than stand up to Dream and Strong. Those little flimsy slaps need to be dropped immediately, and his bad punches when trying to fend of Strong should literally be in the running for worst strikes thrown in a major company. My god. The finish stretch was hot as hell, loved Dream hitting the DVD only for Strong to throw him over the top rope and hit a big backbreaker on Dunne, only for Dream to rebound right back in with the big elbow. This was the match I needed after the first two.

Mia Yim vs. Shayna Baszler

ER: This never really clicked with me. They chose a couple of interesting directions to take, with both gals going after arms, but none of the arm stuff ever actually went anywhere interesting. I liked some of the exchanges, and some of the actual moves, but the selling seemed like it was part of a different match than they actually wound up with. It was kind of odd. Yim set up a spot where she kicked Baszler's arm in the ring steps, and Baszler sold her arm the rest of the match...but Yim weirdly skirted the arm several times. There was a spot where she set up the Code Blue off the tope rope, and specifically trapped Baszler's arm in her knee crook, and I'm thinking "Oh man that's an awesome arm break spot that I've never seen! Flipping over and using her own weight and momentum to kick the arm work up another level!" And then she just did the sunset flip bomb and went for a pin and I was left wondering why they even bothered paying attention to her clearly setting up a focus on the arm during the move. Shayna kinda did the same thing in a way, establishing an attack on Yim's arm (leading to the great spot of her stomping the posted out elbow), but it's not uncommon for Shayna to establishing arm work to then making it easier for her to sink in a choke. So I was expecting that, but then also thought it didn't make as much sense within this match. Not only was she then doing rear naked chokes using the arm that Yim had been working over, but I would have liked to see her punish Yim for having the balls to even come after her arm. And was anybody else expecting the Horse Girls? They made such a big deal about Yim taking out and injuring the Horse Girls, that surely that meant they were going to come out and do something, so I was amused when that never happened. But I was still left so confused about why they never really cashed in anything they actually set up before or during the match. I have no major complaints about the ring work, it all looked fine, though perhaps the obvious silence of the crowd during much of the match was a sign they weren't sure what was happening either. At one point Yim yelled at the crowd to get into it, and the quiet that came after couldn't have felt good. Even right after that when she hit a nice dive, it merely got scattered polite applause. It feels like this is a frequent NXT TakeOver criticism I use, but...It felt like these two have a good match between them, and this had the potential parts of that hypothetical good match, but this wasn't it.

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